Advantages of Integrating Online Metrics with Your Phone System

Posted on May 23 2018 - 11:46am by Matt Holtzen

In the world of business and technology, everything is connected. Or at the very least, everything should be. That’s because businesses need to have the most comprehensive data available to them if they’re going to optimize their digital marketing and sales efforts. Since modern consumers tend to shop online with a high level of sophistication, companies that are able to more accurately monitor their customers’ behavioral patterns can create more compelling content for them –– and as a result generate more leads (and sales!). The main issue most businesses encounter when dealing with their own analytics, however, is following their leads once they go offline. The question becomes: how can you continue to gauge customer interest once they’ve stepped away from the computer?

Metrics with Your Phone System

Online-to-Offline Conversions

Most business owners will recognize the following scenario: a customer interacts with a piece of content online. From there, they decide to follow up on that interest by calling the company in question. They interact with a salesperson and decide to give them their business. This process is a perfect example of an online-to-offline sales conversion. That is, online content generates an offline sale. So what’s the problem for businesses? The issue, as we hinted at above, is that when a customer decides to go offline to complete a sales transaction, they move from one realm to another. Indeed, many businesses across industries have data regarding sales calls, as well as information relating to marketing performance. (A few examples might include: click-through rate, landing-page performance, bounce rate etc.) But, crucially, few integrate the two together.

Utilizing CRMs and Phone Systems

Progressive companies solve the online-to-offline tracking conundrum by integrating their CRM with their existing phone system, which in many instances, is a Hosted VoIP program. The benefits of using hosted VoIP at law firms, recruitment agencies, retail locations, or any business that deals with online-to-offline conversions are varied and numerous, but for our purposes we’re going to focus solely on VoIP-CRM integration. By bringing the two programs together, business owners can effectively close the gap created when an online lead makes a call offline. So rather than dealing with two unrelated categories of data, entrepreneurs instead can access one, unified information set.

Benefits of Unified Metrics

Once a company successfully creates a system that enables them to analyze their marketing and sales data with greater depth and clarity, they can move on to active implementation. In other words, rather than simply viewing marketing and sales reports as reactive statistics, they can begin to implement strategies to optimize and improve their marketing/sales tactics. At the end of the day, figuring out how to integrate your offline and online metrics is about increasing your marketing-sales cohesion. Remember, in an ideal world your marketing and sales teams would operate in perfect harmony; and anything you can do to bring the two closer together can only help your company.