Why Ignoring the Phone is Fatal for Marketers
More phone calls are being made today than ever before. You might want to just put a pillow over your head, scream ‘lalalalala’ and ignore this, but the phone isn’t going to stop ringing any time soon. Trust us. Naysayers have been predicting the downfall of the humble phone call for years. We’re constantly being bombarded with hyperbole screaming at us that millennials would rather die than pick up the phone; that the phone is nothing but some deadwood detritus from the 20th century, clinging on for dear life in this app-based, multi-screen, Netflix and chill world we now find ourselves in. Yet hold the phone. We’re not hanging up just yet.
The record-breaking phone
There are now almost as many mobile phone subscriptions as there are people in the world. Which considering mobile phones have only been around for 44 years, and there are now 6.8 billion phone subscriptions, is quite an achievement. And this is before we even get to landlines. Remember those? Well 40% of all US households still use a landline regularly. In short, there are a helluva lot of phones in the world.
Late to the party?
All you marketers out there have preoccupied yourselves with the world of Digital for the past 15 years. SEO, PPC, email, social media. These channels are all easily attributable and measurable to justify ROI to the powers that be. As soon as the customer heads offline and picks up the phone however, they drop off the edge of the analytics cliff like a load of poor lemmings. Marketers have been late to the party when looking at exactly what is making the phone ring and how the customer got there. And as the way in which customers interact with brands looks set to increase in complexity and number of touchpoints, it’s now key that clarity and predictability are needed. And it’s not too late; calls to businesses are expected to reach 162 billion by 2019. Ignoring this gap in your data is leaving an untapped resource wide open.
Click-to-call
More Google searches now happen on smartphones, as opposed to computers. And with click-to-call we can now make phone calls faster than ever before, feeding our need for instant gratification. More often than not the only way to resolve exactly what we need is by making a phone call. And with stats suggesting that click-to-call commerce is expected to grow to nearly $2 trillion by 2019, this can’t be ignored. The rapid adoption of this feature has changed the need to optimize both customer experience when they speak to the call center and how you manage data relating to the phone call.
Embracing the phone
It’s baffling that the role of the phone in marketing campaigns isn’t awarded the same level of scrutiny as other channels. In fact, 95% of businesses still don’t even have the most basic level of call tracking. With calls converting up to 10 times higher than clicks and 78% of people saying that speaking to a human being gives them the peace of mind and confidence they crave, it’s about time you sat up and started to embrace the phone. That data blind spot isn’t going to cure itself and the phone is still ringing.