It’s Too Difficult/Time-Consuming to Set Up

A bad experience with an IVR provider might put a bad taste in your mouth about the technology, but don’t let it. One bad Pad Thai doesn’t ruin all Thai food, does it? No! Setup for IVR can be instant, depending on your provider. With a web-based IVR designer, you can create a sophisticated IVR application in minutes. Not days. Not weeks. Minutes. So before you write off IVR for this particular concern, be sure to ask your provider if their technology has instant capabilities.

I Don’t Want to Pay Someone to Configure It, and I’m Not a Programmer

Who told you that you need to be (or pay) a programmer to have a sophisticated interactive voice response system? Shame on them! No wonder you don’t like IVR. It doesn’t have to be this way. With a hosted IVR provider, the IVR is configured from an easy-to-use website. You set up your system using your very own human voice, enabling your customers to be delivered to the person they are calling for—no getting lost in phone trees. No programming. No configuration costs. Just you, your home system, and your shiny new IVR.

I Don’t Want My Customers Talking to a Robot

This is the craziest concern of all. Your customers don’t have to talk to a robot, silly! That’s one of the best parts about IVR—you can record your menu in your own voice so that your customers never deal with anyone other than you. It’s easy to setup an IVR: you can use your own phone to record the prompts, and customize the listening options. Your IVR, your way.

I find that a lot of misconceptions about IVR are based on the old-school systems: robotic dinosaurs that didn’t offer a lot in terms of flexibility and reporting. But those were the old days! Now you can get instant, personalized interactive voice response, plus real-time analytics and voice-to-text transcription features. Businesses are using IVR to generate leads, upsell and cross-sell new products, provide phone surveys, and more. Don’t believe me? Check out this white paper on IVR and leave your concerns behind.

The post 3 Concerns About IVR That Shouldn’t Be Concerns appeared first on Ifbyphone.

It’s a good question. If you aren’t familiar with traditional marketing automation, it’s a very popular technology that marketers use to capture, score, nurture, and report on web leads. And while you can certainly import non-web leads (like those you bring back from a trade show) into a marketing automation tool to nurture them, the primary benefit of the technology is derived from online lead interactions with your web site and emails.

Marketing organizations today are gaining tremendous value from traditional marketing automation. When implemented and used correctly, these tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, and HubSpot enable marketing teams to:

• Hand off more qualified leads to sales reps at a lower cost
• Better understand which campaigns are working, so you can optimize spending
• Get credit for the impact your campaigns have on pipeline and revenue

Voice-Based Marketing Automation Is Like Marketing Automation for the Phone

While traditional marketing automation tools work great with online interactions, they simply don’t work if a lead picks up the phone and calls you. That event is lost – you can’t track it back to the ad, keyword search, email, social media site, or marketing asset that drove it. So you can’t get credit for it, and you aren’t able to include it in your analysis of what marketing programs are working and what aren’t.

That’s where voice-based marketing automation comes in. Voice-based marketing automation is like marketing automation for the phone. Thousands of marketing teams today use it to generate, track, score, nurture, route, and report on phone leads.

To help illustrate the difference between the two, below is a table comparing some common functionalities and how each technology facilitates them.

Many businesses use voice-based marketing automation as a standalone tool without traditional marketing automation. But the two can also be used together to create closed-loop marketing where every lead is captured, responded to properly, scored, nurtured, and tracked through the sales process. You get a complete understanding of which campaigns are working and how they are impacting pipeline and revenue.

If you wish to learn more about voice-based marketing automation, check out our new eBook, “The Definitive Guide to Voice-Based Marketing Automation.”

The post What’s the Difference between Marketing Automation and Voice-Based Marketing Automation? appeared first on Ifbyphone.

The post Google Universal Analytics in Action appeared first on Ifbyphone.

CEOs are ready to get their hands dirty

67% of survey respondents have a significantly or totally committed CEO who has influence in most marketing decisions. Not only that, those CEOs want regular reports on marketing ROI: 26% of marketing teams are reporting their marketing metrics to the CEO on a monthly basis. As the tools that enable marketing teams to measure success have become more and more sophisticated, business owners have begun to realize the importance of metrics, monitoring which activities succeed and which fail.

49% of marketing organizations are tracking new customers

Tracking new customer sources is the highest rated marketing metric utilized by marketing organizations. As businesses seek to cut out marketing initiatives that aren’t generating leads—and double-down on those that are—it becomes more important to be able to track the origin of new customers and be able to provide data to justify budget cuts and additional expenditures.

68% of marketing teams have a content developer

It’s not all data. Content marketing is one thing that most marketers agree is a must, and it turns out that 68% of respondents have added a content developer to their marketing teams, creating a consistent cadence of meaningful, appealing content to contribute to the organization’s marketing efforts. How important is content to your marketing team? Do you fall in that 68%?

25% of marketing teams have a growth hacker

Growth hackers are quickly becoming all the rage in marketing organizations, combining marketing knowledge with technology, code and data to grow their company’s business, focus on marketing measurements, and track analytics. With the budding emphasis on metrics, 25% of marketing teams have added a growth hacker to their ranks to manage this important aspect of their processes and contribute to growth.

Inbound phone calls were rated highest in their ability to effectively generate sales leads

When asked what marketing channels were most effective for generating sales leads, respondents rated inbound phone calls as having the greatest lead generation potential of all marketing activity. Many have long believed that phone leads are the missing piece to many marketing strategies, but with inbound calls rated so highly, we may be seeing a turn in the way marketing organizations perceive their most valuable leads (inbound phone leads are seven times more likely to convert.)

These are just a few of the exciting stats provided by The 2013 State of Marketing Measurement Survey Report, but if you want to learn more about what successful marketers are doing and how they’re doing it, the report is available to download free right here.

The post 5 Things You Should Know About the State of Marketing appeared first on Ifbyphone.

Paul Revere–No Need for the Midnight Ride

With a cell phone, Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride would have been completely unnecessary. When the British Army began moving, Revere rode all through Charlestown warning the colonists of impending battle, but he could have just sent out a mass voice broadcast: “Hey guys, the British are up and moving. You should probably get ready.” Simple as that. No riding, no dodging warships, no running around in the dark. Everyone gets the message, everyone is ready.

Lewis and Clark–Lost No More

A phone would really have saved Lewis and Clark a lot of trouble (not to mention a GPS). But if nothing else, they could have called home and said, “Hi guys, we’re out of food. Can you send us some food?” That would have kept them from having to eat their horses, at the very least. Or they could have called a supply store (which, of course, would have had a store locator and routed the explorers’ call to the nearest bartering station).

Henry Morton Stanley–Save Yourself a Really Long, Painful Trip

Henry Morton Stanley is famous for his exploration of Central Africa as he searched for Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone, who had been out of contact for six years. Stanley tramped for months through tropical diseases and an unfamiliar climate. His favorite horse died from an insect bite. It was pretty rough. After months of wandering, he finally found Dr. Livingstone, who was hanging out in a village in Ujiji. If Stanley had just had a phone, the whole fiasco could have been avoided—and Livingstone probably wouldn’t have been lost to begin with. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” could have just been “Hey, David. It’s Henry. Where are you?” And what if Dr. Livingstone had a Find Me? Whether he was hanging out at home or on his cell wandering around the village doing some shopping, Stanley’s call would have rang all Dr. Livingstone’s phones until he answered. The wonders of technology.

Romeo and Juliet–Avoid Tragedy

Although these two characters are fictional, they have still inspired much literature since their star-crossed love story was put to the stage around 1594. It’s the timeless story of two teenagers in love whose parents just don’t understand. Unfortunately, their story ended in infamous tragedy. Think how it could have been different if they’d had cell phones! A quick text could have kept Romeo from upending that poison: “Hey Romeo, not dead. Play along. See u later. Love thee. .”   She could even have automated the message with an SMS notification so she didn’t forget, and Romeo could have confirmed easily. It would have been so simple—and a lot less sad.

Granted, most of history would have been different if the telephone was invented at the same time as the wheel. But “what if’s” are fun! How would your business be different if you could have a magical tool from the future? Tell us in the comments, or just read this ebook on the wonders of the telephone as the missing piece to your marketing.

The post 4 Ways the Telephone Could Have Changed History appeared first on Ifbyphone.

Take a second to think about how your own company uses the phone today. How much new and repeat business could your sales team close without phone conversations? How many customers would you lose without phone support? Would you even be able to stay in business without the phone?

Now think about it the other way: How much would your business grow if you had technology to manage, automate, and scale your phone conversations to capture and engage more leads, generate more revenue, and better support more customers?

That’s the power of voice-based marketing automation. Voice-based marketing automation is the technology that enables businesses to manage, measure, and automate sales and support calls. Marketers, salespeople, and support professionals use it to generate and track phone leads, close business faster, and provide better customer service.

What Does Voice-Based Marketing Automation Do?

Thousands of businesses today use voice-based marketing automation to facilitate and automate activities such as:

• Phone lead generation
• Call tracking and reporting
• Call scoring and filtering
• Lead nurturing
• Call routing and recording
• Over-the-phone payment processing
• Answering routine customer inquiries
• Building inbound and outbound phone surveys
• Sending interactive voice broadcasts

Without voice-based marketing automation, these activities are either impossible to do manually or require a significant investment in time and employee resources.

Download the New eBook on Voice-Based Marketing Automation

If you are interested in learn more about voice-based marketing automation, download our new eBook, “The Definitive Guide to Voice-Based Marketing Automation.”

This guide explains what voice-based marketing automation is and how businesses are using it to generate revenue, improve efficiency, and cut costs. It provides tips for selecting the right system and answers questions such as:

• Why is voice-based marketing automation becoming so popular?
• How is it different from traditional marketing automation?
• What features make up a voice-based marketing automation system?
• What value do businesses get from using voice-based marketing automation?

If you rely on the phone to grow your business, voice-based marketing automation lets you maximize that growth by managing, automating, and scaling phone conversations. Check out “The Definitive Guide to Voice-Based Marketing Automation” to learn more.

The post Grow Your Business by Maximizing Your Phone’s Value with Voice-Based Marketing Automation appeared first on Ifbyphone.

Cool Tools

Using tools like KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and Google Universal Analytics to get better conversions on landing pages is a must. Using heat maps on landing pages enable you to see where visitors are clicking, where they’re not clicking, if they’re scrolling down the page, etc. It’s all about gathering data in order to optimize for a better user experience, and with tools like KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, you’re able to obtain that data easily. A/B tests are no longer random adjustments: they’re purposeful tweaks using meaningful data.

Call Tracking

This is a hack hidden in plain view. Data is one of the choice bits of fodder for growth hackers, and call tracking provides it. The whole idea of growth hacking is “do more with less,” getting to the same endpoint with fewer resources. With call tracking, you get data that indicates which marketing efforts are working, enabling you to cut out initiatives that aren’t. A call tracking number on all your resources—online and offline—is like a compass, guiding you with data as calls come in.

CRM Integration

If you can attribute leads to their different sources, you can watch them all the way from lead, to opportunity, to account, to revenue. Integrating with your CRM means having your marketing analytics side by side with your customer information. One way to hack growth using an integration like this is to use the technology to ensure you never miss a lead. If a call from a lead goes unanswered, you should have an integration that creates a new lead record with an open case that ensures follow-up. Using technology in a way that works for your growth is just one of the many ways growth hacking can be used in your organization.

According to many who believe in the ongoing prominence of growth hackers, marketing as it is historically known is dead. It’s a new era, and that means it’s time to employ a new era’s tricks if you want to see growth. Try these three and read this white paper on using voice-based marketing automation to grow your business.

The post Tips from the Growth Hackers appeared first on Ifbyphone.

But one thing most of us can agree on is the value of content marketing, which has continued to generate buzz as an essential piece of any successful lead generation strategy. If you’re among the many marketers who are creating content for your lead gen campaigns, here are three tips to keep in mind as you strategize.

#1: What’s Old to You May Not Be Old to Your Audience

Many marketing teams are churning out new content to promote every week. While you should certainly continue to create meaningful, attractive content, this doesn’t mean that you should stop promoting the content that you think is old.

If you released a white paper in January and are a little light on content in July, bring out that January white paper. There are new prospects—and even current customers and folks in your target audience—who haven’t seen it yet that might find it very valuable.

Also, don’t settle for just one promotional email when you release new content: the chances of everyone in your mailing list actually reading the content in that email are virtually zero, so send more. Just be sure to exclude the people who have already registered for it.

And don’t stop there: include it in your newsletters, continue to share it in your social media campaigns. Think about new ways to package old material: at the end of the year consider releasing a collection of white papers, webinars, etc. in a “Greatest Hits of 2013”-style bundle. Just because a white paper isn’t the newest thing you’ve created doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.

#2: Don’t Keep Your Content In Jail

Our next tip segues nicely from #1. Monitor your content’s success, and if you see that its downloads are slowly trickling down to nothing, take it out from behind the form and enable prospects to view it for “free.” This allows search engines to index it and improves your SEO, and prospects who might have been hesitant about providing contact information in exchange for the collateral might finally check it out. If they find the content valuable, they could always call you (be sure to include a phone number – preferably a trackable phone number like the ones you get from Ifbyphone – in every piece of content) and become a lead. Slideshare is another great place to share your content where there doesn’t necessarily have to be a form between it and the reader. Get that content out there and let the world see it!

#3: Keep Tabs on Your Email Nurturing Campaigns

When someone registers for your white papers, webinars, and other content and becomes a lead, chances are they aren’t ready to make a purchase. They need a little nurturing. Most marketers understand this and have automated email nurturing campaigns that can help.

When it comes to your nurturing campaigns, don’t just leave them running forever in the background and assume they’re working. You should be routinely checking on the success of your emails to see how they’re doing: that means analyzing open rates, click-throughs, replies, and unsubscribe rates and making decisions based on those results. For example, you might need to tweak your subject line if your open rates are low. Or you may think about less email or less frequent blasts if you notice unsubscribe rates keep rising with each email.

Marketing automation tools make it easy to build and execute email nurturing campaigns, and they provide much of the data you need to monitor success. What they don’t do, however, is tell you when a lead you are nurturing reads your email, then picks up the phone and calls you. That’s an important event and being able to tie that call back to your nurturing helps you determine what’s working and what isn’t.

To track those calls, you can use a voice-based marketing automation solution. Voice-based marketing automation gives you unique trackable phone numbers you can place in your emails. It then gives you custom reports that show which emails are driving calls, if those callers became opportunities, and if they went on to become paying customers. Want to learn more? Check out our free white paper, Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.

The post 3 Tips for Better Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing appeared first on Ifbyphone.

It’s almost eerie—hearing a voice from so far in the past. But in an age where we take instantaneous communication for granted, it’s rewarding to know how far we’ve come: from etchings in a wax-on-binder-board disc, all the way to interactive voice response and Universal Analytics. As something like the descendants of his legacy, we think Mr. Bell would have been a fan of Ifbyphone. After all, we have a major thing in common: we are champions of voice, and believe in its power. Here are three things we wish Alexander Graham Bell were around to see.

Voice Broadcasting

What if Bell had been able to not only record his voice, but send it to everyone he knew? He would have loved voice broadcasting. The power to record a single message and quickly send it out to large numbers of people, with no guessing about whether they would ever hear it, would have certainly been worthwhile to the father of modern communication. Bell was all about creating new ways for people to communicate, and voice broadcasting is one.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

If voice broadcasting creates a new way for people to communicate, then IVR goes above and beyond. For Bell, interaction with voice technology was limited to telephone conversations, and not even the seamless connection that we enjoy today. He would have loved IVR: a technology that enables an exchange of information, a recorded human voice opening an avenue of communication that Bell and his peers hadn’t yet dreamed of.

Call Recording

In Bell’s day, recording even a few seconds of speech was miraculous. Think how shocked he would be if he could see that recording voice on his invention, the telephone, is now done easily and routinely, and for a broad range of reasons. Call recording captures voice, but not for the novelty of it: businesses large and small record their calls to provide a complete view of customer interaction, gain valuable insight into the most frequent questions, and more. All of the options would dazzle Mr. Bell: call recording that begins pre-transfer, call recording that begins post-transfer, etc.

Ifbyphone believes in the power of voice, but we would never have the tools to build upon it without Alexander Graham Bell. Voice-based marketing automation is like his great-great-great grandchild in a way. So here’s to you, grandpa.

To learn more about voice-based marketing automation and why the phone continues to be as awesome as when Bell invented it, check out this free white paper.

The post Voice-Based Marketing Automation Might Have Impressed Alexander Graham Bell appeared first on Ifbyphone.

When I talk to fellow marketers about A/B testing, one question I like to ask is “How do you determine a winner?” If you are running an A/B test on an email subject line, for example, most marketers I speak to agree that it isn’t enough to simply compare open rates to declare a winner. Open rates are an interesting measurement, but the goal for most emails isn’t opens and views, it’s clicks and conversions. And most marketers would prefer an email that converts at a higher rate, even if it wasn’t opened as often.

So how then do you measure conversions? It sounds simple: a conversion is the fulfillment of that email’s call to action. Depending on the email, that can be a white paper download, a webinar registration, a visit to a blog, an online purchase, a newsletter subscription, a demo request, or any number of other events, all of which you can measure.

But what about a phone call to your business? What if instead of downloading a white paper or reading a blog, a person gets your email, goes to your landing page, and calls you? What if a lot of people do? Shouldn’t that data factor in your A/B testing?

Most marketers would consider those phone calls to be conversions; in fact, many marketers would love to have an email generate calls to sales, even if the email was supposed to generate webinar registrations. That’s because phone leads are often more sales-ready than other lead types, and therefore more valuable to sales teams. (Here at Ifbyphone, for example, we found that phone leads become customers 3x as often as web form leads).

Including Phone Call Data in Your A/B Testing

So if including phone call data in your A/B testing is important, how do you do it? The answer is with voice-based marketing automation. Voice-based marketing automation has call tracking technology that can tie inbound phone calls to your business to specific marketing ads, campaigns, search keywords, social media sites, direct mail pieces…you name it.

Marketers can see exactly how their work is driving phone calls, and that data can then be included in A/B tests along with online conversion data to determine a winner. Below are four common examples of A/B tests that benefit from call tracking data.

A/B Testing for Google Paid Search Ads

If your business relies on leads from Google paid search ads to generate business, it’s important that you optimize the performance of your ads and landing pages to maximize conversions. This means A/B testing different messaging, page layouts, and offers to see what works best.

But if you only measure online conversions without including phone call conversion data, you could be picking winners that aren’t driving the most leads. This is especially true for mobile paid search ads where phone calls are often the preferred method for leads to reach out to you. Using call tracking to see what keywords, ads, and landing pages are driving phone calls can be a real eye-opener.

A/B Testing for Print Ad Creative

When brainstorming creative messaging for print ads, marketers often come up with several ideas they like. Instead of using your gut to pick a winner, you could try a small A/B test to see which ad generates the most phone calls and web page visits. You can use voice-based marketing automation to include a unique trackable phone number in each ad and measure which one gets the most calls. If someone visits your web page first before calling, voice-based marketing automation will still tie that call to the correct ad.

A/B Testing for Billboard Ad Locations

If you advertise using billboards, you probably want to know which location drives the most leads and revenue. Could be 95% of your conversions come from a single billboard, and the others are just wasting money. Voice-based marketing automation tells you which phone calls came from which billboard, so you can A/B test different locations until you find the ones that work best.

 A/B Testing for Direct Mail and Email

Which version of your email and direct mail generates the most inbound calls? Which landing page does the best job in driving phone leads? Voice-based marketing automation can tell you. Even if people visit your web site first and browse around before calling, you will still know which email or direct mail piece was responsible for the call.

View Your A/B Test Call Data in Google’s Universal Analytics

One final note: for those of you planning on using Google’s new Universal Analytics tool, Ifbyphone’s call tracking data can be included in Universal Analytics alongside your other web and offline data. It makes it easy to view all your relevant A/B test data before picking a winner.

To learn more about tracking phone calls in Universal Analytics, you may request a demo of Ifbyphone. You can learn more about call tracking by downloading our white paper, “Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.”

The post How Marketers Use Phone Call Tracking Data for Better A/B Testing appeared first on Ifbyphone.