Mass adoption of mobile phones has completely transformed how we use the humble telephone, from gaming and streaming films, to invoicing and generally running our lives.

And of course, on occasion, we still use them to make a call.

So why the ’marriage’ of emails and phone calls?

Well, according to Litmus, 53% of emails are now opened on a mobile device, and if your business relies on telephone calls as a key source of leads and sales, it makes good business sense to use email to drive more calls.

From takeaways, to salons and garages, email marketing allows you to encourage your customers to call you directly from your emails and there are plenty of things you can do to maximise your call-through rate.

Getting started

You might have already noticed, from opening emails on your own mobile, that phone numbers are automatically turned into blue links, which open up the phone and dial the number when clicked.

If you’re a complete technophobe, this may be as far as you want to go with calling from email messages.

However, if you want to learn more, then you’re probably already aware that this doesn’t work automatically with every model of phone, and as our attention spans are supposedly now shorter than that of a goldfish thanks to smartphones, you want to make everything as quick and easy for your prospects as possible.

With a little extra knowledge, you can add tappable phone numbers to your emails to make your number stand out even more.

Adding phone numbers to your emails

You can add your own telephone number links to your emails in a way that allows to you to keep control of the text that appears.

For example, you can add your phone number link to the HTML code of your email using the code below wherever you like in your email copy – for example, you could place it in a call-to-action (CTA):

To book an appointment, <a href=”tel:01234 567 890″>call us now</a>.

In an email, this will appear like so:

To book an appointment, call us now.

It’s a simple and effective way to get your customers to click to call you, without the hassle of having to open up their phone interface and type out the number themselves.

Jazz it up

To really make your click-to-call links stand out in your emails, you can create specific call-to-action (CTA) images and use those to link to your telephone number, like Google does here in its reporting emails:

To use an image as a link, place the <img> (image) tag inside the <a> (link) tag, like so:

<a href=”tel:01234 567 890″>

<img src=“call-to-action.jpg”>

</a>.

For business emails that aim to capture call traffic, experiment with your CTAs as you would for the CTAs on your website; make them bold and prominent, use contrasting colours and wording that instils a sense of urgency.

For example, ’Call us today to book an appointment’ is good, but ’Call us before noon tomorrow for 15% off your next hair cut!’ is better.

Track your email leads

It’s fairly easy for Ecommerce businesses to track how their customers are finding them, but less so for businesses whose leads come to them mostly via offline methods such as in-store promotions or by telephone.

Using call tracking software from providers like Mediahawk makes it possible to generate unique telephone numbers across your online and offline marketing materials. In turn, this allows you to accurately track which of your marketing activities drive the most phone calls to your business.

You can see the exact source, medium (e.g. email), campaign and keyword that produce each call, enabling you to measure how effective your email marketing is – as well as your other online and offline marketing efforts.