Four inexpensive ways businesses can scale customer calls

Without leads, your business won’t survive.

And the cream of the crop, when it comes to leads, are inbound calls. Inbound calls have a conversion rate of 30 per cent to 50 per cent compared to web leads at 2 per cent, for instance.

Simply put, inbound calls are disproportionately more valuable. If you increase your customer calls, you’ll also increase revenue – and drive business growth.

So here are four ways to achieve that – without breaking the bank to get there.

• Focus on click-to-call adverts
• Rework the landing pages
• Use a memorable phone number
• Evaluate call handling practices

Focus on click-to-call adverts
It doesn’t matter what your most successful advertising platform is; it’s crucial to ensure all adverts encourage the audience to ‘click-to-call’.

Right now, you’re probably running adverts with various call-to-actions; offering a content download or encouraging customers to email.

To increase customer calls, realign those adverts to make sure they’re all pushing the same clear message: Call us now. Distilling your message increases the likelihood that your audience will follow-through.

You know the old saying – if you don’t ask, you don’t get. The reverse is true too: the more you ask, the more you get.

Even better, if you’re already investing in advertising, it won’t cost you anything to change copy. You’re making your existing investment more effective by targeting higher-value results. That’s smart business.

If you’re not currently investing in advertising, look for other logical areas where you can reroute spend. For instance, if investment in content marketing is not generating traffic, that money could be better spent on paid advertising.

Rewrite landing pages with one simple call-to-action
A landing page isn’t like any other web page. A simple webpage may have multiple goals, i.e. to inform or educate, to respond to visitors’ queries, to encourage visitors to continue their journey or to get in touch, to secure sign-ups for your newsletter, etc.

A landing page has one aim only: to get the visitor to convert, to have him/her take one specific action – in this case, to call you. Your call-to-action should be clearly visible and differentiated in design so visitors who scan your landing page cannot miss it.

• Using a single call-to-action in the form of an obvious button (with no other buttons or button-like items on screen) can increase conversion by 45 per cent.

• Using a bright colour to make your call-to-action stand out can increase conversion by 95 per cent.

Don’t complicate your message with more than one call-to-action messages. If your landing page is long, you could include the same call-to-action multiple times. This also means you shouldn’t include any other links, including a navigation bar. The only way your visitors should be able to progress through the landing page is by clicking the call-to-action.

Like click-to-call advertising, distilling your messaging won’t cost you anything extra if you have those landing pages set up.

Use a memorable phone number
You might not consider phone numbers as a part of your brand identity, but they are.

Your phone number gives an impression, either good, bad or neutral. Most businesses settle for neutral – but you could make that phone number work harder for your business by choosing something memorable.

Different types of memorable phone numbers:

• Single-digit repeats – 1111, 2222, 3333
• Pair of digits – 3344, 6677, 8899
• Double pair of digits – 2323,1616, 7474
• Ascending or descending run of digits -1234, 5678, 4321
• Mirrored digit groups – 1221, 7667, 2442

A memorable phone number can become a fundamental part of the business identity and this route is an inexpensive one as many providers charge a paltry surcharge to choose a number. Additionally, if you optimise your online conversion through existing collateral using the first two tactics, you could spend the money you’ve saved on a new number. That’s essentially free.

Evaluate your call answering policy
This starts from the assumption that prospective customers have already picked up the phone. What happens next, though, can be a black hole.

When customers hang up before they speak to someone, you’ve effectively lost a possible lead, that too, post all the elbow grease to get them on the phone. Typical reasons for customers hang-ups include slow call answer times, silent waiting periods, poor quality music/audio and ill-trained staff among others. Some 67 per cent of customers hang up in frustration while waiting for a customer service representative to answer.

To increase the success of those calls and in turn, increase sales conversions, re-evaluate your call-handling policy. The typical contact centre answers 80 per cent of calls in 20 seconds; answering 90 per cent in 15 seconds is a better goal.

If need be, hire someone else to field calls. It does put up an added cost but it could save money by increasing revenue through evading lost calls.

Alternatively, create a standardised script to improve customer service amongst your call-handling staff. You could easily draft one, and it would go a long way in improving caller satisfaction.

Increasing your inbound lead volume is the best way to boost sales conversions and drive revenue growth. Bringing about simple changes that help achieve just that.

Anisha Sagar is the general manager of Business Incorporation Zone (BIZ)