Track Marketing Efforts With a Toll Free Number

Tracking your marketing, effectively, is essential to establish your ROI, help better plan future marketing strategies, and over the long term, minutely tune your efforts, to maximize your profits. That’s why your marketing should always be fluid. You should always be testing, always be optimizing, and you should always be striving to achieve better returns.

These aren’t new concepts and in fact they are true whether you consider your online marketing or offline marketing strategies. But what are some of the ways to effectively track your different marketing efforts?

Within this post I hope to shine a light on one of the better and most inexpensive ways to track your efforts. By using inexpensive toll free numbers you can minutely track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

How This Works

Whether you receive a virtual dedicated number through a company like Ring Central or Got Vmail, or just pick up, from any number of sites, a 800 number that can be forwarded to your primary line, you need the ability to track those calls.

Virtual Dedicated Lines

The virtual dedicated line is typically the least expensive option and can give you immediate access to the stats that you need. For example with Got Vmail you can pick up their “Grow plan” for $49 which comes with 2 toll free our local numbers and you can just pick up additional numbers that connect to that account for $5.00 each. While I haven’t tested it with Ring Central (who coincidentally is who we often use) Im sure something similar is available. There is MANY different companies out there offering these kinds of services.

They offer immediate online stats that you can even download. This comes, as you can imagine, very handy when tracking marketing results.

Forwarding numbers

I’ll be honest and haven’t done enough research here as the initial investment is typically cost prohibitive, but if this is the route that you are going to go make sure that you find something that offers you direct stats of some type. Waiting till the end of the month to track your results does not allow your marketing efforts to remain fluid by any means.

How To Use This Tracking Ability

Really this can be used so many ways that it really comes down to your imagination, but some of the ways that we have used them is:

- Pay Per click
If you are using landing pages on your Pay Per click campaign for products that you might not normally carry and just want to test out the market throw one of your toll free numbers up on that PPC page and track your results. By combining the results of the call sheets and your actual online sales or leads generated you can test keywords, ad descriptions, and conversion rates.

- Radio Ads or Television Ads
This is where it really comes in handy since you will be able to better track the individual ads. You may have noticed a lot of commercials now offer different URL’s in their advertising like http://www.widgets.com/offer19 They do this in order to track the response to that specific ad. Many times “Offer 19″ is actually code for “Southern California” and /offer20 may be “Miami, Florida” etc… My initial research on that front shows that most people will leave off the “offer19″ and just type in the primary URL. However by using a different telephone number you can track it each and every time. This is also a great spot for a vanity number.

- Direct Mail Marketing
With the cost per conversion of direct mail marketing being around 5x higher than just about all ‘print’ based marketing tracking every lead is essential to tracking results.

There are many others, but these are just a few that should be immediately thought of when running a campaign.

Why Should You Use Toll Free Numbers To Track Your Marketing

When looking at the cost of even the smallest direct mail run somewhere in the area of $2,000, spending an extra $50 to track results should not be somewhere you would skimp. If you can make adjustments on the fly to your PPC account based upon the amount of calls you are getting think of how much you could save… If you are targeting a specific demographic with cable TV you can know daily what areas are producing for you and where your marketing dollars should leave from and where they should go.

Remember keep your marketing fluid and keep your marketing dollars, especially in this economy, where it is going to do the absolute best for you.

Side Note
Many of the virtual dedicated online companies offer free trials. Try it out and see if its right for you. You might just be amazed at the difference it can make to knowing and tracking all of your marketing efforts.