Sometimes after Oozle has worked with a beauty school, an owner will approach us with this concern, “We’re seeing more leads, but my admissions person is telling me that the quality of those leads aren’t good.”

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. At Oozle, we work to increase the number of leads coming into your school. Schools then rely on their admissions teams to nurture and close those leads.

3 Discoveries on No-Shows

Every school deals with no-shows. Rob Thatcher, owner of SalesComm, a company that helps beauty schools improve their booking rates, says call tracking is the solution. You have to record and know what is, or isn’t, being said to leads.

He says with call tracking there are a few things school’s discover immediately.

Discovery 1: Potential students are calling, but no one is answering.

When a lead calls and gets voicemail, Thatcher says 40% of the time, that person won’t leave a message, and that’s a conservative number. When they don’t leave a message, that lead moves on and no one at the school knows it has happened. When you have call tracking, people will know that you know if the calls are being answered or not. It's amazing to see the answer rate go up when folks know this data available.

Discovery 2: Admissions reps are rushing through the calls.

“The second thing we notice is that the admission team rushes through calls. They’re not even a minute into the conversation and they’re inviting someone to come into the school.”

Think of that as being akin to asking someone to marry you ten minutes into your first date. It scares potential students off when they are asked to commit too early.

Discovery 3: Giving too much info over the phone.

“Third, we find they’re giving too much information. They’re telling them all the things that would be incentive for someone to come and visit the school.”

How Recording Calls Builds Trust

Thatcher says what often happens when it comes to phone calls at a school is that owners know they don’t know what’s happening and directors think they know.

“We introduce call tracking to prove or disprove one of these ideas - either we’re great on the phone or we stink on the phone.”

Some people feel recording calls is too Big Brother. They don’t want their staff to think they don’t trust them. Thatcher says this is not a gotcha game.

“We catch them doing really good things. We want to explore best practices so we can spread what’s working to other people on the team. Think of it like a pro football team. There isn’t a team out there that doesn’t watch their games and practices. It’s not to find out all the bad things, it’s to improve and get better.”

What Data You Can Use to Get More Leads

As the data from call tracking comes in, owners immediately understand the importance of investing in better conversations. There’s a lot riding on every call.

Data is priceless when it comes to inbound marketing and sales. It’s the information we use to not only see what works and what doesn’t, but to take what is working and make it even better.

Call tracking allows you to hold both sales and marketing accountable. Using the data provided, you can optimize your marketing campaigns.

Are you running any sort of PPC campaign? With call tracking, we can see the keyword someone typed into search, which led to a call. Maybe there are some words that aren’t bringing in any phone calls or form fill-outs, which means we can scale back on those words and put more budget towards the keywords that are working.

When it comes to sales, we’ve found that when people know their calls are being recorded, there is an immediate lift in booking by about 10%. If there’s no accountability for their conversations, they can always fall back on, “The leads were bad.”

How Much Does Call Recording/Tracking Cost?

For the months of August - September, Oozle is running a special on call tracking. The set-up fee, normally $250, will be waived if you sign a contract for call tracking this month. Packages start at $122 per month for 500 minutes and go up from there.

What is Call Tracking and Why You Need it

Call tracking allows you to have multiple, unique phone numbers that you can attach to your different marketing channels, like a print or social ad, or maybe a radio or television ad. This will tell you which platform is making the phone ring and how many unique business opportunities are coming from each channel.

You can see how often phone calls are missed. When a call is answered, you can see who answered and listen to the conversation they had with the potential lead. This gives you priceless insight into how helpful they are, if they’re providing the right information and if they’re really making the sale, or letting people go without trying.

As an added bonus, call tracking also allows you to see how your measure up on calls compared to 50 other beauty schools.

There are many great features of our call tracking, but my favorite part of is we listen to each call so you don’t have to! School owners, directors, and admissions leaders are busy and don’t have time to listen to each call, so we do it for them, and mark each call as a lead opportunity, or not. We also mark each call if an appointment was made! You’ll know with one simple report who your top performers are and their booking percentages!

Below are some actual screenshots of one beauty school’s call tracking showing the different features and how data can provide an ROI:

(The above image shows a snapshot of how you compare vs. other beauty schools, as well as total calls - how many of the calls were actually lead opportunities - and how many appointments were actually booked.)

(This data will give you a good idea of when your peak time of calls come in so you can be prepared. You'll also know a few reasons why people aren't booking appointments.)

(The above data will break down all your different call tracking lines and individually shows how many leads came from each one as well as how many tours/appointments were booked.)

(The above screenshot shows the staff who's answering the calls and their booking percentage. This may be the most important report out of all of them. This report helps owners, directors and admissions directors hold those answering the phone accountable, and recognize those who are doing a great job, etc.)