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Call to Action Belongs on Every Communication

Would you hand out a business card without a phone number or email? Not likely. Yet every day marketers publish ads that don't have a call to action. And that's a mistake, writes marketing maven Jeff Bacon:

"In general, I strongly recommend that everything you do has a call to action, where you tell the prospect what you expect them to do and provide the means for them to do it."

Marry brand and direct response advertising for online advantage

Direct response and brand advertising aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. You can marry the two in online marketing to build brand recognition as well as move customers to action. That's the message of blogger Jamie Riddell at Cheeze.com.

Fewer Clicks Equals More Conversions

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."

Why Do I Click to Call? Let Me Count the Ways

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.

The More Things Change, the More the Advertising Bottom Line Stays the Same

I seem to be on a retro track these days. I tripped over this Team Rubber post recently about the father of "measured" advertising, Claude C. Hopkins, whose 1923 classic "Scientific Advertising," broke new ground for the then-infant advertising industry.

"For those who are sometimes tempted to believe that advertising has been thoroughly re-invented by Google, Hopkins is a salutatory read," says Team Rubber's writer.

Yell.com Mobile Aims for Best of Both Worlds: Browser and Phone

In a new post, mobile advertising guru Andrew Grill highlights U.K.-based Yell.com's new mobile map-based "yellow pages" services. The free-to-use (ad supported) service takes advantage of both browser and phone capabilities to offer a true Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 experience -- for example, ever

Click-to-Call Measures Value for Advertising Dollars

Chances are that belt-tightening is in your budget for the foreseeable future. That doesn't leave much room for anything that can't be justified in cold, hard numbers - including advertising. You have to demonstrate results for every dollar spent.

That's why the advertising experts at Impact Branding and Strategic Marketing Solutions emphasize that each and every campaign must be measurable. Impact Media suggests:

Your Biggest Competitor Could be Bad Design

One of my college teachers had a whimsical way of getting students to think about what they were doing and why. Instead of simply asking them to solve a problem or accomplish a task, he asked us "how can you make it worse?" or "how can you ensure that this project will fail?"

Make it Easy on Your Customer

Biz Chicks Rule has some good advice for small businesses looking to get the most bang for the marketing buck. Author Bridget Wright highlights the importance of building relationships with customers and making it easy for people to engage: "Good direct response advertising also makes it as convenient as possible for a prospect or customer to respond." Can you say, Click-to-Call?

Don't Leave Home Without a Personal Concierge

VentureBeat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce's personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting -- voice, SMS, email, Web.

Mobile Web Dynamics Favor Advertisers and "Click-to"s

It's a mistake to see the mobile Web as just a "smaller" version of the desktop Web. That mobile Web is really a whole new animal with completely different dynamics. Nothing makes that clearer than this post, Get Clickthrough Rates Through the Roof, by Mike Baker, CEO of Nokia mobile Web marketing subsidiary Enpocket. Baker reports that mobile Web clickthrough rates average 2-6 percent -- and gives one example where CTR was an exceptional 8 percent.

Big Bang for Small Biz from Web Marketing

In a recent post, Mike Moran at Small Business Answers says that the dynamics of the Web favor small businesses. Not only because the Web levels the playing field, but also because small businesses don't have the time, money or resources to get tied up in the analysis paralysis that plagues big companies.

Even Shopping Carts Need Click-to-call

Even shopping cart businesses can benefit from adding rich voice applications like click-to-call to e-commerce sites.

A Perfect Marriage: Mobile Web and Click-to-Call

Like Cracker Jack and baseball, peanut butter and jelly, or the proverbial horse and carriage, some things just go together. Like the mobile Web and click-to-call.

When people are searching on the mobile Web, it's a good bet they're looking for something they want right now. So it's just plain smart to make it easy for them to get in touch - especially for businesses like restaurants where reservations are important.

Jessica Dolcourt at Download.com has highlighted three mobile applications that incorporate click-to-call: Golf.com, Find It! For Blackberry and Zagat To Go (which has added click-to-call since Dolcourt's post). Expect to see more smartphone and PDA applications incorporating click-to-call as the mobile Web extends its reach.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction -- Voice Fills in the Picture

Only a handful of e-marketers include customer satisfaction in their Web marketing metrics, according to Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise. This data, from a recent eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit survey, shows just how far Web marketing can detour around the reality-based world.

It doesn't take a rocket to understand that customer satisfaction drives that all-important metric, conversion rate – or that without it, conversion rates nose-dive.

While online surveys are useful for gauging customer satisfaction, they force answers into predetermined boxes – they're black and white. Adding voice to the online marketing mix adds the Technicolor of inflection, phrasing and context to build a full color picture of customer satisfaction.

For example, "I'm working on my car and I need to remove a bolt from the carburetor. I had to look all over for the right wrench and then when I finally found the automotive wrenches, there was hardly any information," supplies insight about how customers expect to navigate your store or site -- and why they might abandon before buying. Plus, it delivers context information for keyword optimization and ad buys.

The familiar click-to-call supplies the mechanism for smoothly incorporating voice into the online mix. Here's how:

Ask customers to participate in a brief survey by simply clicking on a phone icon on the page or in an email. This connects them directly to a voice-directed survey that includes multiple choice as well as open-ended questions. While you have them on the phone, you can even immediately route unhappy customers to a service representative, pre-briefed from the survey results.

You can also reuse the results to add customer comments to your website for a more compelling testimonial. Let's face it, hearing and talking is our natural communication medium, not reading and writing.

Things Work Better With Voice

Remember the old slogan, Things go better with Coke? It didn't say that all you need is Coke“ just that things were better, more fun with a Coca-Cola in hand.

Voice works the same way, as Thomas Howe Company points out in a recent post, Voice is Spice.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Mobile Web

The mantra of mobility is in everyone's mouth these days, regardless of whether they're talking about advertising, business applications or shopping. Oracle is gearing up a new line of applications designed from the ground up for mobility while SugarCRM has announced plans to support the iPhone and the BlackBerry.

What a Difference a Click-to-Call Makes

What a Difference a Click-to-Call Makes

Click-to-call on retail checkout pages can help you keep down cart abandon rates. But in online retailing, click-to-call isn't just for websites. I recently had an experience illustrating the difference a click-to-call can make in an email. In this case, the absence of one meant a lost sale.

Click-to-Call's Personal Touch

Imagine you went to a hair salon that was running a glitzy advertising campaign and the owner handed you a pair of scissors to cut your own hair. Ridiculous?

But that's just the case with many business websites. They spare no cost or effort in creating trendy graphics and keyword advertising to attract visitors. But once customers find their way to the site they're on their own.

It's the familiar human tendency to strain out gnats and swallow camels.

A few days ago the UK-based Retail Bulletin took a look at luxury retail sites and found many lacking in exactly the personal attention that is one of high-end retailers' central value propositions.

It's not just high end retailers who miss the importance of the interaction with customers in their website designs. Few of the millions of business websites out there give it much more than a standard "contact us" link. 

But when site visitors get to the point of clicking on that link, they probably want an answer now – I know I do. And instead of sending an email or navigating a voicemail menu, they'll probably just drop it or click over to the competition – like I do.

Click-to-call keeps those visitors connected and engaged by bringing back the personal touch. Connecting the phone call is just the first step. A click-to-call can also provide a lot of information for delivering calls efficiently – instead of to voice menu purgatory.

For example, IfByPhone click-to-calls and 800 numbers can be routed based on the webpage and even the keyword customers are calling from. And before the call is connected, IfByPhone can 'whisper' information about it to the service representative, like: "You have a call about the Mothers Day promotion offer."

Someone once said, "Systems work best when they roll down hill." That goes for online business as well. When you make it effortless for customers to connect personally with you and get the help they need, conversions and return visits will snowball as well -- instead of your search advertising budget.