Featured Partner Series
A very wise person once asked, “What is marketing without measurement?†At TRFFK, we don’t need to ask ourselves that question, however, because we already know the answer: Nothing! While marketing may be exciting, it is an expensive and fruitless exercise if you are not tracking the results and adapting your marketing budgets based on what those results tell you.
CallRail knows this better than anyone. Named number one for call tracking satisfaction by leading business software review platform G2 Crowd, the company helps data-driven marketers (something every marketer should be!) optimize the performance of their advertising campaigns, increase sales effectiveness, and improve customer retention. By partnering with CallRail, we at TRFFK are able to keep our fingers on the pulse of what is happening behind the scenes on your campaigns and make sure we are able to feed that knowledge back into their continual optimization.
Seeing as this is part of our everyday work flow, we thought it would be fun to sit down with Madelyn Newman, Director of Product and Customer Marketing at CallRail and find out a little more about the company that makes our jobs (and your campaigns) so much more effective.
Q: Let’s start with why call tracking is so important in the first place. What are your thoughts on that?
A: As analytics became more important within digital marketing, it’s only natural that more methods of tracking and measurement have emerged. The appetite for analytics has grown substantially, because data is everywhere –– on our smartphones, on the dashboards of our cars, on our wristwatches.
Given that context, when you think about inbound phone calls to businesses and consider how critical that touchpoint is for the vast majority of businesses, it’s simply archaic to leave that conversion point untouched, or untracked and under-analyzed. Today, most sophisticated digital marketers view phone calls as a central metric for their efforts, and a concurrent rich intel source –– informing future campaigns.
Digital marketing as a whole needed to move beyond simply looking at clicks and conversions on websites and see how consumers are really engaging with businesses. One of the best ways to look at that is through phone calls. Recent studies show that nearly 60 percent of buyers want to discuss pricing on their first phone call with a business. From our perspective, it’s hard to understand who wouldn’t want to understand what, then, is driving calls from those likely buyers, so that they can generate more of them.
Q: What sets CallRail apart from other call tracking companies?
A: I think the most interesting answer to that question for this audience probably has to do with our origin story. Our CEO, Andy Powell, started CallRail to get insights for his side business –– a website that indexed European auto repair shops in the Atlanta area, giving visitors basic information like location, contact information, and services offered. At some point, Andy began selling “featured†paid advertising spots on his website to repair shops. But he soon realized that he needed a way to prove ROI to buyers –– that their advertisements were generating leads, which most often came in the form of phone calls.
But when Andy surveyed the landscape of call tracking providers, he noticed that call tracking was mostly used by –– and accommodating to –– enterprise users. So, he and co-founder Kevin Mann set out to build CallRail.
In our DNA is not just usefulness in the auto industry, but also design for the small business user.
The less interesting answer: we have been named the number one call tracking provider for satisfaction by G2 Crowd for several consecutive seasons. Over 100,000 companies now trust CallRail as their call tracking and analytics provider, which has set us apart as a true leader in the space. Our setup is designed for ease of use, and our pricing is non-contractual. (Plus, we’re rolling out some really cool stuff, like the ability to calculate how much each Google Ads-generated call lead is costing you.)
Q: Are there are any particular features you are proud of?
A: Yes! We have two really useful machine learning-powered features that our users love. One automatically spots common keywords and phrases mentioned in phone calls to your business, named Call Highlights. We can serve this information up in various reports, as well as in the call waveform. Then, there’s CallScore, which can automatically rank phone calls as either a lead or not a lead, based on the content of the conversation. Over time, this feature compares previously-scored calls with incoming calls to more intelligently score them.
We also offer a multitude of integrations from Google Analytics and Ads to Facebook to HubSpot to Salesforce and Zapier. And we have a deep range of native features within CallRail itself, such as local and toll free numbers, keyword call tracking, anti-spam protection and multi-channel attribution.
Q: Where do you see the future of call tracking heading?
A: Call analytics will only continue to become more important with the increase of mobile searches and click-to-call functionality. Today, the majority of visitors come to websites through smartphones, and the ability to initiate a phone call directly from a company’s website is stronger than ever.
We have an agency feature which allows platforms and agencies such as TRADER’s TRFFK to integrate directly with CallRail and have a white label option. This plan is core to CallRail, because it allows marketing experts to take our platform and integrate it into their broader platform for optimum reporting functionality.
We also believe artificial intelligence will continue to impact the space, and we will be at forefront of integrating this technology into phone conversations to improve user experience and better capture conversions for marketers.
Q: If you had one message for TRFFK’s dealers, what would it be?
A: Don’t think call tracking is just for digital! Use it in every form of marketing, from websites to billboards to business cards, so you can track your online and your offline marketings. No matter what happens with the future of marketing, phone calls will always be part of a consumer’s experience with a brand –– and a rich one, where important conversations are had.