What Is CallRail? How To Use It With Virtual Receptionists To Boost Marketing Results

Imagine learning that your expensive advertising campaign is only generating half as many leads as your affordable SEO marketing; you'd probably be furious that you're squandering that much cash on a mediocre endeavor. 

If you had the right tracking data, however, you could use it to create actionable plans so that you get the best return on your investment every single time. That’s where CallRail comes in.

What is CallRail, you may ask? This guide will cover everything you need to know about what CallRail is and how you can use it with our virtual receptionists to boost your marketing results.

Table of contents:

What is CallRail?

• What is call tracking?
• What is form tracking?

How using CallRail with virtual receptionists improves marketing results

• Offers better ROI
• Improves the customer experience
• Prioritizes qualified leads
• Measures team performance
• Increases productivity with responsiveness
• Saves money on marketing budgets

What is CallRail?

CallRail is a call tracking and marketing analytics platform that helps businesses understand which campaigns are driving inbound leads via calls, texts, forms, and/or chats.

Using a service like CallRail, you can track the volume of calls, call trends and patterns, duration, time of day, origin location, keywords, and even the performance of PPC landing pages to determine which ones are producing the most leads and calls for your company. You’ll also get a picture view of all phone contacts from both online and offline sources.

Using call and form tracking, CallRail analyzes your inbound leads and connects them to your marketing return on investment (ROI), enabling you to see which marketing campaigns are effective and which ones are not. This saves you time, money, and the effort of doing the work yourself.

Now let’s walk through how call and form tracking works.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is the process of determining how callers found your business. By utilizing call tracking software like CallRail, marketing and sales teams can link phone conversations to the precise online and offline marketing channels that brought customers to your company.

At its most basic, call tracking is very straightforward: It involves utilizing a different tracking phone number for each marketing campaign to distinguish between campaign calls. 

Online channels: You can use a tracking phone number in your digital ads or use dynamic number insertion (DNI) on your website to monitor calls that come from online campaigns.

Offline channels: You can use a tracking phone number on your print ads, billboards, and business cards to track calls from offline campaigns.

Let’s imagine, for example, your business currently invests money in both online marketing, like Google Ads, and offline marketing, like direct mail, to help generate leads. Your marketers want to make sure your phone leads are being tracked, so they purchase two unique phone numbers from their call tracking provider: one for Google Ads and one for direct mail.  

A potential client who contacts the number after seeing one of these marketing campaigns will then be routed to your in-house team or outsourced virtual receptionists. 

From there, your marketing team can produce reports that provide information about the caller's history, caller ID information, and which campaigns are driving inbound calls.

What is form tracking?

While call tracking shows which ad or keyword made someone call, form tracking reveals what made them click “submit” on a form. Together, they showcase all your lead activity, giving you better insight to help you market and spend smarter. 

Let’s say one of your advertisements inspired a person to click. You are notified when they download a report and submit a form a few days later. Then they give you a call. 

When you take that call, you'll be able to access a simple, seamless timeline that connects all these interactions. This timeline was made possible by form tracking.

How using CallRail with virtual receptionists improves marketing results

Thanks to CallRail, you will be able to pinpoint exactly which leads come from which campaigns, allowing you to increase your marketing efforts where they are already having an impact and make improvements to the ones that require a few adjustments.

But it doesn't have to stop there. You can take the process one step further with the help of the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai. Our live agents can answer all of those inbound leads for you, enhancing your speed to lead, customer experience, and overall business growth. 

Check out these ways using CallRail with our virtual receptionists can improve your marketing results.

Improve ROI on marketing

With all the data you get from source tracking, you can assess the effectiveness of newly produced leads and measure the true ROI of your marketing expenditures.

Once you know what’s not working, you can get rid of it. You can also identify the initiatives that are effective and give them priority. This guarantees that all of your marketing activities are maximizing your ROI.

In order to free up internal employees to concentrate on other areas of your company, you can guarantee that your leads are addressed quickly and accurately by outsourcing to our virtual receptionists.

With virtual receptionists available round-the-clock to take your calls and qualify your leads, you'll waste less time and be able to concentrate your efforts on more qualified leads, which will inevitably result in a higher return on investment.

Enhance the customer experience

Knowing where your incoming calls are originating from and how they are being handled are both parts of call tracking. Personalizing the customer experience is essential to retaining customers in the face of fierce competition and rising customer expectations. And often it starts with a phone call. 

Call attribution allows you to gain access to the context of the customer journey and determine how each connection influenced the sale. With virtual receptionists on your team, they'll be able to use this information to see the customer's overall journey, enabling them to have more targeted discussions, build better connections, and identify qualifying leads that will help them close a deal.

Prioritize qualified leads

You don’t want to waste your time on unqualified leads. That’s why it’s important to instill a proper call-routing system that connects each lead based on their needs and qualification. 

With CallRail's Call Flow Builder, you have the ability to design a call routing system that looks after your callers as soon as they connect to your tracking number. You can include a custom greeting that instructs them on how to navigate your call flow or an interactive menu (otherwise known as an IVR menu).

Interactive voice response (IVR) is an automated phone call operating system that answers a call, asks simple questions to callers, and routes the call according to their answers. Some examples include:

Language preference: 

• “For English press 1, for Spanish press 2, for French press 3”

Department preference: 

• “For sales press 1, for technical issues press 2, for billing inquiries press 3

If you need to get more information about callers before knowing where to accurately route them, IVR can help gather that data and perform call actions accordingly. 

Once the system properly routes the caller, virtual receptionists will screen leads on the first call using your specific criteria. They’ll qualify a lead by asking for context based on your industry — not just a name and phone number. Some examples include:

Law firms: 

• “Are you currently working with an attorney?”
• “Who are the other parties involved?”
• “Are you prepared to pay an attorney to assist you with this matter?”

Childcare services:

• “How many of your children are you looking to enroll?”
• “What are the ages of your children?”
• “How would you describe the temperament of your children?”

Life Insurance: 

• What is the composition of your household?
• What is your employment status?
• How old are you?

Spending time on quality leads helps your business grow more quickly and efficiently, which eventually boosts revenue from your ideal clients.

Measure team performance

To ensure the best possible client experience, effective resource and operational management is essential. When you track and record calls, you can audit which team members spoke with which clients and assess how well they handled the conversation.

With call recordings, you can actually hear how the person handled the call. Did they sound grumpy, hurried, or give inaccurate information? Or did they sound professional and handle the call flawlessly? Here, you have unique access to your calls and tremendous insight into the data. 

There is no excuse for failing to address problems or not knowing how calls are handled. With virtual receptionists, you can customize brand-specific instructions for them to follow as well as on-call actions for them to take (like transfers or appointment scheduling), ensuring that your calls are always handled expertly. 

Increase efficiency with responsiveness 

Did you know following up with leads within the first minute of their contact increases lead conversion rates by almost 400%? Because the first business to answer a call from a customer typically wins their business, response time is crucial.

It can be challenging and time-consuming to handle various amounts of inbound leads from different channels, which decreases the time you have to follow up with new leads and prospects.

By outsourcing your calls to virtual receptionists, you can free up internal personnel and assign these duties to knowledgeable agents who are trained how to take and field calls efficiently. They’ll answer all your inbound leads in a timely manner and handle the interaction with flawless execution. 

Save money on marketing budgets

You'll notice significant savings in your marketing budget when you stop wasting money on unsuccessful efforts. With call tracking, you can increase your savings by identifying the initiatives that are producing the best ROI. 

You may even discover that some of your best campaigns are the inexpensive (or free) ones you’re running. Your marketing budget will have much more leeway to accommodate other channels, test new initiatives, or simply enable you to get more leads for less!

With a virtual receptionist service, you’ll not only get top-quality answering services, but also the added bonuses of 24/7/365 support, technical integrations for seamless workflows, no sick days, and no management issues to deal with. In the short and long term, virtual receptionists are far less expensive than in-house receptionists, with the added flexibility of month-to-month plans to boot

You can spend the money you save using virtual receptionists to grow your company.

Time to get started

With the use of CallRail’s tracking system and Smith.ai’s 24/7 virtual support, you’ve got everything you need for a smart and efficient client engagement system at a low and flexible cost, without hiring any in-house staff to keep overhead to a minimum while your business grows even faster. 

Knowing what makes your phone ring allows you to gauge the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and improve future marketing strategies. With CallRail, you will be able to identify which leads originate from which campaigns so you can increase your marketing efforts where they are having an impact and make adjustments to those that could use some fine-tuning.

With the assistance of Smith.ai virtual receptionists, you can even advance beyond call tracking. We can handle all of your lead intake and screening needs, or even just take care of after-hours and overflow calls. We can also integrate with your software to log every call and keep you updated on each call that comes in, even if you aren't around to answer it.

Get Started with CallRail

Get a free 14-day trial to experience the power of call tracking for yourself.

Get Started with Smith.ai

Book a consultation to learn how our virtual receptionists can help you achieve your specific business goals, faster!