Mark Sullivan is the director of analytics at CallRail, a call tracking and analytics platform.
Tell us a little about yourself. Describe your job, how long you’ve been doing it, and how you got into this field.
I am passionate about technology education. My number one goal is to arm business owners and agencies with the best marketing tools available in order to keep them focused on what they love doing.
My life has had its share of adventures. From fighting Dengue Fever to getting an operation on a hotel balcony by a missionary Canadian surgeon in Nicaragua, I am well acquainted with how to fight through obstacles in the pursuit of my objectives. I was fighting through one of these obstacles for my consulting company when I discovered CallRail.
As the founder of Vasolo, I learned the immense value that CallRail provided my clients, many of whom were business owners. I loved the call tracking platform — so much so that I decided to come onboard, not only to continue to share this technology with my clients but to be a part of this fast growing industry with its vast importance to local businesses. Call volume is on the rise and there is a smart phone in almost every pocket, this is the place to be!
What is CallRail?
CallRail provides call tracking and analytics services for small businesses and the marketing agencies that serve them. CallRail's easy-to-use cloud platform helps business owners discover which marketing campaigns and search keywords are driving valuable phone calls. Small businesses and marketing agencies then use the call analytics to optimize advertising campaigns, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction. CallRail was recently named as one of the top 10 fastest growing companies in Atlanta by the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Since 2011, CallRail has pushed the envelope of what is possible with phone call analytics and has helped thousands of marketing agencies, service companies, and small businesses understand the results that their ad campaigns drive through one of the most important and often overlooked channels – the telephone.
How can the marketing industry use CallRail to create better results for its agency or clients?
CallRail is changing the way marketing agencies prove results for their clients. We allow businesses of all sizes to understand the results that their ad campaigns drive through the most important, and often overlooked, channel: the phone.
Before CallRail, call tracking was expensive, complex, and out of reach for most small businesses. Now it's possible for businesses to understand which ads, marketing campaigns, and even search keywords are driving valuable phone calls.
Every day we try to push the envelope of what is possible with inbound communications — not only can our customers know which campaigns and keywords are driving calls, but we also provide full multi-channel campaign attribution for accurate analysis of phone calls that were driven through multiple advertising campaigns. A complete timeline of visitor activity completes the picture by showing exactly what a website visitor did before, during, and after the phone call.
We are constantly adding new capabilities to the platform, like human-powered voicemail transcription and powerful interactive voice response menus. CallRail’s call tracking and analytics isn’t just something our clients are adding on top of their existing phone systems, it's completely replacing them. Simply put, CallRail is cloud-based telephony that's remaking the way companies track, handle, and analyze phone calls.
What changes in your industry made you realize that CallRail would fill a void?
Recent research shows that consumers are relying more and more on voice and mobile when researching and purchasing products (74% of mobile users rely on search during their shopping process). There are multiple options for tracking the path to purchase online, but when consumers start their search online but convert over the phone, the only want to track these purchases back to the source or keyword that lead to them, is through call conversion tracking.
Describe 1-3 core features of CallRail?
We have created a strong feature set to help our clients thrive in the growing mobile and voice market, including our dynamic dashboard and reports that instantly let you know the campaigns that are driving calls, with attribution to the sources that drove the call — whether on or offline. Our interactive dashboard shows how many phone calls you receive from each of your campaigns, enabling you to stay up-to-date with traffic spikes and trends by day, week, or month. Real-time call data means you'll be able to make better and faster marketing decisions.
Call recording also comes standard with every CallRail account, assisting our clients with coaching staff and qualifying leads. Call recording is a great way to:
- Qualify your leads so you can spend more time on those that are likely to convert to sales.
- Assess the quality of marketing campaigns so you’ll know where to invest your time and money.
- Provide valuable feedback to your sales reps so you can standardize your calls for better leads.
- Evaluate service levels to ensure your customers are getting high quality support to build loyalty.
Finally, CallRail offers multiple integrations, including the ability to report calls as conversions in Google Analytics and AdWords, and we also offer the option of powerful tools like SMS messaging, voicemail transcription and custom call flows. With more than 300 integration options CallRail offers an open API and available webhooks to build your own integrations or retrieve data and even gather real-time notifications.
How do you see your industry evolving in the next few years?
Great question. I see an increased appetite for advertising accountability on behalf of business owners and their marketers. People are coming to expect more out of their advertising online. With that increased expectation comes a stronger incentive for showing a campaign’s return on investment. Call tracking is just one means of communication measurement but there are many more that will play a larger role in every marketer’s toolset.
I also see a converging of the small business phone system with the swiss army knife functionality that modern call tracking platforms offer. All of this is good for the business owner and good for the marketing agencies who support them. After all, anything that helps keep business owners doing more of what they love and less of the tedious marketing measurements makes for a happier owner, which usually leads to a happier workplace for the rest of us.