Top Mistakes Businesses Make in Pay-Per-Call Lead Generation

In today’s complex industries, phone calls are among the most powerful tools for converting prospects into customers. They allow you to personalize your product presentation, overcome objections, and qualify leads to a matching buyer or sales rep  – a framework that’s far more challenging to execute with web lead campaigns.

Yet, to deliver tangible results, pay-per-call lead generation must be followed with accurate lead qualification and distribution, something the right call management software can unlock for your business.

But that’s easier said than done. Most companies never reach their full potential, largely due to mistakes they make, often stemming from a lack of experience or a focus on immediate profits.

Speaking of mistakes, below are the most egregious mistakes to avoid in pay-per-call lead generation.

Not Validating Publishers

Proper affiliate validation does two things for your business:

• First, it prevents bot-driven calls, artificially extended call durations, incentivized callers, and other violations, as well as outright fraud. 
• Second, it enables you to partner with publishers whose audience aligns with your offer, ensuring efficient and effective pay-per-call marketing.

Here’s a widely adopted and effective publisher validation process:

1. Analyze content and audience: Use web analytics to ensure that the publisher’s website and audience align with your offer.
2. Assess risks: Scan the publisher’s IP address and website through risk scoring solutions to determine if they were involved in suspicious activity.
3. Monitor performance: Regularly check whether the publisher generates legitimate traffic of sufficient quality.

If the publisher underperforms or infringes upon the rules, you may want to discontinue the partnership as soon as possible. This saves you effort, money, and protects your brand’s reputation.

Targeting Wrong Keywords

Keywords help our pay-per-call campaigns reach the right audience. If your keyword strategy is off, you risk wasting your budget on leads that are unlikely to convert into a profit.

You can avoid this by analyzing user intents.

For instance, the “What is solar energy?” query might be too broad for solar sales lead generation. You should instead focus on queries like “The best local solar installers” to gain visibility among users who are already evaluating their purchase options.

Paying for Underqualified Leads

In performance marketing, you only want to pay for leads that increase your ROI. Qualifying leads by these three criteria helps you ensure this:

• Call duration: A call is paid if it lasts above a minimum qualification time, such as 60 or 90 seconds.
• Caller’s location: Calls originating outside of pre-approved areas are automatically considered unqualified.
• Caller’s intent: AI transcribes and qualifies calls in real time depending on the context of the conversation.

Interactive voice response (IVR) and AI call agents are game-changing pay-per-call tools that help you automate the caller qualification process.

Important note: Well-adjusted automatic call distribution software identifies friction points within automated calls, allowing your call agents to intervene and prevent drop-offs.

Poor Interaction with Publishers

Affiliate marketing isn’t just about paying for leads. It’s also a partnership that you must cultivate, so that you and the publisher can effectively reach your mutual goals.

These practices will help build a strong affiliate partnership:

• Create high-quality promotional assets: Develop banners, forms, and email templates with concise copy and engaging visuals.
• Provide data reports: Share data about users who convert into callers to help publishers fine-tune their communication.
• Motivate publishers: Reward the best-performing publishers with increased commissions, more frequent payouts, and monetary prizes to incentivize them to create more converting content.

Not Having a Lead Management System

Callers who don’t translate into sales immediately require nurturing, which is much easier to manage with a lead management system (LMS).

LMS is essentially a database that stores information about your leads, including their demographics, contact information, firmographics (for B2B), website activity, content consumption, and other relevant details. 

While all of this data helps you find the right approach to a lead,  certain data points provide more valuable user insights than others.

BANT, the lead qualification framework, focuses on such data:

A lead generation tip: Lead scoring is a more effective approach to lead qualification. For example, each lead parameter can be assigned a score of up to 25 points (you can change that based on the parameter’s importance), resulting in a maximum total score of 100.

Leads that score above, say, 70 are considered sales-qualified and are ready for outbound calls or email campaigns. Nurture those who fall below that threshold by providing guides, success stories, and the benefits of your offer until they are ready for a sales pitch.

Overlooking Dynamic Call Tracking

There are two types of call tracking systems for pay-per-call lead generation: static and dynamic. The first assigns a single call number to a marketing channel or campaign, while the second assigns a unique call number to each caller.

Here are the advantages of dynamic call tracking over static:

• Efficient budget allocation: Although dynamic call tracking software is more costly, it provides you with actionable insights into your campaigns that pay off in the long run.
• Enhanced nurturing: Identifying leads’ preferred content types and channels allows you to deliver highly relevant nurturing campaigns.
• Personalized calls: Understanding leads’ past online journeys enables calibrating your communication and selling products more effectively.

Mismatching Caller Intent and Agent Skill

As a call-reliant business, you must constantly track the productivity of your call agents to identify the best closers and get them on the line with high-intent callers.

You measure the performance of your call agents through:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of the calls converted into sales
• Sales volume: The total volume of sales generated
• Lead-to-opportunity ratio: The percentage of qualified leads that are converted into sales opportunities

Unfortunately, the best closers can’t handle every call. Therefore, you should incorporate call agent team training to ensure a high performance level is consistently maintained across your employees.

Beginners should start with the basics: understand your offer from top to bottom and learn a script. Advanced agents, in turn, should grasp how to handle objections and tailor sales pitches to caller data – call simulations help to practice both.

Conclusion

Pay-per-call lead generation is a complex marketing model that demands knowledge and planning. You need to be mindful of your affiliates, software, and even the skills of your call agents. However, if you’re ready to surmount these challenges, you can acquire a potent business tool that has the potential to boost your conversion rates by over 30%. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the marketing automation tools for pay-per-call?

Marketing automation software for pay-per-call is categorized into two main types. The first is lead management systems (LMS), which handle data management, automatically pulling lead information into your database. The second type consists of IVR and AI call agents, both of which automate inbound calls.

How to calculate cost per lead (CPL)?

Decide on your pay-per-call lead generation budget and divide it by the expected number of inbound calls. In affiliate marketing, you set CPL according to your program’s conditions and the market average.

What’s the role of pay-per-call lead generation in the sales funnel?

Pay-per-call marketing targets users at the middle and the bottom of the funnel. That’s when prospects are already evaluating their solutions and are more inclined to make a direct call.

What’s conversion rate optimization for pay-per-call campaigns?

Conversion rate optimization is a process of increasing the percentage of calls that you convert into sales, appointments, or other desired outcomes. It includes enhancing affiliate content, keyword strategies, call qualification, and the skills of your call agents. Likewise, it’s crucial to continuously gauge key performance metrics so you can double down on what brings the best results.