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Partner Marketing and Call Tracking

Partner Marketing has become the mainstay of the major brand’s marketing strategy. While once thought of as simply a lead generation tool through affiliates, creating strategic marketing partnerships has become vital for brand engagement and discovery.

A recent survey from Digital Commerce, showed that partner marketing affected 14% of sales in 2016, and this number is only growing. With leading brands now seeing 40% of their online revenue being driven through performance marketing, the partnerships channel is more important than ever.

However, there is a gap in many partner marketing programs, which means not only opportunities missed but missed revenue. To fill this gap, marketers will need to understand how the online to offline economy plays out in their marketing eco-system and how it can be utilised to boost performance.

One Trillion Dollars...and Growing

The global call commerce market generated US$1 trillion in sales for brands globally in 2016 (BIA/Kelsey, 2016). In that year, consumers who were ready to purchase, generated 85 billion calls to businesses, and this is set to grow to a whopping 169 billion money-making calls by 2020.

With 61% of consumers calling during the purchase phase (Google/Ipsos, 2013), it is no surprise that 65% of businesses view a phone call as their most important lead source.

So what is driving this growth? The rise in digital – which many thought would be the death of the phone call – has actually driven resurgence, largely thanks to the mobile phone. With over 4.7 billion people worldwide owning a mobile device, it’s no surprise that the phone call is still important.

Delacon and Partner Marketing

With this in mind, an effective partner marketing strategy takes into account the behaviours of the ever growing, on the move, mobile connected consumer. It recognises the value of the $141.6 billion spent globally on mobile advertising (eMarketer, 2017) and the new mobile and call friendly ad formats driving clicks AND calls. It values the technologies that help it track the journey and voice of the consumer across all channels. Brands and partners alike use these to measure, attribute and optimise all leads and sales – recognising and rewarding marketing partner performance for both online and offline conversions in real-time – whether that is a lead or a sale.

A sophisticated call analytics solution (sometimes referred to as call tracking) enables the measurement, attribution and optimisation of all call conversions originating from marketing partners. By integrating with a call analytics provider, not only can call conversion data be reported in a partner marketing platform in the same way clicks can, but marketers will be able to more effectively measure performance delivered to the brand – taking and giving credit for both the web leads and phone calls generated. Conversely, it allows a brand to assess the quality of all leads generated by each of its marketing partners.

How does it work?

When a consumer interacts with a partner’s campaign, they can either click through to the brand, perform an e-commerce transaction or the consumer may call, generating a qualified lead or sale. For an online journey, by implementing a call analytics code and a number (or what is called a ‘dynamic number’) either on a campaign or landing page, a significant amount of call information is captured when the call is made.

This includes campaign information such as search keyword terms, AdWord or campaign details, online referrer / marketing partner etc. A sophisticated call analytics solution will be able to whisper campaign details to the call agent, capture in call information and report call outcomes such as sale value, callers’ intent or conversation keywords.

The call conversion is then reported within the brand’s partner marketing solution, attributing the call to that specific partner and rewarding them accordingly. Partner performance measurement becomes more accurate, and can be optimised towards higher-valued conversions.

The call analytics data also provides insights into consumer behaviours from online-to-offline leading to sales outcomes. This can be integrated across a wide range of solutions including analytics, CRM, automation, personalisation and business intelligence to offer additional reporting throughout all business reporting.

Benefits
  • Increased leads = increased revenue.
  • Encourage conversions from the Mobile First consumers.
  • Receive higher quality leads from consumers who are in the purchase phase of the sales funnel.
  • Provide multiple channels for partners to drive acquisition.
  • More accurately measure and reward your marketing partners’ performance.
  • Create a seamless customer experience from partners to your brand.
  • Gain full visibility into inbound calls from your partners.
  • Increase leads = increased revenue.
  • Measure and optimise campaign performance based on online and offline conversion data.
  • Provide brands with higher quality leads.
  • Increase performance and preference amongst brand’s marketing campaigns.
Delacon and Performance Horizon

Delacon has partnered with leading partner marketer Performance Horizon, enabling our call tracking solution to be used to track calls generated by the Performance Horizon Platform.

By tracking calls within the platform, affiliate partners can now more accurately attribute the calls they generate back to their marketing efforts. Not only does this increase revenue for the business, but allows them to utilise the information for optimisation purposes.

By using the call information to make optimisation decisions, the affiliate partner can generate better quality leads as they can make decisions around both web based and call based conversions.

“Marketers must justify every decision they make based on return of investment,” Michael Center from Delacon commented. “While affiliate or partner marketing programs are potentially a lucrative source of revenue, it has been hard to correctly attribute if leads or sales are being generated through these programs once the customer has moved offline and engaged with a brand via the telephone. The integration with Performance Horizon means we can now effectively track where sales from phone calls have originated, which enables better rewards for partners and increased sales for brands.”

Call Tracking and Partner Marketing Case Study

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