Without leads, your business won’t survive.

4 inexpensive ways your SME can increase customer calls

And the cream of the crop, when it comes to leads, are inbound calls. Inbound calls convert at 30% to 50% compared to web leads at 2%, for instance.

In other words, inbound calls are disproportionately more valuable. If you increase your customer calls, you’ll also increase revenue – and drive business growth.

So here are four ways you can do that – without breaking the bank to get there.

• Focus on click-to-call adverts
• Rework your landing pages
• Use a memorable phone number
• Evaluate your call handling practices

Focus on click-to-call adverts



It doesn’t matter what your most successful advertising platform is, it’s crucial to ensure all adverts encourage the audience to click-to-call.

Right now, you’re probably running adverts with various call-to-actions – like offering a content download, or asking your audience to email.

To increase customer calls, realign those adverts to make sure they’re all pushing the same clear message: Call us now. Distilling your message like this increases the likelihood your audience will take your desired action.

You know the old saying – if you don’t ask, you don’t get. The reverse is true too: the more you ask, the more you get.

Depending on your current advertising strategy, this simple change could result in a big uplift in daily leads.

Even better, if you’re already investing in advertising, it won’t cost you anything to change the copy. You’re making your existing investment more effective by targeting higher-value results. That’s smart business.

If you’re not currently investing in advertising, look for other logical areas where you can reroute spend. For instance, if you’re spending on content marketing but you don’t see much traffic, that money could be better spent on paid advertising.

Rewrite landing pages with one simple call-to-action

A landing page isn’t like any other web page. A page on your website might have any number of goals, even many at once.

Common web page goals:

• To inform or educate
• To answer visitors’ questions
• To help visitors continue their journey
• To encourage visitors to get in touch
• To build a relationship with visitors
• To secure sign-ups for your newsletter

A landing page has one aim only. To get the visitor to convert. That is, to get the visitor to take one specific action– in this case, to call you.

Your call-to-action should be clearly visible and differentiated in design so visitors who scan your landing page can’t miss it.

• Using a single call-to-action in the form of an obvious button (with no other buttons or button-like items on screen) can increase conversion by 45%.
• Using a bright colour to make your call-to-action stand-out can increase conversion by 95%.

Don’t complicate your message with more than one call-to-action message. If your landing page is long, you could include the same call-to-action multiple times.

This also means you shouldn’t include any other links, including a navigation bar. The only way your visitors should be able to progress through your landing page is by clicking your call-to-action.

Like click-to-call advertising, distilling your messaging won’t cost you anything extra if you’ve already got landing pages set up.

You’re just optimising conversion where you already spend. In fact, this will actively save you money which you can spend elsewhere.

Use a memorable phone number

You might not consider phone numbers part of your brand identity, but they are.

Your phone number gives an impression, either good, bad or neutral. Most businesses settle for neutral – but you could make your phone number work harder for your business by choosing something memorable.

Different types of memorable phone numbers:

• Single digits repeated. Like 1111, 2222, 3333
• Pairs of digits. Like 3344, 6677, 8899
• Double pairs of digits. Like 2323,1616, 7474
• Ascending or descending runs of digits. Like 1234, 5678, 4321
• Mirrored digit groups. Like 1221, 7667, 2442

A memorable phone number can become fundamental part of your identity. For instance, you could create jinglesthat prospective customers identify with the brand.

If you’ve ever experienced that annoying feeling of getting a radio jingle stuck in your head, you can imagine how effective this is. If you can stay in their minds, prospects are more likely to call you than someone else.

This is an extremely inexpensive way to boost your customer calls, as many providers charge only a small surcharge to pick your own number.

Plus, if you optimise your online conversion through existing collateral using the first two tactics, you could spend the money you’ve saved on a new number. That’s essentially free.

Evaluate your call answering policy

This starts from the assumption prospective customers have already picked up the phone. What happens next, though, can be a black hole.

When customers hang up before they speak to someone, you’re losing a possible lead – but you’ve done all the hard work (and paid) to get them on the phone. It’s the worst kind of missed opportunity.

Typical culprits that cause customer hang-ups:

• Slow call answer times
• Long hold times
• Silent hold waiting periods
• Bad or distasteful or poor-quality music
• Poor quality audio
• Poorly trained staff
• Constant passing from pillar to post

To increase the success of your calls and increase sales conversions, re-evaluate your call handling policies.

• The typical contact centre answers 80% of calls in 20 seconds; answering 90% in 15 seconds is a better goal.
• Some 67% of customers hang up in frustration while waiting for a customer service representative to answer.

Consider how long you keep people waiting – perhaps you need to hire someone else to field calls. This is a cost, but it could be saving you money by increasing revenue through preventing lost calls.

Or create a standardised script to improve customer service amongst your call-handling staff. You could easily create this yourself with a little time and consideration and it would increase caller satisfaction and improve conversion.

Increasing your inbound lead volume is the best way to boost sales conversions and drive revenue growth for your business. And these four tips show how it’s possible to increase customer calls without a huge cost-per-lead.