Are you properly tracking your revenue drivers?

At the end of the day, all businesses are after one thing: return on investment. Whether you’re selling widgets or haircuts, you want to maximize the money that your business brings in (while minimizing expenses, of course). This involves keeping a close eye on all the metrics related to your business’ success, but it’s especially important to track your revenue drivers. Let’s say that you operate a small business, and you advertise via a) PayPerClick ads for your website, b) a listing in the yellow pages, and c) radio ads. You know that you get 10 new clients a month from your advertising efforts, but you have no idea what the breakdown is by ad source. If you want to get the greatest ROI on your advertising dollars, you need to put your money into only the most successful advertising channels and eliminate the unsuccessful ones. In other words, you need to track your revenue drivers. But how exactly do you do this?

With a call tracking service, you can get insight into how many phone calls came from each advertising channel: your website, your yellow pages listing, and your radio ads, to keep with our example. Here’s how it works:

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Do you really know your callers?

When someone calls your business because they saw your ad, you can use Call Tracking or Dynamic Number Replacement to determine which ad drove them to call you. What you don’t know is where they live, how old they are or their income. The more you know about your customers the better you can personalize their experience with your business.

There are over 100 million phone numbers in the US that are tied to information beyond a caller’s name and address. Just by having the caller’s phone number, you can find out a lot about that person.  How old are they? Do they have a mortgage and if so for how much? What’s their income? Do they donate to charities? Are they interested in dogs?

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New Telephony Platform Has Tangible Customer Benefits

Hosted Numbers has been transitioning to a new telephony/technology platform for the last 6 months or so. This transition will continue until around the end of the year. And we are not talking about just buying a few new pieces of hardware, but a complete shift in technology and a rewrite of some of our core services. While this is a multi-million dollar effort, the benefits far out way the costs.

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What are "hosted" communications?

A “hosted” service, of any type, is a service in which the customer has no hardware or software to install locally at their premises, and instead pays to use the infrastructure of a vendor to achieve the same net effect as if they’d acquired all the hardware and software themselves. And, thanks to economies of scale, the vendor can almost always provide the service at a lower cost, with more features, and with greater reliability and uptime than if the customer had implemented it themselves.

So how does this tie into communication services? Well, let’s look at an example. Say that you live in Atlanta, GA, and you’re about to start advertising a new product in the Seattle, WA area. Given the nature of the product, it’s important that you refer callers to a local Seattle number instead of your Atlanta office’s 404 number or toll-free number, and you’d also like to record all the calls that you receive.

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