What are inbound calls and who should track them?

Are you tracking your inbound calls effectively to derive actionable insights that will improve your marketing campaigns and increase conversions?

While many marketers focus heavily on digital analytics, phone calls often represent the highest-intent customer interactions that drive leads and generate significant revenue. This is why it’s vital that you have the right call tracking software to monitor and analyse your inbound calls with the highest level of granularity.

In this article, we’ll break down what inbound calls are, who should be tracking them, and why your business needs solutions like Mediahawk to improve your marketing return on investment (ROI) and customer acquisition strategies.

What are inbound calls?

Inbound calls are the phone calls initiated by customers or prospects to your business, as opposed to outbound calls that you initiate. Inbound calls typically result from marketing campaigns, customer service needs, or sales enquiries, representing customers actively seeking to connect with your business.

These calls matter tremendously for your marketing team, since they often indicate high purchase intent and immediate interest. When someone picks up the phone to call your business, they’ve moved beyond passive browsing to active engagement, and how effectively you track, manage, and derive insights from these calls is pivotal to increasing your conversions and ROI.

Using software to track inbound calls provides real-time insights into how successfully campaigns generate conversions and which marketing channels and messages drive meaningful customer actions.

For a deeper understanding of how inbound calls fit into your marketing strategy, explore our comprehensive inbound call tracking guide.

Who should track inbound calls?

Inbound call tracking is highly beneficial across all sectors, but especially for marketers in industries where phone calls are high-conversion actions. Let’s explore some of the key sectors where tracking inbound calls delivers exceptional marketing analytics and actionable insights to improve ROI.

Care homes – Measuring enquiries and move-ins

In care homes, inbound calls often represent significant moments for prospects exploring care options for themselves or their loved ones. These phone call conversations frequently lead to consultations, facility tours, and eventual move-ins.

Your care home needs the right software to ensure every inbound call is attributed to the correct marketing source, so you know the true impact of each touchpoint in the prospect journey. For example, you’ll uncover which paid ads are driving the most inbound calls, so you can adjust your pay-per-click (PPC) strategy to be more cost-efficient. In turn, you’ll be generating more enquiries and minimising wasted spend.

Automotive – Tracking test drive enquiries and sales

Car dealerships value inbound calls since they often involve test drive requests, vehicle availability questions, and financing enquiries. These interactions reflect customers who are further along in the buying journey, highlighting how important call tracking software is in securing a purchase.

You’ll be able to track the specific keywords being searched by customers who click on your paid ads and make a call. This will highlight things like the specific models or types of cars customers are interested in buying. As a result, you’ll be able to adjust your inventory-specific campaigns to address customer needs and interests, which will improve the customer experience and increase sales.

Healthcare and dental – Managing patient appointments and consultations

In healthcare and dental practices, inbound calls are the lifeblood of patient acquisition and retention. These calls range from new patient enquiries to appointment scheduling and treatment questions.

To manage these enquiries and patient handling effectively, your practice needs speech analytics software to derive insights from inbound phone conversations. The system will automatically pick out relevant keywords from each call and assign tags that categorise the calls. You’ll have full visibility over the intent of every call – knowing which are enquiry, issue, and appointment related – so you can initiate the correct follow-ups to avoid frustrations and improve patient satisfaction.

Marketing agencies – Tracking client leads and service enquiries

Marketing agencies will be able to track their client’s inbound calls and more effectively measure the success of campaign adjustments and strategies across different channels. Inbound calls to your clients are likely to be enquiries with intent to purchase, so it’s important to track these calls in order to increase conversions and sales.

Tracking inbound calls gives your agency the full picture of where your client’s most valuable leads are coming from, so you can direct resources to the most successful campaigns and use this insight to further increase conversions. The software will also demonstrate the ROI of your strategies and reveal the impact of your marketing efforts on phone enquiries, consultations, and new business opportunities. This increases client trust, encourages long-term business partnerships, and benefits your agency’s reputation through referrals.

Financial services – Tracking loan and insurance enquiries

Inbound calls in the financial service sector typically involve high-stakes enquiries about mortgages, investment products, insurance policies, and financial advice. These calls are crucial opportunities to generate significant revenue for your firm.

Use call tracking software to learn exactly which touchpoints in the prospect journey produce product applications, consultation bookings, or policy quotes, for example. You’ll be able to automatically assign lead scores to prospects based on the outcome of the call, meaning you can quickly see which marketing channels drive quality calls so you can prepare to give these prospects extra attention.

Legal services – Measuring client enquiries and case consultations

In legal services, inbound calls generally involve case evaluations, legal consultations, and specialised advice seeking from prospects. How you monitor and manage these calls will significantly impact how effectively you obtain enquiries and determine case value.

For instance, you can assign relevant keywords that indicate potentially higher case values, such as terms surrounding a specific type of law or legal claim – “divorce law” or “criminal defence lawyer”. You can analyse exactly which PPC ads are generating calls from prospects who search these words, highlighting your most successful activities in driving valuable enquiries.

Real estate – Tracking property enquiries and viewings

Real estate businesses rely heavily on inbound calls for things like property enquiries, viewing arrangements, and investment discussions. Achieving the highest potential commissions and sales is dependent on driving the right calls from the right prospects.

You’ll be able to see the true value of your marketing channels in generating relevant calls from high-intent prospects. Sales Matching features will reveal the revenue generated from your activities when a prospect books a viewing or makes an offer on a property – whichever you want to assign as a valuable action. This source attribution will show you exactly where you need to be focusing your marketing spend for optimal ROI.

Education – Measuring course enquiries and applications

Inbound calls to educational institutions are vital for prospective students to understand programme details, application procedures, financial aid, and campus visits. Your institution needs the right software to analyse call metrics during critical periods like application deadlines or university clearing.

The system will show you the volume of calls from program-specific campaigns with a certain purpose – such as enrolment or campus visits. You’ll be able to know where and when you should be investing resources into specific campaigns to increase enrolment and campus visit calls, and real-time insights will show when trends change or evolve along the educational calendar.

Technology services – Measuring software or support enquiries

Technology providers receive inbound calls from customers who want to know more about services, see product demonstrations, ask installation questions, or enquire about other support needs.

These calls often indicate serious purchase intent or upsell opportunities for your business.

If your business is offering a new promotion, for example, you can track which campaigns are generating the most calls relating to this offer from different channels. Whether it’s your PPC ads, social media campaigns, or email activities, you’ll have the data to back up your adjustments to increase conversions and minimise spend waste.

Final thoughts

Inbound call tracking provides you with crucial insights into how your campaigns drive high-intent customer actions, and also, how you should refine your campaigns and channels to maximise ROI. You’ll bridge the gap between your digital and offline activities to gain the full picture of your marketing performance, which is essential for any sector needing to increase conversions – whether it’s car dealerships, care homes, marketing agencies, or educational institutions.

If you want to become a marketing leader in your sector, request a demo from Mediahawk today for a call tracking solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing marketing technology stack.