Brands always seek dependable and replicable methods to consistently finalize deals and generate more inbound calls and high-quality leads.

Beyond assessing the success and efficacy of marketing campaigns, every brand must meticulously scrutinize its sales process. This enables companies to uncover hidden customer acquisition opportunities, enhance or introduce new sales techniques, develop distinctive inbound sales approaches, and much more.

Historically, data has served as the foundation for informed decision-making, predictive modelling, and sales insights. Businesses utilise data for various tasks, such as identifying trends and gaps in the sales process or enhancing the marketing value of leads.

However, some companies still encounter challenges in achieving their business objectives. One contributing factor is the absence of suitable technology and tools, such as inbound call tracking software.

Can Call Tracking Aid Sales?

Sales is the arena where your marketing endeavours align with financial goals. While it’s a high-pressure domain, salespeople must analyse their performance through the lens of lead and call data.

Consistent monitoring and accurate interpretation of lead and call information are vital for every salesperson. So, how and where can companies obtain this data?

Call tracking as a service offers countless benefits to businesses. For instance, the right call tracking tools enable companies to monitor and attribute all their efforts, regardless of whether they run lead or demand generation campaigns.

Phone tracking software’s primary goal is to determine which of your marketing initiatives prompt customers to contact your business. If you’re running various ad campaigns, call tracking can help you pinpoint the channels that perform best. Call tracking ultimately ensures that you’ll know the story behind all future calls and how to generate more calls and conversions.

Moreover, call tracking tools allow salespeople to view real-time reports, identify trends, and allocate resources to reduce their cost per lead.

This is just one of the ways call tracking solutions can help businesses uncover hidden revenue opportunities.

How Call Tracking Tools Can Fill the Gaps

Your company can ensure that all its efforts and operations are sustainable by implementing an inbound call tracking software or using a white label solution. Furthermore, it eliminates the need to search for extra resources and create a solution from scratch.

It’s no secret that maximum productivity, efficient workflows, and high conversion rates are top priorities for marketers and salespeople.

All of that is achievable with a solution like Phonexa’s Call Logic. It can accurately track and attribute every last bit of ROI, enhance performance and productivity, optimise call flows, and grant access to greater lead and call insights.

Let’s delve into how Phonexa’s Call Logic can help brands identify the gaps in the outbound and inbound sales process and enhance the quality of incoming leads.

Seamless Integrations

Phonexa offers effortless integration, regardless of your current tech stack and CRM. The platform allows brands to monitor the progress of numerous marketing campaigns in real-time through its single comprehensive dashboard.

Detailed Reporting

Brands require the capacity to closely monitor ad campaigns and process an increasing volume of important calls. Phonexa empowers businesses to stay in the loop with granular traffic flow, comparison reports, and real-time notifications on campaign performance using data analytics functionalities.

Call Bidding & Lead Acquisition

Integral to Call Logic, Ping Post Calls 2.0 provides a tailored solution for all parties involved in the call lead acquisition process. Publishers can bid on the most desirable call data attributes, while buyers and advertisers can boost conversions and sales by acquiring only the highest quality leads. In essence, this product feature enables marketers to optimise the lead journey and generate a robust, multichannel ROI.

Lead Quality

Call tracking tools streamline the process of creating and enhancing ad campaigns. For example, Call Logic provides brands with data analysis resources to assist in all aspects of their marketing decisions. This allows salespeople to leverage call analytics and refine their sales approaches, increasing conversion and close rates.

Predictive Analytics

Understanding the likely outcomes of campaigns enables businesses to optimise their spending and resources to better grasp consumer behaviour. Why is this important? With data-backed predictions, marketing and sales teams can determine potential growth areas and implement new strategies.

Optimise Performance Moving Forward

It’s indisputable that inbound calls provide a wealth of data. By utilising the appropriate inbound call tracking software, marketing and sales departments can enhance their performance and address the gaps in their strategies and attribution models.

Book a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts to explore how integrating Call Logic into your martech stack can enhance your sales performance and bridge the in-person gap in the sales funnel.

There was a time when marketing agencies and brands did not fully appreciate telephone conversations. Today, the success of positive customer experiences and conversion rates relies on various factors, including streamlined and modernised call procedures.

Marketing calls play a crucial role in an effective strategy and a thriving business. Cultivating positive interactions with clients has a lasting impact on how brands operate and develop their implementation strategies.

That’s why brands aiming to improve customer experience and gain insights into lead quality establish call centres using call centre recording software.

But what exactly is the functionality of sales call recording, and why is it valuable for brands? To address these questions and more, let’s delve into the practicality of call recording software and its role in streamlining call processes.

The Value of Recording Marketing Calls

It’s well known that processing calls can assist brands in comprehending buyers’ concerns, needs, and expectations. However, this doesn’t exempt businesses from a potential lack of insight into the customer experience.

Why do businesses record calls? Integrating recording functionality into the call centre’s daily toolkit aids brands in achieving better outcomes for their customers, monitoring and improving call flows, and refining their marketing strategies.

Furthermore, recording marketing calls enables companies to evaluate new strategies, assess customer sentiment, identify experience trends, and determine whether agents require additional training. It’s also important to collect specific call data for compliance and quality assurance purposes.

Brands and marketing agencies often seek a sales recording solution bundled with a call tracking service, analytics, and a cloud phone system.

With Phonexa, you gain access to Cloud PBX (cloud telephony system) and Call Logic (call tracking and distribution platform) — software solutions that work seamlessly to enhance customer conversions and streamline call processes. Recording call data is an integral part of this collaboration. It helps users acquire and utilise call insights to shape growth strategies and identify improvement opportunities.

Call recording software is a component of Phonexa’s Call Logic, serving as a digital tool that enables brands to create an audio record of phone calls between their representatives and clients. Let’s delve into the call recording process.

Consumers are informed that their conversation may be recorded when they call a business. Phonexa’s call recording software initiates a digital sales recording of these calls once consumers connect to the IVR and, eventually, a company representative. These recordings, stored in the cloud for a specific period, can be accessed for future use.

There’s no denying that call recording software is a potent tool that equips brands with all the essential information needed to enhance sales, training, and marketing processes.

Every business prioritises its performance. So, let’s explore why brands and marketing agencies should implement sales recording tools bundled with call tracking, lead management, and other essential marketing solutions to maximise revenue.

Why Utilise Call Recording Software & Other Tracking Solutions

Businesses must maintain constant communication with their prospects and clients to understand their needs and provide optimal solutions to their problems. Robust tools like sales call recording significantly streamline these tasks, making critical information readily available for businesses to comprehend and base decisions on.

Here’s how businesses can harness digital call recording tools bundled with other vital marketing solutions.

Pinpointing Issues & Concerns

Every sales call recording serves as a wealth of information. It aids brands in identifying the challenges their clients face, their concerns, the objections they encounter, and their reactions to any given offer or strategy.

Listening to such recordings enables marketing and sales teams to adjust their customer journeys and refine their processes to ensure the favourable outcome of future conversations.

Recovering Overlooked Details

One of the objectives businesses aim for when recording calls is to have the capability to revisit specific conversations. This can be particularly valuable in cases of confusion regarding a purchase, complaint, or delivered service.

Keeping Your Marketing Team Informed

It’s no secret that marketers collaborate with buyer personas. These target audience descriptions assist marketing experts in segmenting the audience and customizing content, products, messages, and services to meet clients’ needs and align with their behaviour.

However, marketing teams need to know and fully understand their customers to create an accurate description. Listening to recorded real conversations with consumers can help agents craft more targeted marketing messages to which these audiences can relate.

Harnessing the Potential of Untapped Insights

Sales call recordings enable brands to access different types of data. It helps qualitatively and quantitatively assess team performance and pinpoint areas for improvement.

For instance, some call recording software can have a speech-to-text feature, aiding in creating a transcript of the recorded calls. Marketing experts can use these transcripts to cheque if specific keywords were used during the conversation. This way, marketers can utilise recorded marketing calls to enhance performance among call centre agents.

With agent scoring functionalities, Phonexa’s Cloud PBX provides call centres with the ability to identify and flag the efficacy of each of their agents while allowing them to direct specific calls to the agents best suited to answer these enquiries.

But, of course, all of this can only be identified through the use of IVR technology, which asks a series of questions to determine the reason for the call and to whom the call should be directed.

Final Thoughts

Businesses often concentrate on well-known KPIs such as sales growth, profit, support tickets, customer retention, satisfaction, engagement, and other metrics, each of which are essential goals. However, brands must also harness all marketing and technology channels to access every piece of data that can significantly impact business development.

Collecting call data can achieve precisely that. Brands equipped with the appropriate call tracking service and call recording software can identify concealed revenue opportunities and uncover critical parameters like call distribution, sources, the company’s call capacity, speech speed, individual sales agents’ performance, and much more.

In essence, utilising call recording data enables brands to fine-tune their customer service, elevate the customer experience, enhance conversion rates, and train new agents.

No enterprise plans on overlooking premium leads or expending additional effort sieving out low-quality prospects. Establishing connections with leads that align with the ideal customer profile is a primary objective for most businesses.

However, it’s often neglected that merely about 44% of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) meet the criteria as potentially fitting, allowing them to progress through the sales funnel. Hence, the pursuit of generating high-quality leads remains a paramount focus and a significant concern for businesses across various industries.

In addition to lead generation quality, brands must strategically determine whether to internalise the lead generation process or invest effort in discovering lead suppliers through native ads, lead forms, email marketing, or social media.

Naturally, designing and developing the entire process appears to be a logical choice. Yet, numerous brands opt for the adoption of automation solutions that aid in refining their lead generation strategy and optimising each high-quality lead. The ultimate decision, however, hinges mainly on the size of your organisation, the desired quantity of leads, and the value associated with those leads.

Let’s delve deeper into the realm of lead quality, shedding light on key quality metrics, methods for lead assessment, and guidance to decide whether seeking new lead suppliers is necessary.

How To Improve Lead Quality

Marketers often seek guidance on enhancing lead quality and accurately assessing leads. However, before initiating the generation or evaluation process, it’s vital to clearly define what constitutes a “high-quality lead” in the context of your business.

Creating benchmarks for lead quality and collaborating with sales teams to define the stages of lead scoring assists marketing professionals in delineating the characteristics and behaviours of MQLs, SQLs, and all other intermediary leads within a high-intent environment.

For example, SQLs typically adhere to specific criteria, such as aligning with various company characteristics, demonstrating interest in similar products, or indicating a readiness to engage in a phone call. On the other hand, the criteria for MQLs must be rooted in real-time customer data and their consumer journey.

However, ultimately, it boils down to discerning the metrics you should monitor to optimise marketing endeavours and guarantee that your campaigns yield high-quality leads. Here are some of them:

• Visitors converted into leads: This represents the number of individuals who visit the company website and transition into leads. These figures can sometimes resemble conversion rates, providing insights into the performance of marketing initiatives.
• Leads transformed into opportunities: It’s crucial to comprehend how many leads – once generated – successfully progress through lead qualification.
• Time for high-quality leads to convert: The likelihood of a visitor evolving into a customer also hinges on the effort and time invested by company representatives in moving leads through the sales funnel.

Yet, the question lingers: where can you obtain the leads necessary for your company’s business growth?

Searching for Lead Suppliers

Businesses aiming to refine their lead generation process frequently ponder the initial steps. Some seek out suppliers and purchase leads, while others locate the necessary resources and establish an internal lead-generation network.

Have you perused our article on effectively vending leads online? Explore it here to discover how you can identify lead buyers and enhance your revenue.

If you decide to seek lead suppliers, consider these tips to assist you in finding a suitable lead generation company or broker.

1. Emphasise Networking

Participating in shows or conferences remains a reliable method for discovering, communicating, and establishing enduring relationships with lead suppliers or brokers.

2. Monitor Your Competitors

It’s a common practice for businesses to observe their competitors and gain insights from their strategies. As companies strive for business expansion, they experiment with diverse lead-generation approaches to secure optimal revenue. Examining their LinkedIn profiles and exploring their connections is a prevalent and effective method for identifying new lead generators for your network.

3. Prioritise Research

There’s no secret formula; it’s about investing time and conducting thorough research to comprehend the origins of high-quality leads and identify lead generators. Whether you’re seeking insurance, small business, or home service leads, it’s crucial to scrutinise ads, lead forms, keywords, social media, and dedicated groups to discover suitable lead suppliers.

Generating High-Quality Leads

If you’re looking to move away from Jedi mind tricks and save your sales team’s time while enhancing the yield on quality leads, consider these suggestions:

• Collaborate with your marketing and sales teams to craft a distinctive lead definition.
• Engage in a collective effort to design lead-generation programs that cater to the needs of all parties involved in the process.
• Seek input from sales representatives regarding lead generation companies and established contacts.
• Evaluate all leads against the specific lead definition.
• Identify and implement effective lead management solutions.
• Take charge of your sales pipeline and gain insights into metrics like lead quality and lifecycle through lead tracking.
• Fine-tune your lead generation campaigns and introduce lead nurturing strategies.
• Incorporate automation tools wherever possible to ensure smoother business operations.

How To Generate High-Quality B2B Leads

Adapting to changes and leveraging every available channel and marketing strategy is crucial for businesses to stay successful and competitive. Most B2B companies’ primary marketing focus remains consistent: generating more high-quality leads.

Source: HubSpot

However, achieving this requires establishing an effective foundation of B2B sales leads and implementing the tools to analyze relevant datasets and monitor unique customer journeys. Let’s delve into more detail on how B2B companies can streamline the lead generation process.

Coordinate Customer Journeys

To guide the target audience successfully towards specific channels and engage in relevant interactions, brands must meet their expectations. Becoming a journey orchestrator is essential to ensuring that every interaction assists high-quality leads in progressing toward their goals and enhancing overall experiences.

Build and Maintain Lists

The quality of B2B lead lists is pivotal for every outbound strategy. Regular updates and segmentation of lists based on audiences enable accurate targeting goals and analysis of specific behavioural patterns. This approach helps focus efforts on high-intent audiences.

Segment Your Email Lists and Personalise Outreach

Lead nurturing tactics prioritise tailored interactions, and B2B outreach campaigns should avoid resembling typical advertisements. Failure to do so may lead to wasted time, money, and lost lead conversions.

Source: McKinsey

Segmenting the audience and personalising marketing messages can categorise quality leads by industry, geography, and company size, thereby improving conversion rates.

Harness Lead Data

Sustaining business success requires tapping into lead data to determine which marketing channels drive the most relevant traffic and convert leads into customers.

Phonexa’s LMS Sync, a tracking, lead distribution, and analytics platform, empowers brands to capture valuable attribution data, optimize lead generation efforts, and use an automated ping tree service to find interested third parties willing to buy declined leads.

Unlock the Potential of Quality Leads

Executing a successful lead generation strategy is a challenging endeavor. It involves identifying trustworthy lead suppliers or investing in automation solutions to streamline workflows and marketing campaigns.

By employing an appropriate marketing automation solution, brands can effectively organize marketing and sales teams to collaborate towards common goals, resonate with their target audiences, classify prospects, and implement effective lead nurturing tactics. More importantly, they can generate a greater number of high-quality leads.

To learn how Phonexa’s all-in-one suite for marketing automation can help you streamline your lead generation and management and take your company’s leadgen efforts to the next level, book a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore these Phonexa tools to support your efforts:

• LMS Sync for lead generation, distribution, and management 
• Ping Tree with automated bidding structures to help you drive more leads and recycle declined ones
• Call Logic to help you ensure a personalised outreach effort for your purchased leads
• E-Delivery to help you launch a drip campaign to engage your prospects
• Opt-Intel to centralise your suppression lists and preferences 

If you are business, you know that calls are a vital part of your success. In the United Kingdom, a prodigious 94% of adults use mobile phones. Most of these are smart phones, with just about half owning some version of the iPhone and just under 30% owning a Samsung product. The writing on the wall is abundantly clear—if you want to connect with a wide audience, you need to be equipped to manage your inbound calls.

Many of the calls that reach a business are going to be the result of “click-to-call” functionality. This allows mobile users to search for a business and get instantly connected with the push of a button on their mobile screen that will dial the business number.

Determining what marketing efforts impel a lead to make that call will offer tremendous insight into your marketing strategy. This can be accomplished with call tracking and analytics.

Why Call Tracking is a Necessity for Businesses 

Identify Attribution

When your business invests pounds into specific marketing strategies, it is imperative that you take steps to measure the success of those strategies, which can be done by determining your attribution. Your marketing attribution is connecting your incoming calls to the marketing effort that drove the calls.

Call tracking is the effective way your business can get detailed insights into all your marketing attribution. It lets you separate out which calls came from leads who found the number on your website to other leads who may have dialled your number by clicking a click-to-call button in a mobile ad.

Plus, call tracking lets you track your attribution in real-time, giving you an opportunity to adjust your campaigns “as they happen” so they can be optimised for success. Say you notice that a campaign targeting Greater London residents is performing very well while your Manchester campaign is underperforming—you can shift resources from targeting Manchester to Greater London so that you can have a maximum impact where you are already finding success. That’s the power of call tracking.

Improve Service

Another reason why call tracking is indispensable is because of the digital tools that allow you to raise the level of customer service provided to your incoming calls. Utilising an automatic call distributor gives your business the ability to route calls as they come in to the department or call centre that can best service the needs of the caller. This helps cut down on frustrating wait times and ensures that callers are connected quicker—ultimately creating a more pleasant experience.

Your call representative performance can also be helped by taking advantage of the call recording tool. With call recording, select calls can be recorded and stored so that you have a better idea of how conversions occur (or if they do not convert, an explanation as to why).

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Call tracking does more than just help marketers understand how their campaigns are performing—it also provides them with granular insight into all their call leads down to the details of when a call took place, how long it lasted, and where the caller is located. These data points and others can be analysed and studied using call analytics.

With call analytics, you can get a comprehensive understanding of your marketing and your inbound calls, like seeing which keywords are most effective or which destinations are receiving the most calls.

You can take the power of analytics a step further with predictive modelling. A standout feature from Phonexa, predictive modelling creates a visual analysis of your call data and helps you forecast how changes to your campaigns would impact future lead generation efforts and revenue. Using this advanced feature, you can find answers to pressing questions regarding your marketing strategy—giving you the necessary insight your business needs to reach new levels of success.

Today, conversions arise from various consumer interactions across marketing touchpoints and channels, encompassing social media posts, phone calls, and email campaigns. Consequently, identifying the marketing efforts that drive sales and conversions remains one of the businesses’ most essential and complicated tasks.

It’s no secret that customer experience is inscribed in data, and transitioning to data-driven attribution is still a concealed challenge for many companies.

Brands geared up to make a change and shift to multi-touch attribution aspire to be able to draw a direct line from attribution data to business results. However, around 76% of all marketing professionals say they already have – or will have in a year – the capability to measure marketing attribution effectively.

With a multi-touch media perspective, companies can determine if they are overinvesting in specific channels and identify the touchpoints that should receive more credit and budget for influencing customer behaviour and decisions.

Let’s explore different types of data-driven multi-touch attribution models and how attribution tools can assist companies in evaluating the performance of their marketing output.

What Is Multi-touch Attribution and Why Is It Important?

Fundamentally, marketing attribution refers to how businesses understand how their tactics, strategies, campaigns, and potential consumer interactions can contribute to conversions, sales, and revenue.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) assists marketers in identifying the touchpoints responsible for sales and conversions. It’s worth noting that multi-touch strategies and programmes often include data on marketing channels. However, they are designed to assess the performance and weight of specific touchpoints.

Multi-touch attribution establishes the cost and weight of each touchpoint in a customer journey and compares them to the value of the conversions. While the formulae used to determine the importance and relationships of the values delve into the territory of data science, marketers must comprehend the role of every touchpoint.

Implementing multi-touch attribution software can assist businesses with attribution modelling and identifying the marketing initiatives that originated the customer journey and ultimately resulted in a sale. Moreover, reviewing best practises or examples can enhance your understanding of the multi-touch attribution process.

Let’s say that Helen is your prospective client. Firstly, she conducts a Google search for an analytics tool and eventually clicks on a paid search result. Then, Helen reads a blog post covering the best analytics tools on the market. The blog post features a link to the product review page, which Helen clicks.

As she is not yet ready to make a purchase, she continues browsing the Internet and sees a display ad featuring your analytics tool. Consequently, Helen clicks on it, visits your website, and completes a purchase. Taking advantage of marketing channels, including calls, is a crucial element of the delightful omnichannel experience. This also implies using the right solutions, like inbound call tracking and lead distribution systems, and identifying the best attribution models for your business.

Attribution Models

Let’s delve into the principal differences between these attribution models in more detail.

First-touch Attribution Model

 Utilising this model entails assigning all the credit to the initial digital asset or website page that led a customer to sign up or purchase your product. For example, if a social media post is the first digital asset a consumer interacts with, it will receive credit for the conversion.

Last-touch Attribution Model

 As the name suggests, this attribution model involves giving all the credit to the final digital asset or webpage a customer interacts with before a conversion event. The last-touch model is an excellent choice if you are evaluating bottom-of-the-funnel content like landing pages or CTAs.

Multi-touch Attribution Model

This model considers all touchpoints and credits them based on their importance and the type of multi-touch attribution a company deems appropriate for a specific ad campaign.

MTA & Marketing Mix Modelling

Multi-touch attribution is often mistaken for multi-channel attribution (MCA). The latter is a blend of MTA and marketing mix modelling (MMM), helping companies understand which consumers’ offline and online activities lead to a sale. This model also involves using tracking pixels to evaluate the performance of marketing channels like SEO, social media, or ad retargeting. Marketing mix modelling employs a multivariate regression method to measure and predict the impact specific sales or marketing efforts have on buying behaviour. It often involves gathering and analysing product information, price, seasonality, customer location, ad campaign details, and broader data like economic conditions.

Common MTA Models

Several attribution models can be used to identify and weigh crucial touchpoints in the customer journey. Here’s a breakdown of common multi-touch attribution models to help you find the best option for your business.

Linear Model

This is the simplest way to apply a multi-touch approach. Linear attribution assigns an identical value to all touchpoints along the customer’s path to purchase.

If you have four touchpoints, for example, you credit each equally: 25% to email, 25% to a blog post, 25% to a social media post, and 25% to referral.

Time-decay Model

Utilising this model implies that credit is assigned to all the touchpoints that resulted in your customers converting, with more credit given to the most recent touchpoints.

For instance, if there are four touchpoints, here’s how the value can be applied to each interaction: 5% to email, 15% to referral, 30% to a social media post, and 50% to a blog post.

U-shaped Model

Using this attribution model entails crediting the first and last interactions equally with a higher percentage and distributing the remaining portion equally between other touchpoints.

If you assess four interactions, here’s how the value can be assigned: 40% to referral, 10% to a social media post, 10% to a blog post, and 40% to email.

W-shaped Model

True to its name, this model takes on a W-shaped distribution when assigning credit. It involves assigning equal credit to the customer journey’s initial, middle, and final touchpoints. The remaining percentage is then distributed equally among other interactions.

How To Implement MTA in Your Daily Practise

It’s undeniable that MTA is not the most straightforward approach. While businesses must assess the impact of each potential customer action, they must also reorganise their tactics around customers, experiment, and understand what drives CLV beyond obvious journeys and marketing spend. For those aiming to initiate multi-touch attribution, you can either develop the modelling in-house or invest in an attribution tool. Regardless of your choice, keep these three points in mind:

• Tracking: It’s vital to track data from the entire customer journey, including data from various solutions your company uses.
• Attribution models: To apply a suitable attribution model, brands must analyse and process information and ensure that it is standardised and free of duplicates.
• Visualisation: How the data is presented and visualised is critical. It can complicate or facilitate how companies compare different datasets and make marketing decisions.

The Advantages of MTA in Marketing

Multi-touch attribution can help businesses address numerous challenges. The following are some of the benefits MTA offers:

• Collecting crucial data and mapping customer journeys
• Identifying channels, campaigns, and touchpoints that impact the sales cycle
• Connecting sales intelligence to the generated revenue
• Generating more high-quality leads
• Collecting, processing, and centralising information from across marketing solutions

Marketing Attribution Vendors

Opting for the current solution or software that fuels your multi-touch attribution capabilities instead of developing it internally has its advantages. Nevertheless, this approach may entail additional costs and necessitate customisation to align with your business requirements. Below is a concise roster of reputable vendors that can evaluate diverse touchpoints throughout the marketing funnel, assist you in obtaining attribution data, and provide actionable insights.

Phonexa Marketing Automation

Phonexa enables brands to optimise ad campaigns with a singular suite of tracking solutions for performance marketing. Its marketing automation solutions help businesses map customer data, tap into interaction and call history, implement engagement tactics, and achieve multi-channel attribution.

Marketers often overlook the importance of inbound calls as a critical part of the customer journey. Phonexa’s call intelligence helps companies tie inbound calls to various attribution models and identify and track all the touchpoints that led to calls, including marketing campaigns, channels, ads, webpages, emails, landing pages, and even keywords.

HubSpot Marketing Analytics

HubSpot‘s software assists companies in gauging and scrutinising the efficacy of their marketing endeavours. It provides access to data from diverse solutions, facilitating data-driven decisions and the organisation of attribution data.   The marketing analytics tool and dashboard empower brands to comprehensively assess their marketing initiatives, ensuring precise multi-touch revenue attribution and the maximisation of successful efforts.

Salesforce Attribution App

Salesforce enables enterprises and small businesses to pinpoint the marketing touchpoints that resulted in conversions or the highest revenue, depending on the companies’ attribution models.  

Google Analytics Multi-touch Attribution

Google Analytics (GA) facilitates rules-based and data-driven attribution. GA extends its Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) feature to companies. Here are the primary distinctions between these two features.

Source: Google 

Regarding MCF, Google Analytics’ exclusive algorithm calculates gains for each touchpoint and compares the conversion probability when one of the interactions is absent from the journey. Moreover, utilising MCF Model Explorer can assist businesses in conducting a more thorough analysis and comprehending the ROI implications of various data-driven attribution models.

Embark on Your Multi-touch Attribution Journey

Brands aim to eradicate guesswork and direct their budget and efforts toward the correct digital assets. Transitioning to multi-touch attribution is a commendable decision for companies seeking to enhance the customer experience, monitor lead quality, and prioritise campaign goals.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa’s all-in-one automation solution can help your business identify the factors influencing purchase decisions using multi-touch attribution.

Frequently Asked Questions About Multi-touch Attribution

Phonexa’s tech team has been working hard to innovate and build custom solutions across our products to optimise and power your performance marketing automation campaigns.

Here are just some of the new significant features and improvements for the month of November across our suite of products.

LMS Sync & Call Logic Updates

Tracking: New Google Sheets Integration

We have a new Google Sheets integration! If you need to send leads to a spreadsheet, our new Google Sheets integration is easy to set up. This feature is available at the product, campaign, and publisher levels and is located on the Tracking tab. Our Knowledge Base article provides step-by-step instructions on how you can configure the settings in Google, as well as Phonexa.

Fixed Price by Campaign

We added a new feature for publisher rev-share to “Ignore Publisher Price.” If this box is checked, the publisher will always be paid the fixed price, regardless of the minimum price they have posted. You can read more about our rev-share settings here.

E-Delivery Updates

Scheduled Report Export

As you know, we currently have a feature in LMS Sync, Call Logic, and Lynx to schedule an automatic report export. By popular demand, we added this feature to E-Delivery as well for the following reports: Campaign Summary, Delivery Summary, Recipient Summary, and Geolocation Summary.

Failover Automation

To avoid deliverability issues, we added a failover automation for the email delivery channels in E-Delivery.

Opt-Intel Updates

More updates for Opt-Intel! Last month we informed you about the new Download Frequency Report. This month we have two more updates. First, we added columns to the Email and SMS Campaigns lists to display the last suppression list export date along with the method. This will help you have more visibility into mailer compliance.  

The second improvement was to add four new notifications for compliance communications.  

Lynx: New Details on Conversion Report

We added more details for clicks and conversions in the Conversion Report. In the clicks section, we added new fields to help you identify unique clicks, URL, and redirect URL.  

In this fiercely competitive era of digital marketing, tapping into free traffic sources for affiliate marketing is akin to discovering a goldmine. Affiliate marketers are constantly in search of cost-effective methods that can generate high-quality traffic, and this is where free traffic sources play a crucial role.

According to Astute Analytica, affiliate marketing is expected to witness substantial revenue growth, reaching nearly $40 million by 2031. To secure a share of this lucrative market, affiliate marketers need to employ strategic approaches, and one effective method is leveraging free traffic websites. Before delving into these methods, let’s gain a clear understanding of what free traffic sources entail.

Source: Astute Analytica

What Are Free Traffic Sources?

Free traffic sources encompass channels that can be utilised to attract potential customers without incurring any costs. Remarkably, despite being budget-friendly, these free traffic websites often yield results comparable to those achieved through paid marketing efforts. The success of affiliate marketing frequently depends on effectively leveraging these sources.

Undoubtedly, mastering how to acquire traffic through free sources is foundational to your marketing success. For those unfamiliar with the concept, we will elaborate on the best free traffic sources, how to capitalise on them to enhance your affiliate marketing endeavours, and important considerations before selecting free traffic sources.

Phonexa’s Lynx offers advanced analytics, tracking, and optimisation capabilities to enhance affiliate marketing campaigns across diverse channels. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, Lynx is the preferred solution for businesses aiming to elevate their affiliate marketing efforts and maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

How to Select Optimal Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing

Achieving success in affiliate marketing is undeniably linked to a pivotal factor: traffic, specifically from free sources. However, not all free traffic sources are created equal.

Before committing to one, several significant factors warrant careful consideration:

1. Quality of traffic:

• Prioritise quality over quantity. Assess whether the free traffic source is likely to attract high-quality visitors.
• High bounce rates or low engagement are discouraging signs, emphasising the importance of user engagement, as highlighted by SEMrush’s 2020 reports.

2. Type of traffic:

• Different types of traffic (organic, referral, or social) impact affiliate marketing strategies differently.
• Given that 53% of online traffic is organic, according to BrightEdge, choose the type that aligns best with your overall strategy.

3. SEO ranking:

• Quality organic traffic significantly contributes to search engine optimisation (SEO). Evaluate whether the free traffic source supports your SEO efforts.
• Sites conducive to backlinking can positively influence your SEO ranking.

According to statistics published by Authority Hacker, 78.3% of affiliate marketers relied on SEO as their primary traffic acquisition method. This underscores the vital role SEO plays in effective affiliate marketing. 

Source: Authority Hacker

Andrey Lipattsev, Partner Development Manager at Google, mentioned that high-quality content and link building are the two main signals Google uses to rank websites for search.

4. Targeting options:

• Opt for traffic sources that offer effective targeting options. Demographic and behavioural targeting ensures your pages reach the right audience.
• Consider the audience on different platforms, such as Facebook, which primarily attracts users aged 25 to 34 among its 2.9 billion monthly active users.

5. Load time and user experience:

• A seamless user experience is crucial. Fast load times, intuitive navigation, and appealing aesthetics enhance user satisfaction.
• Approximately 88% of online consumers won’t return after a poor user experience, according to Sweor.

6. Conversion rate:

• Ultimately, prioritise conversions over raw traffic numbers. Research whether the traffic source converts well for affiliate programmes in your niche.
• Recognise that not all traffic leads to conversions, as emphasised by a 2019 report indicating that only 2.58% of e-commerce site visits result in purchases.

Considering these factors ensures a comprehensive evaluation of free traffic sources for affiliate marketing. It’s not merely a numbers game; it revolves around quality, relevance, SEO benefits, targeting options, user experience, and conversion potential. Keep in mind that even though the traffic source is free, your efforts and time are not. Exercise informed decision-making to maximise the return on your time investment.

Remember, in the realm of affiliate marketing, it’s about making informed choices to cruise smoothly without spending a penny on traffic.

Now, let’s explore the multifaceted world of free traffic for websites.

7 Essential Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing

1. Search Engine Optimisation: The Golden Strategy

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is synonymous with free traffic. An optimised website can attract a bevy of organic traffic. The following are some effective SEO strategies to help you drive significant affiliate traffic and achieve your goals:

• Optimise your website and content around relevant keywords.
• Enhance on-page elements, including titles, meta tags, URLs, headers, and alt tags.
• Craft high-quality, keyword-optimised content with internal links.
• Build a robust backlink profile from reputable websites.
• 70% of customers acknowledge that website load time influences purchasing choices – improve website load time for a better user experience.

2. Content Marketing: Traffic King

Quality content begets steady traffic. Well-crafted content can subtly persuade consumers to take desired actions.

• Provide valuable content through blogs, articles, guides, and videos.
• According to the Content Marketing Institute, 74% of B2B marketers believe that providing valuable content contributes to content marketing success.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

3. Social Media: Mass Engagement

Social media is essential for audience engagement. Research shows that 71% of consumers who have a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to others. Therefore, get creative and start appealing to the masses on social platforms.

• Leverage platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• Establish yourself as an authority in your niche by regularly posting engaging content to draw eyeballs and drive traffic.
• Build a strong presence, use hashtags, collaborate with influencers, run contests, and encourage user-generated content.
• Focus on visual content and optimise social media profiles.
• Regularly monitor your social media analytics and use this data to refine your approach and focus on strategies that yield the highest results.

Source: HubSpot

• Facebook: As of 2023, Facebook boasts a massive 3 billion monthly active users. This makes it a top contender for sourcing affiliate marketing traffic and a top priority for marketers. You can also use the Facebook Marketplace to increase your visibility and traffic.
• Instagram: This social media platform enjoys an audience of 1 billion users, and the figure is only growing. Use this visually-inclined platform to promote products. Tap into the potential of ‘Instagram Stories’ and ‘IGTV’ for higher reach. Leverage user-generated content and influencer collaborations for authenticity.
• X (formerly Twitter): This platform remains favoured for rapid, text-based content. With 330 million active users, it’s a significant player. Crafting engaging tweets for affiliate marketing can result in a high click-through rate. Enhance your reach with #hashtags to stand out, and consider sharing live event updates to gain a substantial following.
• Pinterest: As a visually-driven platform, Pinterest is a treasure trove for affiliate marketers in industries like fashion, home decor, and food. By creating eye-catching pins, optimising descriptions with keywords, and leveraging group boards, marketers can attract users actively seeking inspiration and recommendations.
• TikTok: With its rapid growth and popularity, TikTok offers affiliate marketers a unique avenue to reach a younger demographic. Users spend over 1.5 hours daily on the platform. Crafting entertaining short-form videos can effectively showcase products or services and direct traffic to affiliate offers.
• LinkedIn: Focused on professional networking and business-related content, LinkedIn presents an exclusive opportunity for affiliate marketers targeting B2B audiences. By sharing informative articles, participating in pertinent discussions, and utilising LinkedIn’s publishing platform, marketers can establish themselves as industry authorities and channel traffic to their affiliate offers.

4. Guest Blogging: Audience Expansion

Guest blogging is an excellent strategy to drive traffic to your website. By publishing content on reputable blogs, you assert your authority and build brand presence while attracting an audience.

According to an Optinmonster report, marketers who prioritise blogging are 13 times more likely to have a good ROI due to their efforts. It is a free yet effective technique to drive traffic and elevate your affiliate marketing prospects. Here are some strategies to consider:

• Conduct audience analysis for precision-targeted content. Audience-oriented content that solves problems serves as a traffic magnet. Remember, providing value is the key to unlocking a regular flow of traffic.
• Guest blogging also serves as a stage to showcase your expertise. This cultivates credibility, a key trust-builder with your audiences.
• Consistency is key in guest blogging. This hooks the audience, keeps them engaged, and builds a loyal following.
• Add an engaging author bio after the blog post. This acts as a soft promotion channel for the affiliate site.

5. Email Marketing: Nurturing Touch

The number of email users is expected to reach 4.73 billion by the end of 2026, as projected by Statista. Harnessing this vast pool of potential customers with a well-planned email marketing strategy can boost your website traffic.

A nurturing email sequence can engage your subscribers while enticing them to visit your website. With its tremendous ROI, email marketing is critical to expanding your affiliate marketing horizon.

• Personalisation in email marketing is paramount. Personalised emails achieve six times higher transaction rates.
• Craft a compelling CTA. Use your CTA to trigger excitement and create a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). This will result in increased CTR and conversions.
• Autoresponders. Employ this tool to automate follow-up sequences to build relationships. Incite action, drive repeat traffic, streamline your process, and optimise your time.
• Strategically place affiliate links. Overloading emails with affiliate links can hinder the user experience. Insert them strategically for the best possible engagement.
• Test, measure, refine. Robust analytics give insights into what works and what doesn’t. Implement A/B testing on your campaigns. Test, measure, refine, and repeat.
• Leverage mobile-friendly emails. Mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens, so ensure your emails are mobile-friendly. Don’t miss out on mobile traffic.

6. YouTube: Video Trending

The demand for videos has dramatically soared thanks to the Generation Z demographic. With its whopping user base of 2 billion, YouTube presents a dynamic platform for generating user engagement through captivating videos.

As per data from Statista, in November 2022, YouTube secured the rank of the world’s second most frequent website. Thus, devising informative videos embedded with affiliate links can steer significant viewer influx and imnprove conversion rates.

Source: Statista

• Crafting tutorials and review videos proves highly effective as viewers actively seek information, presenting an ideal opportunity for seamless product promotion. Providing what viewers desire builds trust.
• Optimise your video content with long-tail keywords to enhance discoverability. In the competitive YouTube algorithm, gaining every possible advantage counts.
• Bridge the gap between viewers and products by strategically including your affiliate link in the video description. This straightforward approach consistently yields positive results.
• Boost audience engagement through comment responses, Q&A videos, and shout-outs. Interactive communities on YouTube have a direct correlation to increased sales.
• Thumbnails play a crucial role on YouTube. Eye-catching thumbnails attract more views, translating into higher conversion rates.
• Collaborate with like-minded YouTubers to extend your reach by tapping into their existing audience base. This strategy is often underused but remarkably efficient.
• Leverage the power of playlists to enhance session duration. YouTube’s algorithm favours channels with longer view times, positively impacting your content’s visibility.
• Stay informed about YouTube trending topics to remain relevant and engaged in popular conversations. Participating in trending topics with relevant links can significantly boost conversions.

7. Forum Engagement: Tapping into Niche Communities

User forums like Quora and Reddit are goldmines for interacting with niche communities. Quora alone has 400 million monthly active users. Interacting with users and answering their queries can subtly direct traffic to your affiliate products or services.

• Meaningful engagement stands out as a key strategy often overlooked. Mere link dropping doesn’t suffice; actively participating in discussions fosters rapport and opens avenues for potential affiliate product recommendations.
• Forums abound with individuals seeking information. Equipped with expert knowledge of affiliate products, you become an enticing source, naturally attracting organic traffic through shared information.
• Creating sticky threads is another effective strategy. These threads maintain post visibility, ensuring continuous rapport and enhancing the likelihood of engagement, thus keeping your affiliate products in the spotlight.
• Harness the influence of your forum signature. A well-crafted signature, providing information about you and your offerings, should be compelling enough to attract clicks and drive traffic to your affiliate products.
• Steer clear of blatant self-promotion, as it can be off-putting and may violate forum rules. Instead, subtly incorporate your marketing into valuable contributions to maintain a delicate balance.

Embark on the Path to Affiliate Marketing Success Using Free Traffic Sources

In the dynamic realm of affiliate marketing, tapping into the potential of free organic traffic sources has emerged as a transformative strategy. As we wrap up our exploration of these invaluable avenues, it becomes evident that they wield the capacity to redefine success for affiliate marketers.

However, it’s crucial to bear in mind that beyond the allure of free traffic, the emphasis must remain on quality rather than quantity. Statistics underscore the significance of high-quality traffic, be it organic or from referrals, as the key to conversions and triumph in affiliate marketing. In your pursuit of greatness in affiliate marketing, keep in mind that while these affiliate traffic sources may not incur monetary costs, they do demand an investment of time, effort, and strategic planning. As you delve into the multifaceted world of free traffic, may you strike a balance between these elements and harvest the rewards of affiliate marketing without straining your budget.

Secure your comprehensive performance and affiliate marketing software suite today to propel your business toward unprecedented success. Alternatively, book a demo to explore how Phonexa can empower you to unleash the full potential of affiliate marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions

There’s no template to assist companies in winning or establishing meaningful connections with potential customers. Successful lead nurturing demands time, commitment, data, and strategic approaches.

While the significance of implementing an efficient lead nurturing strategy is unquestionable, businesses often grapple with generating leads that are prepared to make a purchase. However, a well-devised approach to guiding prospects through the sales funnel can yield remarkable results. Companies that adopt thoroughly researched lead nurturing strategies typically attract 50% more sales-ready leads at a reduced cost.

Numerous factors need consideration for companies to effectively manage, educate, encourage, and nurture leads. This guide provides insights into the lead nurturing process, empowering you to elevate your nurturing strategy for enduring success.

Defining Lead Nurturing

The primary objectives of lead nurturing are to build trust and cultivate relationships with potential customers. Companies employ lead nurturing strategies in both B2B and B2C contexts to engage diverse audiences, encouraging increased interest in their brands, fostering connections, and driving purchases.

The implementation of nurturing strategies is indispensable for business success. It facilitates the expansion of databases, enhances the quality of relationships with prospects and clients, and contributes to the creation of more targeted content.

Source: QuickEmailVerification

A successful nurturing programme must be grounded in the needs of prospects. This ensures that brands maintain customer-centric communication efforts, delivering essential information to heighten brand awareness, foster trust, and sustain connections with potential customers at every stage of the buying cycle.

Crafting an Effective Nurturing Process

Businesses customise pertinent content, devise targeted marketing campaigns, and establish a lead nurturing process to shepherd leads through various stages of the customer journey and guide them down the sales funnel.

Email marketing frequently features in lead nurturing campaigns due to its effectiveness in broadening market reach, converting more leads, and engaging the target audience. These campaigns typically initiate when leads take specific actions, such as adding items to their cart or subscribing to the company’s blog or social media accounts.

Once leads perform the desired actions, companies initiate a lead nurture email sequence containing time-sensitive offers, personalised recommendations, or purchase reminders. Featured here are a couple of lead nurturing examples showcasing how different companies sustain engagement after leads complete a purchase or abandon their carts.

 Source: ReallyGoodEmails                      Source: ReallyGoodEmails

However, it’s imperative for brands to understand that lead nurturing isn’t a one-off marketing campaign; rather, it’s a prolonged effort that demands continuous dialogue. Thus, formulating comprehensive ideas for lead nurturing campaigns is crucial to seamlessly advance marketing efforts, enhance sales, and ensure sustained business growth.

To aid in this process, here’s a succinct lead nurturing plan template designed to assist in developing or customising a strategic plan for higher conversion rates and effective communication with leads, facilitating systematic progress.

Source: Adobe Marketo

Undoubtedly, lead generation is a high-effort, high-reward endeavour, as is the creation of targeted content. This is significant because it precisely caters to the diverse needs of prospects, drawing in more marketing-generated leads. However, comprehending how to apply it across various channels and tailor it to different prospects is a distinct challenge.

Let’s delve into how businesses can harness specific marketing channels to optimise their lead nurturing efforts.

Optimising Lead Nurturing Channels

The effectiveness of marketing channels plays a pivotal role in guiding potential customers through the buying cycle. Here are some widely utilised channels for cultivating, educating, engaging, and motivating leads:

• Relevant content on the company website: Brands leverage blog posts, landing pages, personalised offerings, and compelling calls to action to capture the attention of prospects.
• Email marketing automation: Emails serve as a tool for businesses to employ automated lead nurturing, encompassing updates, follow-ups, in-depth informational content, and more.
• Social media and voice interactions: Businesses utilise social media accounts and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to deliver educational content, conduct surveys, extract crucial data from person-to-person conversations, and connect with potential clients unfamiliar with their products.
• Cross-channel remarketing: Given the shrinking attention spans, businesses need to re-engage lost prospects, establish a clear brand impression, and ensure a seamless experience across platforms.
• Webinars, offline and online events: Webinars and industry events provide marketers with opportunities to interact with potential clients, pose questions, receive instant responses from the target audience, and humanise their brands.

Identifying the most effective channels demands time and the utilisation of appropriate marketing automation solutions, such as a lead management and distribution system, call tracking, email and SMS marketing systems and more. However, the crucial aspect lies in understanding when and how to reach out to prospects.

Distinguishing Lead Generation from Lead Nurturing

Lead generation involves identifying and gathering contacts that can potentially evolve into future clients. In contrast, lead nurturing focuses on acquainting prospects with the brand, fostering trust, and motivating them toward a purchase.

Both processes are integral to any business strategy, albeit directed at distinct business objectives.

Essential Data for Crafting a Nurturing Strategy

Acquiring pertinent data is the primary task for companies seeking to analyse current business performance, optimise marketing expenditure, and foresee outcomes, trends, actions, or scenarios.

When formulating a B2B lead nurturing strategy, consider the following questions and leverage the corresponding data:

The demographic and behavioural data collected can be utilised for personalisation, ensuring that your nurturing programme remains timely and relevant. For instance, with marketing automation, lead nurturing becomes a seamless task operating automatically, triggered by clients’ actions (or inaction).

Should you choose to personalise nurturing approaches based on behavioural data and lead scoring results, you can present prospects with various nurturing paths akin to if-then statements. A couple of examples include:

• If the potential customer is a marketing professional in the e-commerce business, the B2B lead nurture path is B.
• If the prospect is a salesperson in the e-commerce business, then the B2B lead nurture path is A.

While investing time in setting up workflows for the nurturing process to run automatically is essential, it ultimately saves you time, money, and effort.

Reasons to Implement a Nurturing Strategy

Building connections with leads and fortifying a more substantial reputation are just a few of the advantageous outcomes that effective nurturing tactics provide for businesses. Moreover, lead nurturing aids brands in abbreviating sales cycles, reducing customer acquisition costs, and enhancing their marketing return on investment.

Let’s delve into other advantages of formulating and executing a nurturing process:

• Enhanced conversions and fortified customer relationships
• Improved opportunities for audience segmentation
• Elevated revenues and refined marketing expenditure
• Supplementary avenues for analytics and chances to enhance the customer journey
• Capability to augment brand awareness

5 Efficient Lead Nurturing Strategies

Whether you’re starting a nurturing strategy from the ground up or refining existing tactics for sustained business growth, consider adopting these approaches.

Develop Buyer Personas

Understanding the traits of your hypothetical buyers—such as preferences, lifestyle habits, and challenges—facilitates audience segmentation and informs decisions on social media content and outreach strategies.

Here’s an example of a B2C buyer persona you can refer to when building your own.

Source: HubSpot

Utilise real client feedback through brief surveys to enhance outreach efforts and elevate customer experiences.

Craft Targeted Lead Nurturing Content

A robust content marketing strategy guides your brand, shapes marketing messages, and justifies investments.

Source: Semrush

Here are the four primary stages of creating a content marketing plan for your brand. Follow these four stages to create content designed to activate marketing triggers, align with audience interests, and nurture each buyer persona effectively.

Employ Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing Tactics

While email newsletters are favoured by over 30% of B2B marketers, relying solely on drip marketing campaigns may fall short.

The drip approach is about setting timing and action triggers and providing your prospects with relevant content in the moment of need. Otherwise, it will not add value or build trust with prospective customers.

Source: Business2Community

Effective lead nurturing requires a multi-channel approach involving social media, retargeting, sales outreach, website content, and marketing automation platforms.

Utilise Lead Scoring

Lead scoring ranks leads based on their value to your business, incorporating factors like conversion readiness, professional information, and engagement level.

Source: TechTarget

Create or customise a lead scoring model to focus marketing efforts on consumers who have taken specific steps, moving them closer to making a purchase.

Implement Marketing Automation Solutions

Marketing automation ensures the delivery of relevant messages, providing a consistent customer experience. Brands employing marketing automation witness a 451% increase in qualified leads thanks to improved audience identification, segmentation, and targeting.

It’s essential to maintain a steady stream of high-quality leads for business success. Solutions like LMS Sync, Phonexa’s lead tracking and distribution software, assist companies in leveraging lead data, identifying top-performing channels, and boosting conversion rates.

Planning Ahead

Whether operating in the B2B or B2C realm, meticulous planning of lead nurturing campaigns is crucial to converting efforts into tangible sales and clients. A comprehensive approach involving understanding your target market, creating buyer personas, capturing vital lead data, and efficiently tracking and distributing leads can contribute significantly to revenue growth while maintaining a prominent presence in the minds of both clients and prospects.

Interested in learning more about Phonexa’s marketing automation suite? Book a demo to discover how we can help you generate high-quality leads, provide personalised experiences, and effectively convert leads into customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Most businesses endeavour to comprehend customer desires and accurately define consumer values. However, while the price customers pay for specific goods remains important, what they expect to receive in return – beyond the products or services they paid for – holds much more significance.

In the post-pandemic era, the concepts of responsibility, customer satisfaction, and customer experience play a different and more substantial role. That is why introspection and re-evaluating priorities have become the new normal for consumers.

The same holds true for brands aiming to provide an elevated customer experience (CX) and journey, establish long-term relationships with clients, and prevent customer loss.

In most instances, marketers are committed to retaining existing clients and encouraging them to make repeat purchases. Certainly, driving high-quality leads, converting them, and perfecting your new user retention experience is always worth the effort. However, at some point, brands must blend customer retention tactics even during the acquisition phase.

It’s no secret that low retention and high churn are ominous signs for any company. More often than not, they indicate issues with your customer engagement and retention strategies.

Let’s delve into the importance of customer retention and shed light on the three most common marketing approaches that can lead to losing client interest and customer attrition.

Why Customer Retention Is Important

Customer retention entails a company’s ability to satisfy and motivate existing customers to make repeat purchases.

From a business perspective, establishing lasting relationships with current customers is crucial to the health of operations. Marketers channel their efforts into driving more high-quality leads and boosting conversion rates to achieve this.

The reality is that it’s far more economical to keep a current client satisfied than to win the attention and loyalty of a new one. This raises the question, “why do brands keep investing in customer acquisition versus retention?”

While retention rate statistics may differ by industry, they may also vary depending on where your product is in its lifecycle. If it has been up and running for several years, the retention rate should be one of the critical indicators to monitor.

It’s worth mentioning that businesses must also consider how well the customer journey is mapped, assess the approaches marketers use to acquire new customers, and identify some of the reasons that existing customers may churn. These and many other factors can significantly affect customer retention.

How Customer Retention Rate Is Calculated

High customer retention results in customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, increased marketing ROI, and heightened brand awareness. It is essential to measure and evaluate the current situation to determine whether you need to enhance the customer retention rate (CRR) and concentrate on re-engagement.

Examine the CRR or customer retention rate formula and consider some examples.

Before computing CRR, it is necessary to specify a period, such as a week, month, quarter, or year. Next, follow this formula to measure customer retention over a specific timeline:

                                         # Customers at the End of Period – # Customers Acquired During Period)

Retention Rate (%) = 一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一一 x 100

                                        # Customers at the Start of Period

Imagine that your company began the quarter with 40 clients, acquired 13 new customers during the mentioned period, and experienced seven customer churns. The CRR will look something like this:

[ (46 – 13) / 40 ) ] x 100 = 82.5% retention

Once you gauge your CRR, it can be beneficial to scrutinise the churned customers. This will help you identify the reasons for their departure or the types of customers that are more likely to leave.

Businesses frequently encounter challenges in enhancing their customer retention rates. One of the reasons is their failure to acknowledge the role and closely examine the customer experience. Since customer-facing interactions are fundamental to brand loyalty, it’s crucial to comprehend how brands communicate and manage customer relationships across various channels.

Let’s delve deeper into how the following approaches can influence customer expectations, experiences, and retention rates.

3 Approaches to CX and Retention

More than anyone else, marketing experts understand that they must improve the customer experience to enhance customer retention. So, here are the most common approaches you must avoid when devising strategies to elevate customer experience and retention rates.

1. Domination of Manual Processes

Many companies still grapple with automating manual tasks and processes. However, automation works wonders when deployed correctly.

Marketers in the financial services or insurance sectors often seek straightforward ways to qualify leads, ensure speedy contact strategies, facilitate fast and efficient invoicing, or pinpoint the most profitable marketing channels.

In fact, around 77% of businesses that adopted automation reduced their marketing overhead by 12.2% and increased sales productivity by 14.5%. Such a shift enables enterprises to focus on data accuracy, improve customer retention, and refine customer interaction across all marketing channels.

Brands armed with marketing automation solutions like Phonexa’s lead management and distribution software, LMS Sync, can streamline the process of converting leads into customers by leveraging automated lead flows and insights into real-time data analytics.

Ultimately, employing a comprehensive marketing automation solution can help your brand make every interaction more personal and rewarding for your clients while significantly increasing loyalty.

2. Inadequate Customer Support

In today’s landscape, poor customer service and support are unacceptable. Customer satisfaction relies heavily on the overall experience, service consistency, and personal interactions.

Calls remain integral to the conversion journey, as some consumers remain sceptical about new technologies such as chatbots or self-service portals. However, since around 95% of customers seek proactive communication from businesses, enterprises must keep pace by offering multiple contact options and ensuring that customers can quickly reach live support agents.

Source: PEGA Research Report

Considering that access to customer data can significantly enhance the overall marketing strategy and CX, companies need to comprehend the reasons behind calls and the origins of all inbound calls.

Integrating a call tracking solution like Phonexa’s Call Logic into your daily operations and embedding it with cloud-based telephony systems like Cloud PBX will assist you in providing timely on-call support to your customers. This integration offers visibility into the customer journey, real-time performance insights, and the ability to attribute call outcomes to a given marketing strategy.

Moreover, the call analytics features within Call Logic can help brands identify trends, develop more successful acquisition and re-engagement campaigns, and enhance overall customer retention.

3. Lack of Customer Engagement

When grappling with elevated customer churn rates, many companies recognise that a lack of customer engagement is often the root cause. This frequently involves brands struggling to identify the most effective marketing channels and customers feeling disconnected from the brand’s offerings or core message.

This is where re-engagement becomes crucial. Encouraging customers to interact with your brand can be challenging. In such cases, understanding your clients better is essential.

As most customers expect a satisfactory level of proactive communication, companies must tackle this challenge with a proactive rather than a reactive approach. The proactive approach should include the following tactics:

• Launch loyalty programmes: These programmes provide tangible incentives to clients, enhance customer satisfaction, and encourage clients to remain loyal to the program’s goals, your product, and your brand.
• Automate email marketing: Staying in touch with the target audience is crucial for the success of acquisition or re-engagement campaigns. Leveraging email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and straightforward ways to refine your customer retention strategy and increase CRR. Brands equipped with E-Delivery, Phonexa’s email and SMS marketing software, can refine and manage email lists, personalise messages to specific customer groups, and enhance inbox performance.
• Give customers a voice: Without customer feedback, brands have little chance of improving customer retention. To understand what works or doesn’t work for your clients, you need direct input from your customers. One of the most effective ways to gather feedback is by creating and running IVR surveys.

Stay Competitive

When it comes to retaining customers, there’s always room for improvement. To stay competitive in a hyper-saturated business marketplace, companies must arm themselves with exceptional customer retention strategies and support these tactics with comprehensive and dynamic marketing automation technology to ensure customer satisfaction at all costs.

Did you know that Phonexa onboards new clients in an unprecedented 10 days? Get in touch or book a demo to discover how Phonexa can assist you in enhancing your customer retention strategies, refining your call centre operations, and converting more leads into engaged customers.

Did you know that responding to leads within just 5 minutes can increase your chances of conversion by up to 9 times? Timing is everything in the fast-paced world of business, and lead distribution software is the secret weapon every company needs to maximise the potential of their inbound leads.

Businesses often grapple with the complexities of assigning inbound leads to their marketing and sales teams, hindering the conversion process. The accuracy of the lead qualification process ultimately determines your sales conversion rate, and the key to success lies in mastering effective lead distribution strategies that not only streamline the conversion process but also provide substantial control over revenue.

But how can businesses navigate through this chaos and ensure a seamless lead distribution process? The answer is leveraging cutting-edge lead distribution solutions that efficiently handle declined leads and empower businesses to wield control over their revenue streams.

In this article, we’ll delve into the value of the lead management process and the pivotal role played by lead distribution systems in fostering business growth.

The Importance of Streamlined Lead Management

Let’s start by understanding the core of the lead management process – identifying, managing, and converting prospective customers into loyal, paying ones. Lead management solutions, including lead distribution and tracking, empower businesses to attract high-quality leads, manage them efficiently, and ultimately generate income by converting them into loyal customers.

Let’s dive into the details of the management process, exploring each stage and examining how a lead distribution solution makes it possible.

The 5 Essential Stages of Lead Management

Traditionally, lead management is segmented into five stages. Here’s a brief overview of each phase to enhance your comprehension of the process.

Stage 1. Lead Capture

Lead capture entails leads entering a company’s database for the first time. The initial entry of leads into the company database comes from various sources like social media, websites, events, email campaigns, and PPC efforts. As a result, businesses generate inbound leads in substantial numbers today.

Here is a list of channels that marketers commonly employ to capture leads:

The growing array of lead sources prompts brands to automate their lead capture process instead of handling inbound leads manually in an Excel spreadsheet.

By utilising marketing automation tools such as lead distribution and tracking, businesses can leverage integrated lead capture features. These functionalities enable capturing leads from diverse sources and seamless transfer to the relevant sales professionals for subsequent follow-up.

Stage 2. Lead Tracking

Businesses use the lead tracking stage to determine lead sources and types – inbound or outbound – and use this data to plan and enhance future conversion strategies.

Stage 3. Lead Distribution

In this stage, sales professionals are strategically assigned leads based on behaviour, website engagements, and relevant experience.

Carefully planned lead distribution can enhance conversion rates and boost sales. For example, companies can allocate leads considering factors such as geographic location, interest in specific products, or account size. In certain scenarios, sales representatives may be designated to the same region, necessitating the application of specific rotation methods and lead assignment rules to ensure equitable distribution of leads.

Stage 4. Qualification Process

During the qualification process, sales professionals engage with assigned inbound leads, using lead scoring to identify sales-ready opportunities. In the process of qualifying a lead as a sales opportunity, sales representatives commonly rely on a set of features provided by their managers, aiming to eliminate any guesswork involved.

This procedure is referred to as lead scoring, involving the assignment of specific scores, typically ranging from one to ten, to inbound leads. These scores are determined based on various criteria, such as demographics, engagement, buying history, behaviour patterns, interests, and more. Leads deemed qualified, particularly those with higher scores, are considered sales-ready and usually given the highest priority.

Stage 5. Lead Nurturing

A highly advanced lead generation process doesn’t guarantee an abundance of high-quality leads. 

In other words, the majority of inbound leads may not receive high scores or make an immediate purchase. Even if leads lose interest in your offerings, it’s important to view them as potential buyers.

Develop and implement lead nurturing strategies to keep leads interested and engaged until they convert into customers.

What Is Lead Distribution Software?

Lead distribution systems serve as the bridge connecting consumers with the products or services they seek. Businesses can employ various marketing channels to match leads with the most suitable representatives, optimising the conversion process.

The lead distribution system enables the use of various distribution logics. Here’s an illustration of a lead distribution logic employed by a financial services company:

Source: A Marketer’s Guide To Call Tracking & Distribution

Lead generation firms frequently employ distribution and lead distribution software, effectively linking prospects with ideal buyers. Businesses employing automated lead distribution capitalise on advanced algorithms, aligning representatives, buyers, sellers, and leads based on information garnered during the lead and call tracking processes.

For example, Phonexa’s LMS Sync, a lead management and distribution solution, includes a distinctive filtering feature. This feature swiftly empowers buyers to receive the most pertinent leads, reducing lead response time. Moreover, it facilitates lead distributors and generators in promptly directing leads to the appropriate destination.

Distinguishing Lead Distribution From Lead Management

While lead management encompasses capturing, tracking, validating, nurturing, and forwarding leads to sales professionals, lead distribution is about capturing inbound leads and directing them to specific destinations or lead buyers. It not only facilitates monetising declined leads but also connects businesses with more interested parties.

Automated Lead Distribution Methods

As businesses scale, manual lead management becomes less effective. Automated methods ensure efficient lead distribution. Here are four common automated methods:

• Round Robin Lead Assignment: This algorithm distributes leads based on the availability of representatives, reducing lead response time.
• Top Performer: Prioritises high-performing leads and matches them with top-skilled reps.
• Geographic Location and Language: Routes leads based on sales professionals’ location, avoiding language and time zone issues.
• Company Budget and Size: Tailored for B2B leads, considering the unique aspects of marketing to enterprise-level companies.

Crafting Effective Lead Distribution Strategies

Customising lead distribution rules and automating tasks is crucial for success. Follow these steps to develop an effective strategy:

• Identify the Best Distribution Software: Choose software that allows seamless buying and selling of leads.
• Screen Prospects for Quality: Ensure the distribution system assists in screening prospects for quality.
• Customise Distribution Rules: Tailor rules to handle and distribute inbound leads effectively.
• Test and Evaluate: Regularly test distribution rules, compare conversion rates, and fine-tune strategies for optimal performance.

It’s likely that sales representatives and marketing professionals on your sales team have employed one of the lead distribution strategies outlined below. Although each strategy has its merits and limitations, it’s essential to grasp how these approaches can assist you in determining the most suitable fit for your company’s upcoming growth stage.

The following are common lead distribution strategies.

Fine-Tuning the Lead Distribution Process

After selecting a distribution strategy, optimising and streamlining the process is crucial. Here are five tips:

1. Implement Marketing Automation Tools

The collaboration and seamless transfer of leads between sales and marketing departments are vital. Businesses can streamline their lead capture process by implementing an appropriate marketing automation solution.

Whether a lead signs up for a trial, communicates through social media or completes a web form, their information can be captured, behaviour tracked, and then directed to specific sales professionals via the CRM system integrated with the lead distribution tool.

2. Automate Lead Qualification Process

Businesses should identify the factors influencing their lead qualification process, such as geographic location, company size, budget, and organisational challenges. This enables the filtration of inbound leads based on specific predetermined criteria, ensuring that only high-intent leads are directed to your sales representatives.

3. Set Lead Distribution Rules

Following lead qualification and prioritisation, businesses should allocate them to appropriate sales professionals, establishing specific lead distribution rules. Common factors considered in setting these rules include:

• Experience and skill set: Many brands prioritise high-quality leads for experienced sales reps, ensuring top-level performance and maintaining high conversion rates.
• Geographic location: Assigning leads to company representatives from the same area can be an effective approach in certain cases.
• Representative’s availability: A standard method involves assigning leads based on the sales rep’s availability.

Regardless of the chosen criteria, it’s essential to ensure that company representatives have sufficient resources to engage with leads effectively.

4. Capitalise on Measurable Outcomes

Monitoring and assessing the outcomes of the applied lead distribution strategy is equally crucial as evaluating each stage’s performance within your sales funnel. Here are key metrics that businesses commonly monitor:

• Call duration
• Lead response time
• Conversion rate
• Close rate

5. Leverage Tech Stack Integration

Before deploying a lead distribution system, brands should verify that their lead generation, call tracking, lead management tools, lead distribution tools, and CRM can seamlessly integrate. This ensures that companies can minimise lead response time, maintain an efficient sales process, and foster transparency within sales and marketing teams.

Lead Distribution and the Lead Generation Process

More than 50% of marketers allocate half of their budget to lead generation efforts, a practice hardly surprising given that effective lead generation builds a sales pipeline by capturing and stimulating the interest of potential buyers. Businesses leveraging lead gen to define their ideal customer profile can confidently pursue capturing higher-quality leads.

The synergy between lead generation and effective lead distribution is pivotal. Let’s delve into how lead generation efforts can enhance your company’s lead distribution system.

• Streamlined sales process: Companies armed with distribution and lead distribution systems can expedite the routing of new leads, deliver prompt responses to enquiries, and successfully close more sales deals.
• Elevated customer experience: Allocating the most knowledgeable representatives to handle lead enquiries unquestionably enhances the customer experience, fostering trust and satisfaction.
• Enhanced performance tracking: Among the various benefits of lead generation, its ability to simplify data analysis and performance tracking stands out. Combined with a tracking and lead distribution solution, businesses can assess how many sales representatives a lead has engaged with until the deal is closed.

Why Use Lead Distribution Software?

Efficiency and streamlined processes are paramount for organisations aiming to boost performance. Lead distribution software ensures better performance, speed, and integrations, allowing businesses to focus on innovative lead generation methods without compromising lead quality.

Phonexa’s lead distribution software, featuring ping post technology, empowers businesses to optimise traffic flow, craft customised ping trees, harness predictive insights into active campaigns, and strategically direct leads in real-time. This comprehensive software facilitates lead management and distribution processes by offering advanced reporting, automation, call tracking, and distribution resources, making it one of the most effective lead distribution solutions on the market.

Within Phonexa’s ping tree software, a sophisticated lead distribution process unfolds, utilising ping post technology to deliver and route leads to multiple sellers and buyers based on diverse factors, filters, and lead prices.

All these functionalities converge at the lead management dashboard through LMS Sync, Phonexa’s comprehensive lead management, tracking, and distribution solution. The ping tree software further enables publishers and affiliate marketers to promptly disseminate the same leads across a network of potential buyers for real-time bidding.

Features of Phonexa’s Lead Distribution Software

Intelligent Lead Distribution

Utilises rules-based distribution to find the best match between a lead and sales rep based on specific criteria such as lead origin, language, interests, etc.

Streamlined Sales Process

Seamlessly organises lead data, distributes leads, adds prospects to the sales pipeline, and streamlines the sales process with CRM integrations.

Multiple Integration Options

Allows integration with CRM software, ensuring automated workflows, strategic decisions, and accelerated lead data transfers.

Advanced Reporting

Provides granular analytics and an easy-to-use dashboard for detailed insights into agent performance, unpaid invoices, and more.

Customer Feedback Capture

Facilitates lead assignment while tracking leads and prospects through the sales or marketing process.

Real-Time Bidding and Lead Acquisition

Ping Post Calls 2.0, powered by Phonexa, enables collaboration between performance marketers, small businesses, and enterprises for real-time bidding based on the best call and lead data attributes.

Lead Distribution Software Use Cases Across Industries

Let’s explore how businesses can leverage lead distribution software in four different industries.

Financial Services

Financial institutions frequently employ technical terminology to explain their processes and products, posing a challenge for potential customers to comprehend these offerings and complicating purchasing decisions. As prospective clients often have numerous questions, they reach out to financial advisors for clarification and informed decision-making.

Implementing lead distribution software can provide significant advantages for financial institutions, including:

• Automate key business processes, including lead distribution, ensuring prompt engagement with inbound leads.
• Use lead distribution to channel leads to appropriate financial advisors, enhancing first-call resolution.
• Capture customer feedback to assess and improve the performance of advisors.

Home Services

The home services and improvement sector encompasses various specialised offerings, such as solar power solutions, remodelling, and roofing.

When home service providers predominantly receive inbound leads from performance marketing companies or an affiliate network, these leads are concurrently distributed to multiple contractors. Essentially, the same lead may be sold to multiple contractors in a specific area, underscoring the importance of swift contact.

Implementing lead distribution software can assist contractors in achieving several objectives:

• Minimise lead response time
• Enhance conversion rates and increase sales
• Develop effective lead generation campaigns
• Distribute a higher volume of leads in less time
• Collect and capitalise on valuable lead data

Insurance

In the highly competitive arena of insurance, professionals and providers engage in strategic manoeuvres to secure a favourable position. Consequently, it is crucial to incorporate technological tools and solutions to enhance customer engagement, bolster retention, attract high-quality insurance leads, and execute effective lead distribution.

Here’s how insurance carriers and agencies can optimise the benefits of lead distribution software:

• Employ automation through ping tree and ping post technology to maximise sales and profits resulting from lead distribution endeavours.
• Enhance understanding and control over the generated inbound leads.
• Customise and fine-tune filters to attract a greater volume of insurance leads that align with specific criteria, thereby boosting the conversion rate.

Leverage real-time reporting capabilities to uncover trends in lead data.

Travel & Hospitality

Consumers reach out to hotel chains and tour operators to enquire about travel packages and accommodations, typically through phone calls, email, or live chat.

Implementing lead distribution software can be instrumental in helping travel and hospitality businesses meet their sales and marketing objectives by:

• Ensuring efficient lead distribution by directing calls and web leads to knowledgeable agents and sales representatives.
• Alleviating misunderstandings and language barriers by distributing leads to local sales professionals.
• Concentrating on closing more deals and optimising sales processes by channelling leads to the most suitable sales representatives and generating invoices proactively, even before prospective clients reach out to competitor companies.
• Fine-tuning the customer journey, recover lost inbound calls, and avoid missing any calls by integrating a marketing automation suite that encompasses call tracking and lead distribution solutions.

Optimise Your Lead Distribution

The continuous cycle of generating, capturing, qualifying, and distributing inbound leads persists across industries and niches. Consequently, formulating a distribution strategy and integrating lead distribution software is a reliable method to expedite the outreach process to leads and provide them with the optimal customer experience.

Schedule a consultation with Phonexa’s experts to discover how a comprehensive solution can increase lead response time, streamline sales workflows, and automate your lead distribution process.

Frequently Asked Questions

If there were any doubts about the role of AI in digital marketing, the advanced capabilities of ChatGPT have unequivocally silenced sceptics. However, marketers were already well aware of its potential: according to Statista, 62% of marketing professionals incorporated marketing AI tools into their digital marketing strategies in 2022, marking a staggering increase from 29% in 2018.

AI-driven marketing has become immensely popular due to its unmatched precision and cost-effectiveness. Beyond aiding in customer interactions, artificial intelligence is progressively proving its value in creative domains such as writing, art, music, and coding – commonly referred to as generative AI.

For marketers, the question naturally arises: How can I harness AI in marketing to attract and convert more customers? Undoubtedly, AI elevates performance marketing campaigns to new heights, accomplishing tasks in mere seconds that previously consumed hours or even days.

Just look at the remarkable speed at which AI has evolved:

Source: Statista

Let’s dive into the intricacies of performance marketing AI tools and technologies and explore specific methods to incorporate them into your campaigns.

Groundbreaking AI Technologies for Performance Marketing

Though AI may appear omnipotent, the scope of performance marketing AI technologies, instrumental in achieving measurable outcomes like clicks, downloads, and conversions, is often limited and occasionally conflated with applications. For instance, “marketing automation” is not an AI technology but rather an application of machine learning combined with natural language processing (NLP) – two foundational marketing AI technologies.

Contrary to the misconception that artificial intelligence might entirely replace human marketing, experienced affiliate and performance marketers recognise that the effectiveness of marketing AI technologies is contingent upon the marketer wielding it.

For in-depth insights into the dynamic interplay between artificial intelligence and human marketing, be sure to cheque out Phonexa’s Amplify webinar:

Underlying AI Technologies for Performance Marketing

As a marketer, understanding the intricacies of AI technologies may not be necessary; however, knowing how to apply them within your campaigns is crucial. Fortunately, you can leverage marketing AI from start to finish, from AI content marketing to customer routing to conversion.

Here are five performance marketing AI applications that can revolutionise your campaigns:

1. Content Generation and Personalisation

AI, especially generative AI based on deep learning, defies the notion that it struggles with creative tasks. Statista reports that 55% of marketers use ChatGPT, and 42% use Copy.ai, an NLP software that generates content like social media posts and product descriptions.

AI in advertising is thriving, with some brands entrusting ad creation entirely to generative AI. For example, Heinz employed the text-to-image programme Dall-E 2 to visualise AI’s interpretation of “ketchup.”

AI aids in content translation, summarisation, curation, and, importantly, offers data-driven insights about user preferences and optimal timing for engagement. AI marketing automation software can send emails during the most responsive hours, optimising outreach.

While AI can automate content creation, human oversight is essential to avoid issues such as awkward wording, plagiarism, poor translation, and the lack of connection to the broader narrative and marketing strategy.

Here’s how you can write compelling blog posts with minimum effort.

2. Customer Journey Optimisation

In 2023, 35% of marketers believe their customer journeys are either “fully automated” or “mostly automated.” Customer journey optimisation involves collecting and analysing historical and real-time data as a customer progresses through the sales funnel.

Marketing AI can tap into lead data, dissecting the customer journey from A to Z. User behaviour analytics software can optimise lead flow and conversions, providing real-time insights into on-site performance, clicks, and conversions.

3. Chatbots

Chatbots, using natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, speech recognition, intent recognition, and sentiment analysis, have evolved beyond self-service tools. According to Statista, 57% of B2B marketers use chatbots, with 55% generating new leads via chatbots.

Chatbots find applications on websites, social media, and mobile apps, enhancing user engagement and lead generation.

4. Call Routing

In call-reliant businesses, accurate and seamless call routing is critical. Contemporary IVR systems incorporate a fusion of marketing AI technologies, ranging from natural language processing and speech recognition to text-to-speech conversion.

Delve into the components of call centre technology.

When a caller contacts your business, it is imperative to offer them the most direct conversion path and consistent support across all touchpoints, addressing potential transitions, such as when a caller switches devices or dials an incorrect department. To achieve this, a cutting-edge AI-driven call routing system complemented by a meticulously designed IVR is essential.

Call Routing AI Technologies

AI-driven call routing systems ensure precise data-driven routing by employing the following marketing AI technologies:

These technologies identify callers, verify them, and direct them to the right live operator or provide independent solutions for simpler requests.

Related read: Maximise your business with call analytics software.

5. Predictive Modelling

Predictive modelling, driven by machine learning, utilises predictive analytics to simulate future outcomes without launching actual campaigns. By interpreting historical and real-time data, it provides data-driven predictions for future campaigns.

Predictive modelling allows marketers to simulate different scenarios and adjust variables until they identify a winning AI marketing strategy.

AI and Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has embraced AI technologies across various facets, from lead generation to customer support to sales to fraud detection. AI applications in affiliate marketing vary from narrow-focused marketing AI technologies like facial recognition to complex chatbots, IVRs, and virtual assistants, as well as sophisticated data analytics and predictive modelling.

From the initial AI description by Alan Turing in 1935 to advanced AI models like ChatGPT, DeepMind, and AlphaGo, AI has evolved to cover all aspects of life and business, with affiliate marketing being a significant beneficiary.

Source: Statista

AI in Digital Marketing

Regardless of the AI application – whether it’s content generation, customer segmentation, or affiliate partner searches – AI performs tasks incomparably faster than humans, with processing speed contingent on the scope of implementation and desired optimisation level. Supervising AI is far simpler than brainstorming independently, allowing you to conserve energy for critical strategic decisions and non-automatable tasks.

Using Marketing AI Technologies to Deter Online Fraud

With approximately 10% of affiliate traffic being fake and 17% of links deemed fraudulent, combating affiliate fraud has emerged as a prominent AI application. From fake leads to cookie stuffing to URL hijacking, AI effectively monitors affiliate traffic, issuing warnings and halting campaigns upon detecting signs of fraud.

Source: Statista

How Artificial Intelligence Combats Affiliate Fraud

Many AI fraud detection systems undergo training on both legitimate and fraudulent cases, utilising extensive datasets to acquire the ability to distinctly and promptly identify dishonest activities. When surpassing the established threshold, emergency algorithms come into play, triggering system notifications about detected fraud or automatically blocking it.

Here’s an example of a marketing AI-powered fraud detection process:

1. AI collects comprehensive data on ad clicks and application installations, including device types, IP addresses, views, clicks, and user identifiers.
2. The collected data is compared to learnt patterns and the fraud threshold, with AI assigning a risk score to specific actions, affiliates, or traffic sources.
3. If the risk score surpasses the threshold, AI sends an alert or automatically blocks the fraudulent activity.

Best of all, AI continually evolves with the incorporation of new data into the system, adjusting to the continuously advancing techniques of fraud.

AI Gets Embedded Over Time

To grasp the trajectory of artificial intelligence marketing, observe the universal pattern of increasing adoption of new technologies. Only 13% of customers in 2019 were eager to use chatbots rather than traditional communication channels, unsure whether the emerging marketing AI technology would improve or worsen their shopping experience. Three years later, 25% of customers were “happy” or “very happy” to communicate with a chatbot when contacting a business.

Here’s our take on where the future heads and the place of AI in it.

The synergy of AI and marketing is evident, transforming the industry by combining yesterday’s impractical AI tools with a human touch. As marketing AI technology advances, everything that can be automated will be, and businesses that fail to keep pace risk losing in the competitive landscape.

The future indicates a continued shift towards automation, with marketing AI becoming an integral part of various business processes. AI and marketing’s collaborative evolution provides efficiency while retaining a human touch. An Amplify webinar featuring Erik Huberman, Founder & CEO of Hawke Media, and Talar Malakian, CMO at Phonexa, explores leveraging AI without compromising the human aspect. Topics covered include ad spending optimisation, AI-powered trend analysis, AI in performance marketing, and interpreting customer intents through AI-drawn data.

Enhance Your Affiliate Marketing With Phonexa

Phonexa offers an all-in-one performance marketing suite that seamlessly ties revenue back to campaigns and affiliates.

For just $100 a month, access eight proprietary solutions under one contract and a single set of credentials. Phonexa’s software suite includes lead tracking and distribution, call management, predictive modelling, user behaviour recording and analytics, real-time click tracking, email marketing, suppression list management, and automated accounting.

Phonexa’s Software Suite Composition

Select your subscription plan now or book a free consultation to learn more about how you can elevate your affiliate marketing with Phonexa.

Frequently Asked Questions

Many successful digital marketing and promotional strategies thrive on performance-driven approaches. When marketers witness active audience engagement, they can analyse and calculate the most effective strategies, extending the success streak by implementing proven tactics and utilising performance marketing software tailored to their specific needs.

For this reason, many businesses heavily rely on performance marketing tools to monitor results. However, despite this reliance, marketers still grapple with the challenge of accurately measuring performance and ensuring precise attribution.

After a period of stagnation from 2018 to 2021, the revenue-based return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns witnessed a 6% growth each subsequent year. In 2022, global advertisers achieved a median ROI of $4.25 for every dollar spent on performance-based promotions. This underscores the crucial role of employing digital marketing performance-based strategies in promoting brands and specific products.

Increasing profits, enhancing marketing performance, and optimising ROI pose formidable challenges for any business. Yet, with an advanced partner and performance marketing solution, one can effectively track essential key performance indicators (KPIs) and optimise efforts in performance marketing.

Whether you’re a business owner, solopreneur, or a novice affiliate, consider these tips to identify the most suitable performance marketing platform and software for your business.

Understanding Marketing Performance and Its Significance

Businesses can launch online promotions across various platforms and media channels, such as blogs, social media, and emails. All digital channels share a common feature—they can track and evaluate user activity. In contrast, measuring performance precisely with traditional promotional tools like magazines, TV advertisements, or billboards proves to be complex.

In the digital realm, tracking every activity becomes effortless. You can ascertain how many people view your ad, click on it, engage with it, or proceed to perform a targeted action. The process of setting up, measuring, and analysing these campaigns is referred to as the marketing performance approach.

This approach is often an integral part of affiliate content marketing strategies. Marketers leverage content performance platforms to test how even the slightest changes can impact ad performance, subsequently adjusting campaigns to enhance profitability.

Marketers are consistently seeking best practises with a high return on investment (ROI). Consequently, many invest time in identifying the most suitable marketing tools capable of tracking each online promotional interaction and generating more high-intent leads.

Understanding Performance Marketing Management

Performance marketing management is a promotional practice where businesses pay only for specific, performance-based results. Payments can be tied to clicks, leads, sales, or other targeted actions, and marketing tools are utilised to track sales, ROI, KPIs, and essential metrics.

It’s widely known that digital performance marketing platforms can track numerous metrics. Let’s explore some of the most common ones that merit consideration.

A performance-based approach proves to be an effective method for managing advertising costs, particularly in the realm of affiliate marketing, where advertisers compensate affiliates only when their marketing efforts yield a pre-defined result.

Depending on your campaign objectives, you can opt for various performance marketing strategies, such as pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, pay-per-acquisition, or pay-per-impression. Identifying the most critical performance metric for your situation involves a multi-stage process: evaluation, alignment, activation, execution, and optimisation.

In the initial stages of a performance marketing strategy, tracking performance is paramount. Subsequently, uncovering patterns in data becomes crucial, and Phonexa’s solutions excel in providing valuable insights to enhance revenue per lead.

Once results are obtained, launching the campaign with clear and realistic goals is essential. Based on captured performance data, specific campaigns can then be optimised to achieve improved marketing performance results.

For this reason, it is advisable to seek performance marketing software equipped with a range of tools. While some platforms offer advanced artificial intelligence features, relying solely on them might be premature. During the consideration stage, take the time to select the best performance marketing software that can fulfil your mission without the need to switch between multiple service providers.

How Affiliate Performance Marketing Software Operates

Affiliate performance marketing software significantly influences marketing attribution and revenue for networks, merchants, and affiliates. Affiliates receive compensation based on user actions they generate, such as clicks, calls, subscriptions, sales, etc. Tracking every action and understanding touchpoints and the customer journey is standard practise for savvy brands and affiliate marketers.

Modern performance marketing tools often bundle capabilities like affiliate tracking, real-time analytics, and conversion rate optimisation, providing marketers with insights into changes as they occur. Additionally, affiliate marketing software aids in partner management, bringing organisation to promotions and offering businesses a clear view of actual results. For affiliates, these tools enable monitoring changes and experimentation with different promotional strategies.

These solutions play a vital role in monitoring various aspects of online campaigns, identifying potential hurdles, and eliminating them. Real-time reporting, a feature in many performance marketing tools, replaces disparate spreadsheet data and provides actionable insights into active campaigns.

Benefits of Utilising Performance Marketing Software

Performance marketing solutions offer numerous benefits to networks, brands, advertisers, and performance agencies, contributing to their overall success.

Here’s a closer look at how these solutions benefit all stakeholders.

Precise Segmentation

• Allows companies to segment their audience pointwise, making targeting and promotion more straightforward.
• Enables personalised communication guidelines to ambassadors for optimal feedback.
• Aids in saving marketing budgets by achieving goals more efficiently.

Enhanced Tracking

• Adds dimensions to lead generation and distribution efforts.
• Monitors digital marketing performance and captures essential data.
• Facilitates timely trend-spotting before issues become apparent.

Enhanced Lead Management

• Improves current lead management by highlighting weaknesses in marketing efforts.
• Reveals the interconnectedness of various marketing strategies.
• Enables testing and optimisation, such as A/B tests for website layout.

Time and Cost Savings

• Optimised campaigns require less management time.
• Focus on specific affiliate niches or sub-niches to boost marketing performance.
• Boosts marketing performance and improves ROI.

Phonexa’s singular suite for partner and performance marketing encompasses a variety of tools designed to oversee your digital marketing campaigns. With features such as user behavioural analytics, click and lead tracking solutions, automated accounting, mailing tools, and more, our comprehensive operating solution equips you with extensive data, enabling informed decision-making and helping you achieve your goals.

Challenges of Using Performance Marketing Software

Despite the advantages, affiliate performance marketing software comes with its challenges. Addressing these challenges correctly can transform them into advantages.

Data Integration

Content performance platforms can extract insights from various campaign sources, such as your website, other sites, and social media. The integration of data from multiple platforms can be intricate due to differing data formats and compatibility characteristics.

Nevertheless, Phonexa’s solutions make this integration possible. Phonexa provides an array of integration options, including Google Ads, VICIdial, Pixel, Anura, and ImpressionWise. Connecting Phonexa’s solutions allows for seamless tracking of the digital marketing performance of ongoing campaigns.

ROI Measurement

Understanding your Return on Investment (ROI) is crucial for the success of a performance marketing campaign. By tracking multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can gain a deeper insight into your campaigns, leading to improved results.

However, not all marketing platforms ensure accurate attribution. We recommend utilising tools that calculate ROI across multiple channels.

Marketing Experiments

Optimising and adjusting a marketing performance campaign is crucial. If you have uncertainties about the chosen approaches leading to desired results, consider implementing A/B testing, call tracking solutions, lead management software, and in-depth user behaviour analytics to unlock your true affiliate marketing potential.

Choosing Performance Platforms: Criteria To Consider

Every business has unique characteristics and marketing goals, so consider a combination of factors before making a final choice. Here is a list of criteria to consider when selecting a suitable solution for a performance marketing network.

Select tools that align with your tech and pricing requirements. Ensure that if you decide to scale your performance marketing network, the chosen tools meet your business needs. While changing your working instruments is challenging, it’s essential to select performance marketing software that aligns with your marketing and business goals in the long run.

Achieve Your Digital Marketing Performance Goals With Phonexa

Understanding ad campaign performance and tapping into all the crucial aspects requires implementing tools that tie revenue back to channels, campaigns, publishers, and networks through marketing attribution.

Phonexa offers an all-encompassing performance marketing software suite, allowing users to monitor every detail of their digital promotion. For example, LMS Sync is a lead management tool equipped with built-in predictive modelling that takes the trial and error out of marketing efforts.

Lynx, Phonexa’s click tracking software, improves performance marketing campaigns by tracking digital sales, measuring impressions, ROI, and CR. Affiliate marketers can leverage the extensive data it offers on click performance, ensuring precise lead attribution, targeting, and journey control.

HitMetrix is a behaviour analytics and conversion rate optimisation software, enabling affiliate marketers and brands to optimise lead flows and conversions. Its advanced data visualisation tool provides key insights into website performance.

E-Delivery and Opt-Intel are valuable email marketing tools. E-Delivery increases mailing engagement with multi-channel distribution, in-depth analytics, detailed behavioural segmentation, automated A/B testing, and more. Opt-Intel streamlines business mailings by creating suppression lists, extending list-sharing features, and automating data transfers.

Cloud PBX and Call Logic are essential call management solutions supporting agent productivity and monitoring every aspect of their work. In-depth call analytics and predictive modelling tools help identify blind spots and find effective ways to tackle related issues.

Real-time reporting is one of the crucial features for affiliate marketers. With granular analytics, you can find the most profitable solutions and future-proof your performance marketing efforts in any niche such as home services, insurance, and finance.

Employ the Best Performance Marketing Platform & Software

Planning your marketing strategy is just the beginning. You might need additional tools to sell or purchase leads and build automated workflows in the long run. In this case, ensure that the chosen performance marketing software can measure crucial KPIs, offer seamless integration, and close the loop between leads, calls, clicks, and revenue.

Ultimately, the right performance marketing software should align with your business needs, be affordable, and offer different scalability levels.

Enhance your campaigns with Phonexa, the best performance marketing platform and software. 

Learn how we can help you unlock new revenue streams and streamline your affiliate marketing by booking a free consultation.

Frequently Asked Questions