Effects of online and offline advertising and their synergy on direct telephone sales

Retailers are accelerating direct marketing efforts to reach consumers, and increasingly integrating telephone numbers in online and offline advertisements to generate direct response. The telephone channel is a channel for both lead generation and sales, and yet its effectiveness for direct sales is unexplored. We provide a novel investigation of the effects of online and offline advertising (search advertising, banner advertising, general print advertising and specialty print advertising) on inbound telephone sales using a unique channel-specific telephone sales dataset. We make four findings: banner advertising, typically suited for exposure-based objectives in online and offline channels, is in fact more effective than search advertising to influence inbound telephone sales in both the short term and long term; print advertising is useful for generating inbound telephone sales; there are synergies for advertising in general (non-product focused) and specialty print (product focused) media; and online advertising is complementary to offline advertising and influences inbound telephone sales from print media. These results highlight that the combinations of advertising sources that effectively generate inbound telephone sales are different from those observed to influence sales in other channels, and have important managerial implications.