You’ve been working hard to create visibility for your business. You get calls and emails from your website. Changing your number and contact email is only going to confuse visitors and potentially result in prospects calling the wrong number in the future, right?
This is a hesitation we occasionally encounter when it’s time to set up tracking systems for a marketing operation. While I can understand and appreciate the concerns business owners have about using new, dedicated means of contact to track leads for various channels, the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Here’s what I mean.
Assessing the Concerns
The biggest worry I hear from businesses is along these lines: customers or prospects will write down or save a tracking number from the website, the business will discontinue the tracking number and revert the site back to the primary number and these people will call the old tracking number and won’t be able to reach the business. While possible, this is a small risk for the following reasons:
- If the marketing efforts are working, you will want to keep the tracking numbers and emails, not discontinue them.
- If the marketing efforts are not successful, there will not be a high volume of new visitors on the site recording the contact info anyway.
- The majority of people who reach a discontinued or incorrect number or email will quickly look up the correct contact info online.
Considering what will be Lost
The cons of NOT using a tracking number, however, present much more difficult obstacles for a marketing operation. Namely, without a tracking number you will have incomplete results when assessing various marketing channels. This means an unclear line of sight to channel effectiveness – which limits your ability to make informed decisions regarding ongoing strategy – and an inability to accurately determine ROI for your marketing investments.
While there are a few other methods of tracking phone calls without using a new number, they tend to involve setting up awkward hoops for the caller to jump through such as reading codes from the website. Extra steps like these are exactly the types of things you want to avoid when optimizing your site for conversions.
The bottom line is that unless it will cause serious logistical problems, it is in your best interests to use tracking phone numbers and dedicated emails to track your leads. If you decide against these tools, it’s important to recognize what you’re losing.
What are your favorite lead-tracking tools, and which ones did you dislike? Let us know in the comments!
cnadler
Simple Machines Marketing
