Ifbyphone Blog

Now that the 2008 Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates have all been announced, let’s briefly look at an emerging phone technology in the political polling space.

Recently, Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal wrote an article and blog post highlighting the use of automated phone polling using voice broadcast and interactive voice response technology for political campaigns.

Here are the benefits of voice broadcasting that were mentioned in the article & post:

1. “Automated polls can cost as little as one-tenth the equivalent, live-interview phone poll.”

2. “Their accuracy record in the primaries — such as it was — was roughly equivalent to the live-interviewer surveys.”

3. “Politicians’ names are pronounced correctly and identically each time, and responses entered correctly are recorded correctly.”

4. “There also is evidence that automated polls inspire honesty, particularly on sensitive topics.”

While the SMB market recognizes these benefits and is quickly embracing voice broadcasting technology, according to the article traditional media sources are generally not relying on automated phone polling for political campaigns.

With affordable automated polling technology and sinking newspaper profits,  how quickly do you think that will change?

Learn More About Political Polling & Customer Surveys Via Phone

Learn More About Hosted IVR For Automated Phone Polling

Learn More About Voice Broadcasting For Automated Phone Polling

Your Web advertising program is only as good as your landing page. That’s the message of this post at the Small Business Wordpress blog.

“If a surfer clicked an ad expecting to find gold plated doorknobs, then you better make sure the landing page has just that. There is nothing worse than a customer who is ready to buy but can’t.”

The key isn’t clever copy or design — quite the opposite. It’s clear copy and simple design that makes things easy for visitors to act on your offer in three clicks or less.  Adding a click-to-call to that landing page can help you keep those clicks to a minimum. The equation is simple: ”The more clicks you have, the less sales you make.”

That’s math for online marketers to live by.

The folks at Brand UK Blog don’t mince words. Here’s what they say about brand advertising in a recent post: ”For a small or medium size business it is a complete waste of money.”

Got that? Now, direct response on the other hand, does just what it says — gives you immediate feedback on how well your campaign is working. 

And how effective is that? Let me tell you from personal experience.

This year alone I’ve spent more money at the women’s clothing store Ann Taylor than I want to acknowledge. With an overflowing closet, I hardly need more clothes.

But last week, when I got an email from my friends at Ann Taylor with the subject line “Save 70% Now,” don’t you think I leaped like a trout to the bait? As a marketing insider, I know exactly how and why I got that email. But it’s also true that I love Ann Taylor clothes and I’m always game for a deal. And that’s what it’s all about — not conning people, but connecting people with what they’re looking for. In my case, it’s a perfectly fitting pair of navy capri pants and an adorable red silk blouse. 

LinkedIn is a powerful networking resource for individuals and SMBs alike. Unfortunately, when using LinkedIn the only obvious way for someone to contact you is by sending a message through LinkedIn’s interface.

What if you’d prefer to receive phone calls through LinkedIn? What if you could do so while keeping your phone number private?

Well, we want to share a LinkedIn trick using our Smart Click-to-Call technology that makes it possible for your contacts to call your directly through Linkedin.

Here is how it works:

LinkedIn allows users to include several links in the “Website” section of the LinkedIn profile, but most users just include a company URL, and maybe a blog URL. Our trick works by entering the Ifbyphone Smart Click-to-Call link into LinkedIn’s “Website” section (as shown below) and by making the anchor text for that URL some variation of “Click-to-Call Me”, “Click Here To Talk With Me On The Phone”, or “Click Here & I’ll Call You Now”. This link allows contacts visiting your profile to call you by phone without needing to reveal your phone number.

This is where you do it:

Once you enter your Ifbyphone Click-to-Call link, contacts visiting your site can simply click on the link, enter a phone number, and “Click-to-Call”. Both your phone and your contact’s phone will ring and you’ll be on the phone together.

The image above shows a URL that keeps your phone number private, in case you don’t want just anybody on LinkedIn to have your phone number. For even more simple implementation, you can just type www.phone-me-now.com/yourphonenumber (replacing ‘yourphonenumber’ with your Ifbyphone phone number).

If you’d like to see a live example, take a look at my LinkedIn profile. Or, just click on the image below, enter your number, and you’ll be on the phone with Ifbyphone.

If you like this trick, we’ve actually created both a unique facebook app and Joomla module where you can automatically allow profile and site visitors to call you using Click-to-Call. More details are available on our Plugins page.

You can also use the Phone-Me-Now Click-to-Call URL for an email signature, forum signature, blog, PDF, Powerpoint presentation, or anywhere else a simple URL can be inserted.

If you aren’t yet an Ifbyphone customer, you can try this in your LinkedIn profile for free by signing-up for our free Phone-Me-Now trial account.

To learn more about Click-to-Call technology, visit our Smart Click-to-Call page. You can also read our other posts about Click-to-Call & Click-to-Call Best Practices by clicking here. To try this hack for free visit the Ifbyphone Phone-Me-Now Signup Page. Setting it up is pretty simple, but if you have any questions feel free to “Click-to-Call” us.

P.S. Have you dowloaded our free iPhone Voice Broadcast App yet?

How many ways can you use a click-to-call? UK-based mobile phone dealer Dial-a-Phone has given it some thought in a post with the deceptively dull title Click to Call VoIP And The Consequences For Mobile Phones. In addition to the usual suspect — advertising — author Kathryn looks at online dating and social media applications.

I wanted to share a quick story of one of our customers.  They write software that (among other things) manages shifts for busy and complicated work environments.  In the past, when people couldn’t make it into work for any reason, someone had to guess who might be available, look up their contact information, make a series of calls, and ask if someone could fill in.  That takes time.  But our client knew there was a better way.

They quickly realized that adding automated phone calls would save a huge amount of time and money for their clients.  So they called me, and I talked them through how easy the integration is.  Honestly, that’s my favorite part of the process - talking to developers.  When you tell them how easy it is to work with us, you can always hear a short happy sigh of relief.

Now that they’ve integrated automated phone calls, as soon as someone is marked as calling in sick, the software calls through other people that might be available to take the shift. In the old days, their clients would spend about 1.5 hours a day just calling people to cover shifts.  That’s a hard cost of about $35 per day.  Just as importantly, the employee is working on something other than their primary responsibilities for a big part of their day.

The new process would cost their clients maybe $3.  So by investing $3, they save $32 and gain back 1.5 hours of productivity a day.  That’s over 1000% Return on Investment.  1000%.  That’s a savings of $11,680 a year for each of their customers.

I would love to link back to this client, but this is such a huge advantage for them, they don’t want their competitors to know what they’re doing.  This is a great story, but it’s just one of the many that our customers are experiencing.

If you’re interested in learning how to add voice to your software or business processes, click here and I’ll call you right back.

It was a busy week for all of us at IfByPhone last week, but no one was busier than our CEO, Irv Shapiro.  We had a booth at Ad:Tech Chicago last week and were able to meet hundreds of interesting people.  Additionally, Irv gave a speech focusing on how our applications and technology relate to marketing and advertising campaigns in today’s landscape.

The people who stopped by the booth were amazed that we can instantly provision toll free numbers and that we have no setup fees.  Our Call Tracking, Click-to-call and trackable numbers are all available on demand, and sales and marketing people can watch campaign results in real time.  People aren’t used to dealing with a company as responsive as we are.

On Wednesday, Irv and some other people from IfByPhone had breakfast with some very interesting people involved with the Voice 2.0 industry.  It was great to meet people in person that we’ve only conversed with online like Thomas McCarthy Howe, Shai Berger from Fonolo, James Body from truphone, as well as Andy Abramson from Comunicano.   Not only are we making noise with a series of new product announcements recently, but the other companies are shaking things up as well.

Also there was David Dalka, a very smart guy from Chicago.  He is particularly in tune with Social Media and how it interacts with actual businesses.  You can check out his summary of the breakfast on his post “Irv Shapiro’s phone mashup speech.”

Want to talk about it? Click here.

The mobile Web really is different and advertisers are taking note.  Mobinttechno’s recent post, Mobile Advertising Channels and Mobile Sites offers one-stop shopping for what you need to know to ramp up mobile Web advertising campaigns. The post covers design tips and strategies, tools and links, a comprehensive list of “click-to” response actions for mobile Web advertising — click-to-call tops the list — and illustrates ways to use the phone/Web combination for maximum effect:

“Telephone numbers can be linked directly from a website to a call, so ensure that ability has been added and think about expanding the amount of staff information available on the site. If someone’s late for an appointment, an email address isn’t the best use of information, but a direct line number is.”

Ifbyphone recently announced the Ifbyphone Store Locator, yet another business solution in our suite of instant phone applications. Store Locator routes incoming calls to a business phone number to the location nearest to the caller. For example, a franchise can advertise one number nationally. If I call that number from Chicago, my phone call will be routed to their nearest store in Chicago.

As Irv Shapiro, CEO, stated in our press release:

“Store Locators aren’t new but they often require a lot of programming. What differentiates Ifbyphone’s Store Locator is that it’s easy and instant,” he said. “Ifbyphone customers don’t have to wait weeks and weeks for programmers to build them apps or for their IT groups to approve and install them. “With Ifbyphone’s Store Locator, businesses can be up and running in minutes instead of days or weeks.”

Here are a couple of screen shots showing how quick & easy it is to setup the Ifbyphone Store Locator:

Read more about Store Locator here.

TelephonyOnline.com is featuring a Podcast interview about Ifbyphone.

To hear it, visit the URL below:
http://telephonyonline.com/podcasts/ifbyphone-irv-shapiro-0806/

To download the podcast, visit:
http://telephonyonline.com/podcasts/telephony/telephony_podcast_3.41.mp3