More and more companies are looking into affiliate marketing as a means of driving new business.
After all, in theory it’s a risk-free way to get another business to support your lead generation efforts and help you with some of the heavy lifting.
That’s fine if your customers are coming to you via an online channel, where all stages of the customer journey can be tracked. You can clearly see who helped with that customer journey to reward them, and seamlessly identify where any revenue has come from.
But what if picking up the phone is one of the biggest steps on your customer’s journey? How can you keep track of that journey, so you’re rewarding the right people and keeping track of all your customers?
Through its partnership with Manchester-based call tracking software firm Infinity, affiliate platform Awin has the solution.
“Infinity work closely across the Awin agency and advertiser portfolio to enable call tracking and extend visibility of the Awin platform,” said Jess Brown, Awin Agency Partner.
“This gives visibility on call reporting metrics such as length of call, as well as keywords, and conversions. More recently the partnership has been strengthened through collaborative pitching between agency partners, Awin and Infinity which has resulted in multiple new client wins and existing clients bringing call tracking under their performance marketing activity successfully.”
We caught up with Matthew Bradley, Partner Account Director at Infinity, to find out more.
Can you tell us a bit more about what Infinity does?
Infinity is a global call intelligence provider that enables marketers to unlock invaluable insights before, during and after every call. Using these insights, you can optimise marketing spend, refine messaging, nail attribution and produce better customer experiences. With the Infinity Hub, you get full visibility over the entire customer journey, and you can join the dots between online discovery and offline phone call conversions.
Our award-winning Conversation Analytics suite sheds light on what happens on all inbound and outbound calls – at scale. This means you can access invaluable intel and lift the lid on the ‘unfiltered truth’ from customers. When this is the case, it’s far easier to create compelling messaging that really resonates with your audience, you can target the right keywords, and spot common queries to optimise the online journey.
How does Infinity work with Awin to help agency clients?
Infinity gives Awin’s clients clarity on which affiliate channels (i.e. the businesses you’re paying to refer new leads to you) are driving the best results. Specific phone numbers are generated and tracked within the Infinity Hub. These are allocated to individual publishers, so when a customer picks up the phone, Awin’s clients know exactly which affiliate channel drove that call.
So, when you need to see which affiliate partners are driving the most revenue, you’re able to see an accurate picture. Revenue attribution with Infinity and Awin is seamless and straightforward. Awin’s customers can focus more time and resources on the affiliate channels driving the right results and identify the ones not performing as well, and better allocate budgets.
Here are the main ways we work together:
Infinity provides tracking phone numbers which feature on each publisher, CSS or Brand Partner to track calls directly from each affiliate website. Infinity captures the type of call, such as whether it’s a sales call or a general enquiry, the outcome, and the value of each call as well as the volume and duration to trigger specific goals and conversions.
Only 11% of journeys can be classed as ‘online only’, and many marketers face the challenge of losing visibility over what happens once a customer picks up the phone
MATTHEW BRADLEY, INFINITY
When Infinity Tracking JavaScript is installed on a client’s website, it dynamically replaces the phone number for each concurrent visitor. The key driver in this scenario would be to understand affiliate links driving calls from the advertisers’ website.
The main benefit of this is accurate attribution and the ability to optimise based on publisher performance within the Awin platform. In addition, by adding the call data as a conversion point, it opens up more opportunity for the adoption of new publishers. Infinity will track both typical user journeys, calls direct from affiliate sites, and affiliate links that are driving calls from the website itself.
Can you give us some examples of how Infinity is helping clients to cover what was previously a ‘blind spot’ and costing clients revenue?
Only 11% of journeys can be classed as ‘online only’, and many marketers face the challenge of losing visibility over what happens once a customer picks up the phone. It’s also important to note that a customer picking up the phone is a much higher intent lead than an online visitor. The proof’s in the pudding; inbound calls are 10-15 times more likely to convert.
The Infinity Call Tracking solution gives marketers full visibility on calls and conversions generated from affiliate activities, enabling them to connect the dots between the online and offline journeys. They also get a ton of insights into what’s happening on the calls with Conversation Analytics. Getting this unfiltered truth sheds a light on the common queries customers have, their pain points, and the language they use.
Armed with this intel, marketers can better tailor messaging and PPC bidding to make sure they get the right leads coming into their pipelines. There’s also much more reassurance around allocating budget to the activities that are going to drive high-intent phone enquiries and conversions.
What type of client is your call intelligence solution most suitable for?
Call intelligence should be leveraged by any business where phone conversations represent an important aspect of the customer journey. Some examples include car dealerships, healthcare providers, insurers, banks, property companies, travel agents, high-end retailers and utilities businesses.
What is the onboarding process for a new client?
Businesses can start tapping into their call data within a matter of hours. Deploying Infinity Call Tracking is as simple as adding a JavaScript snippet to your website and integrating the rest of your martech stack and CRM system. Adding the snippet to your website is quick and easy. You just log in to the Infinity Hub and select ‘Settings’ from the bottom of the left-hand navigation, then choose Tracking Script from the Tracking section.
When you’re ready, just click the ‘copy to clipboard’ button to copy the snippet to the clipboard. You can then add it to your website either manually or using a tag manager. If you do use Google Tag Manager to manage tags on your site, you can also use it to add the Infinity snippet to your site quickly and easily.
Users who are familiar with leveraging call intelligence can get started right away, but unlike other providers, Infinity has a dedicated consultancy team on-hand to help optimise the speech analytics tools in the platforms. This is where you can analyse conversation data to shortcut the time it takes to uncover actionable insights and drive performance improvements.
Can you give us an example of a success story which demonstrates the power of Infinity for agency clients?
A great example of how we’ve worked with Awin to generate some really great results is Vodafone. Affiliate marketing is one of their biggest digital channels, and many of Vodafone’s broadband sales happen over the phone.
Vodafone used the Infinity’s Call Intelligence software to accurately map which affiliate channels were driving the calls that converted, helping them nail attribution and map the customer journey. Vodafone also used Conversation Analytics to spot the calls where high intent terms were used that would indicate a conversion. Having this seamless affiliate attribution in place has broadened the scope for Vodafone to now also promote products only available over the phone via affiliate channels, meaning more leads in the pipeline.
