Evolution of Phone Marketing

While 1983 big breakthrough was a far cry from the iPhone X, it was a harbinger of things to come, a personal telecommunications device that could be carried outside the hardwired home. It took another 10 years to make cellphones that you could comfortably carry in your hand. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that SMS as well as access via mobile browsers took off. With these factors now in play, connecting with consumers via handheld devices began to really take hold as a viable mass marketing tool.

It took until the 1970s before call centers and what was quickly dubbed ‘telemarketing’ emerged. The industry exploded as technology made it cheaper to set up outbound call centers. By 2000, the 10 biggest telemarketing agencies were making a million or more calls per hour. It was also by the turn of the millennium that essentially all businesses had now equipped themselves with toll-free numbers and braced for the rise of inbound marketing.

Having the data is one thing, but doing anything useful with it is quite another. And it depends what your interpretation of the data is. A single click can be meaningless without context without scoring it and extrapolating what it means about that specific customer journey. One way to make sense of your data is with channel attribution, based on customer touches or clicks. There are a number of models for doing this – First Click, Last Click, Position based, Linear and Time Decay.

Each of these models has pros and cons, but none is fully effective with incomplete data. Even though we’ve moved into instant, digital everything, some very significant parts of buyer’s journeys still happen offline and offline actions rarely get credit in any attribution model. Offline data efficiency gaps can widen due to the very tangible differences between various marketing channels, some channels are simply more wide used by specific demographics during specific legs of their journey.

For example, Facebook is a great place to build awareness and create a community, but it’s not typically where consumers go to make purchases or to gain deep knowledge of your products or services. If you’re not measuring phone calls, you’re likely missing a big chunk of the data. This is true if you’re using a last click model that would be giving calls a huge share of credit, if only you were tracking them. Even though the integration of the web and smartphones into everyday life has done away with phones that flip, phone calls are still alive and well in the marketing process.

In fact, the evolution of phone technology has created a mobile first world, where mobile searches result in immediate calls and conversion from the same device. Measuring which search queries, ads and content make those calls happen, therefore, is key to building and refining a winning overall strategy. Predicting which new technology or device might emerge as the next big marketing tool is a tough endeavor.