Recent years has seen mainstream adoption of quality web analytics applications, which has resulted in them having a critical role in the decision-making of online marketing spends. Any serious e-commerce merchants will conduct routine investigations into their Web sites ability to generate online sales, and more importantly what channels are best converting visitors into sales.

A long-time problem that many service-based business owners face is their ability to measure offline sales and leads that originate from their online marketing efforts.  Unless the business owner is diligent in probing the caller about how they found them they will have no idea of what marketing initiatives are driving a positive ROI.

A recent MarketingSherpa case study focused on the success of Jenny Craig’s ability to use “Click to Call” as a way to drive prospects to their call centre and retail outlets. Jenny Craig used a Click to Call tool (sometimes known as Web to Phone) to drive direct sales from their website, and at the same time initiated a sales cycle that gave them the ability to monitor offline conversions.

After a careful marketing analysis on improving sales, they were able to implement a system whereby their website visitors were able to request an immediate call from a service representative in their area.  Jenny Craig over the years has resisted conducting transactions online, as they did not want to abandon the in person and over the phone relationship between clients and consultants.

Not only does Click to Call allow you to monitor and improve online marketing initiatives, it also provides an easy way for potential customers to contact you, which has to have a strong positive impact on your Web site conversion rate.  The Jenny Craig Case study states that there conversions were seen to be about twice as high using this system.

If you are interested in a solution that allows you to better monitor your offline conversions keep an eye out for an upcoming post where we start evaluating a couple of options.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.