Survey results: Sales over the phone increase by up to 40% at Christmas
Written by Natalia Selby
However… 60% of companies don’t track all of their calls! We surveyed 200 UK SME owners and managers to find out about their business phone call activity at Christmas. 42% of businesses across all sectors said their inbound calls increase during the festive season. And, in terms of their bottom line, 35% said that their sales made over the phone increase by up to 40%; with 20% saying they can even increase to over 50%.
Great news for businesses and this suggests that the telephone is still a powerful response and sales tool during the most profitable time of the year.
… But businesses aren’t tracking calls
Only 60% said that they apply specific telephone numbers to a few or none at all of their marketing channels. When businesses are trying to attribute where calls have come from, a massive 50% said they manually track their inbound calls, with only 16% saying they use some form of call tracking software.
The problem with manually tracking your telephone calls is that most businesses will likely attribute the call to the last touch point in the consumer’s journey. It has been widely reported that this attribution model is incorrect because it only reveals one part of the consumer journey and misses out a whole series of other interactions with your business before they picked up the phone.
SMEs are using multi-channel at Christmas
In today’s marketing landscape, we know that buyers are faced with more stimuli than ever before. So it’s good to see that, of those surveyed, SMEs use at least four channels to drive Christmas sales: 30% use multiple channels spanning both offline and online mediums, from social media to print and businesses will be ploughing budget into these channels to capture Christmas shoppers.
Come January 2017, they’ll want to know which activity has paid off. But, if their marketing is lacking trackable telephone numbers and calls have been tracked manually, they’ll have a hard time figuring out which marketing campaigns generated the profit. This can make next year’s Christmas strategy planning a nightmare as the data will probably be incorrect.
If you want to make the most of the influx of calls to your business this Christmas, use call tracking to plan for a more strategic Christmas marketing plan next year.