I know this is unorthodox, but I’m going to give away the secret upfront: Your customers like to call you, love to call even. In fact, consumers are calling financial service providers in greater numbers than ever before, and they’re calling after engaging online.
In Invoca’s newest report, the 2016 Call Intelligence Index, data from over 50 million consumer phone calls was analyzed to see how today’s omnichannel customer moves between online and offline channels. Here are three key takeaways financial marketers need to know:
- 74% of customer calls in financial services came from digital marketing in 2015
- 26% of those calls came from channels specifically targeting mobile users
- Calls decreased by 41% from offline sources year over year
Why are fewer calls coming from offline sources?
In a word: mobile. Due to the rise of mobile, customers are online more than ever, and they’re making more calls after engaging online. BIA/Kelsey reports that by 2019, businesses will get 162 billion customer phone calls from mobile. That’s more than double the 77 billion calls in 2014.
Mobile makes it easy for someone in the market for financial services to get quick and personal attention with the tap of a button. It’s much more convenient to tap a click-to-call button and connect with a live representative than go through the traditional process of filling out a web form and waiting for a call back (at an inconvenient time, no doubt). And in an industry that’s plagued by mistrust, customers want the option to talk to a real human.
Why is this shift so important for financial services marketers?
Your response to the shift in customer behavior could make or break you. Traditionally, financial services companies have focused their advertising dollars on offline media, but because of mobile, consumers are everywhere. They’re searching Google, watching TV, listening to the radio, and probably spending way too much time on social media.
Over the last few years, financial marketers have been adapting to this trend. CMO.com reports marketers have been “pivoting to digital because they are seeing diminishing returns and poor audience engagement in traditional advertising channels.”
But it’s not enough to make the shift to digital and mobile. In an industry like financial services, where purchases are complex, marketers have to blend online and offline touchpoints into one single experience. You can’t afford to leave phone calls out of the mix, especially since these are such high-value interactions.
So how can you integrate phone calls into your digital strategy? It’s actually pretty simple.
How to integrate calls in your digital marketing
Visibility
First thing’s first—you need to know why people are calling so you can optimize your campaigns to drive more phone calls. You can use a call intelligence solution to track calls back to the marketing sources and all the digital touch points that led to the call. For example, in paid search, you can track calls back to the keyword so you know exactly which keywords are the most profitable. With this added visibility, you can optimize your creative and budget on a granular level to reflect customer behavior.
Caller Experience
You’ve gotten a customer to call; don’t lose them once you have them on the line. Take the time to create a seamless caller experience that reflects the caller’s journey up to this point. Before your customer ever talks to a rep, it’s important that their call is automatically routed to the right place. With call intelligence, you can route based on the source of the call or the caller’s attributes, like geographic location. You can also make sure your sales reps have real-time data about the caller and their online engagement history so they can have the most effective conversation possible.
Quality
Concentrate on quality. Look at key quality indicators, like the length of call. Invoca found the average call duration for financial services is 5:02. While that’s a great start, there’s room for improvement. Use call intelligence to capture unique caller attributes and the actual outcome of a call, so you know the kinds of calls that are likely to turn into customers and revenue. This way you can optimize your targeting to maximize quality calls.
The bottom line is that your customers want to call you. But because customers are mobile, those phone calls are originating in places we’re not used to. So you need to make sure you’re using the right media channels and messaging in order to get them to call. Thanks, TV, print, and radio—it’s been real. But it’s time to focus a little more on online and mobile channels.
If you want to learn more about how phone calls fit in today’s omnichannel customer journey, download the 2016 Call Intelligence Index.
Source: B2C
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