Voice-based marketing automation (VBMA) refers to software platforms designed for marketing, sales, and support departments to measure, manage, and automate their phone conversations. Marketing departments, sales teams, and support agents use VBMA to initiate, manage, monitor, track, route, record, and report on sales and support phone conversations.[1]
VBMA encompasses a wide range of automation and analytics tools. It is used as a standalone solution and as a way to complement the functionality found in traditional marketing automation software.[2]
Activity | Marketing Automation | Voice-Based Marketing Automation |
---|---|---|
Lead Generation | Uses emails and web forms to generate web leads | Uses voice broadcasts, phone surveys, and SMS texts to generate phone leads |
Lead Tracking | Tracks email success, web downloads, and web site activity | Tracks voice broadcast success and inbound phone leads |
Lead Scoring | Uses web forms to score web leads | Uses inbound IVR to score phone leads |
Lead Routing | Routes web leads to sales | Routes phone leads to sales |
Lead Nurturing | Uses emails to nurture leads | Uses voice broadcasts, phone surveys, and SMS texts to nurture leads |
Lead Reporting | Generates real-time reports on web leads | Generates real-time reports on phone leads |
CRM Integration | Shares data with CRM tools like Salesforce.com | Shares data with CRM tools like Salesforce.com |
Voice-based marketing automation platforms have emerged as an integrated solution in response to both the growth in mobile users,[3] and mobile advertising.[4] It is estimated that mobile search will generate 73 billion calls to businesses (up from 30 billion in 2013) and businesses are placing more value on phone calls as a lead source, as is evident from the estimated $64.6 billion spent annually on ads to generate phone calls.[5] With Google's call-only ad type, businesses were able to generalize billions of calls through mobile search. In 2015, mobile search drove 48 percent of calls.[6] Advances in call analytics have been made to provide businesses with deeper insights to measure and optimize inbound calls.[7]
Voice-based marketing automation software consists of the following core pieces of functionality:
There are three types of groups who use voice-based marketing automation software: