Benefits of Call Tracking

When asked about their advertising and marketing performance, most dentists and doctors take the easy way out, "business is good, so my marketing must be good." The truth is, without accurate tracking, it's impossible to know how good (or bad) your advertising and marketing is.

Call tracking and dynamic number replacement - combined with website analytics - allows you to accurately track every single advertising and marketing strategy. Never again will you wonder how a particular marketing strategy performed or which advertising strategy generates the lowest cost per lead; the best leads; or the leads that most often convert into profitable sales.

Undoubtedly, every custom builder has heard the old advertising adage, "I know half of my marketing is working - the trouble is I don't know which half." What many remodelers don't realize is that this quote was uttered nearly 100 years ago!

Today, technology exists to show savvy dentists and doctors exactly which strategies are working and which should be changed or eliminated. Marketing, when done in this fashion, is more a science than an artform. Curious as to whether the new website is working better than the old one? Track it and test it! Questioning whether you should renew that yellow page ad? Track it! Next year, the answer will be black and white.

If you call your stock broker and ask how your portfolio is doing and he/she responds, "it's doing pretty well" would that be enough for you!? No way! Treat your  advertising the same way! With call tracking and website analytics in place, you'll have an environment of accountability - for the advertising sales reps that call on you as well as your own internal marketing department.

How Call Tracking Works

Setting up phone call tracking is easy and there are a number of flexible options as far as how to get started - all of which are determined by your business goals and unique requirements. Tracking a print ad, for example, can be as easy as ordering a local or toll free number from Blue Corona's phone call tracking platform and placing the number in your ad.

Every phone call received on this phone line can be attributed to the ad! You also have the option of recording every phone call. Phone call recording is a valuable feature and can help you determine not just how many leads you receive, but the quality of each lead. Phone calls can be reviewed and played back via Blue Corona's web-based platform (screenshot seen above). Listening to tracked phone calls is as easy as checking your email (or easier!).

As an additional tracking option for offline ads, you can combine a tracked phone number with a unique vanity URL. So if your main website address is www.bensdentalpractice.com and you want to accurately track a TV ad, you might assign a specific phone number to the TV ad and use the website address (URL) www.bensdentalspecials.com instead of your main website address. When you advertise this way, you'll know that the only people that came to the landing page www.bensdentalspecials.com were people that viewed and responded to your TV spot.

You can also use phone call tracking to track calls generated from online sources such as banner ads, email newsletters, pay per click campaigns, online yellow page website and even SEO. To track calls on the web, you use a specific local or toll free number combined with a tracking code which is added to every page of your website. The phone call tracking code is on the "back-end" of your website - similar to Google Analytics, the popular web analytics program.

Blue Corona will implement the code for you and you don't need an in-house IT person or any technical knowledge to get set-up fast.

Phone call tracking codes are completely invisible and unobtrusive to your visitors. When a visitor comes to your website from a tracked source, the phone call tracking code on the back-end of your website will detect where the visitor is coming from and dynamically replace every number on your website with a phone number that's specific to the tracked advertising source!

For help getting set-up with your first call tracking number, to get call tracking set-up for your website or for help with ad campaign specific landing pages (micro-sites, mini web-pages, etc.), contact us.

What You Should be Tracking

Savvy dentists and doctors track every single paid advertising and marketing strategy. The idea is to determine exactly which strategies produce the greatest ROI and which are lagging and then reallocate your marketing dollars accordingly. When you take this approach to advertising and marketing, as opposed to operating on gut instinct alone, you will end up with a system that allows you to reliably and consistently grow your business in a highly cost-effective manner.

At a minimum, you should be tracking things like:

• Direct mail
• Email marketing
• Fliers & Handouts (@ Homeshows)
• Pay Per Click Campaigns
• Print, Magazine & Newspaper ads
• Radio Spots
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• TV

Even if your website is your online marketing strategy, you should invest in phone call tracking and marketing analytics.

The Cost of Phone Call Tracking

Many dentists and doctors are concerned about the cost of phone call tracking. While the cost of call tracking depends on a number of factors - number of phone lines, website tracking, campaign specific landing pages, etc. - it's generally very inexpensive (especially when you consider the advertising decisions it allows you to make). We have a customer who was spending $2,470 per month with ValPak, a coupon style direct mail service. He had been doing it for years. We tracked the calls from it for 3 months and he received a total of 15 phone calls and no leads!

Phone Call Tagging Explained

Some dentists and doctors offices track the number of phone calls they receive and then review which ads or marketing strategies generated the most calls. Doing this is beneficial - certainly better than simply guessing which ads work the best, but it won't tell you which advertising strategy really works the best. Why? Because not all of the calls you receive from a particular advertising strategy are leads. This is one of the problems with using companies software to auto-optimize your performance (there's a company out there that starts with a "Y" that really emphasizes their softwares ability to automatically improve your results - it doesn't work!).

When they first start using call tracking, many businesses are blown away by how few phone calls actually end up being leads. If you run an ad in Bethesda Magazine, you're more likely to get more phone calls from other print ad sales reps than from actual prospective customers! Call tagging is an optional service provided by Blue Corona where your account manager listens to every tracked phone call you receive and categorizes it according to your business. For example, we might place each call into one of the following categories: Lead, solicication, repeat caller, existing customer or robot/auto-dialer.

Call tagging is an extremely valuable service for discriminating dentists and doctors that demand the details! To learn more, contact us.

Phone Call Tracking Does Not Require Special Equipement

You do not need any special equipment to have Blue Corona track your phone calls. Our phone call tracking software uses local or toll free remote call forward numbers and works with your existing phone system. You do not need any technical knowledge to get started. Some dentists and doctors are concerned about what happens to the tracked phone numbers when a campaign ends. Although you have multiple options, you can keep a phone line "active" but not tracked for less than $10 per month. You can also have the number transfered to your own system and pay whatever you pay to maintain a single phone line (usually several dollars per month).

Drop us a line and tell us a little bit more about what you'd like to track and we'll send you a customized proposal. You can also call us at 800-696-4690.