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?
Even shopping cart businesses can benefit from adding rich voice applications like click-to-call to e-commerce sites.
As I’ve noted before, the lowly phone call gets short shrift in the esoteric art of Web marketing. But often the one thing that would turn a window-shopper into a buyer, or a frustrated subscriber into a happy one, is a piece of information that’s not on the website — for example, “Is the device compatible with my system?” or “Can my doctor call in another refill on my prescription?” FAQs can’t possibly anticipate every question.
It’s not only a question of making it easy for customers to connect — although we all know that anything standing between impulse and action drives down the likelihood of an immediate sale.
When the call comes through your site’s click-to-call, it can carry information along with it — what visitors were looking at when they called or subscriber information. Combine that with a voice survey to get additional information for the customer service agent answering the call. And by integrating voice into the Web application, you capture all this information — and with it, insight for website improvements and better customer service, not to mention those FAQs.
Here’s news to make online marketers salivate: A majority of mobile Internet users (three in five) “are more inclined” to buy in response to relevant opt-in ads on their phones, according to a 2008 study conducted by UK-based mobile ad agency Aerodeon. And it’s not just impulse shopping like songs from iTunes. Almost half of regular mobile Internet users reported using the mobile Web to research big ticket purchases like vacations and cars.
Aerodeon reports that slightly more than half of all people who use the Internet on their PCs also use the mobile Internet. When you look at 18 to 24 year-olds, mobile Internet use rises to nearly 80 percent. And two-thirds of all mobile Web users use it to search. All of this presents a huge, unfolding marketing opportunity.
Now, you might assume that the most common interaction between mobile Web visitors and advertisers would be a click-to-call – you are, after all, on a phone. The mobile Internet would seem to be the single most ideal medium for click-to-call.
However, Internet marketers don’t appear to have gotten the message. My brief and admittedly unscientific research – comparing Google hits – indicates that the preferred call to action for a mobile Web ad is a text message. A search on “mobile campaign” and “text messaging” lands 5,470 hits, while “mobile campaign” and “click-to-call” gets a measly 622 hits.
I guess when all you can see is a keyboard, every problem looks like text.
However, there are some voices crying out in the mobile Web marketing wilderness. Joe Whyte of Search Marketing Standard recommends click-to-call for mobile landing pages – right after a “clear and precise call to action.”
Here’s what Whyte has to say:
“The great thing about mobile marketing is that the users are more apt to take advantage of this medium. They are already on the phone so, by providing a click to call option on your mobile site, you’re increasing the odds of that user turning into a lead for your business.”
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.
More than a year ago PhoneGnome CEO David Beckmeyer posed the question Where are the Voice 2.0 developers? We’re still waiting for the answer, says FierceVoIP editor Doug Mohney in his post, Pulver’s Purple Prophesies–And Fallout Thereof, charting VoIP’s journey from industry-disrupting new technology to plain vanilla status quo.
If you’ve been around the VoIP space any length of time you’ve heard plenty about the uber-cool applications that digital voice was going to bring us. Well, we have mobile personal ads from Jangl – wait, didn’t Jangl go under a few weeks ago?
Let’s face it, whether you call it rich voice or Voice 2.0, the pickings are slim. Talk about the impossible dream. Searching Google News on “rich voice VoIP” yields three hits. One is about fax-over-VoIP and the other two are about the same services for public safety agencies. Not exactly paradigm-shifting.
A decade later the VoIP industry has barely scratched the surface on the opportunity presented by turning phone calls into data. The last VON show in San Jose was all about new variations on the century-old theme of making and delivering phone calls. Like one more Baskin Robbins flavor – it’s still just ice cream. A new Skype handset is still…a handset.
Instead of making more ice cream maybe we should think about making something new — using the flexibility that VoIP opens up for making business operations smarter, more efficient, and more effective.
For example, add a short IVR to capture information like address or account number to route calls to the nearest office, look up account information or schedule a service call. Or think outside the phone call envelope altogether, as PEAK Technologies has done in its voice-based supply chain applications.
Just as we no longer write separate applications to update customer name in the accounts receivable and customer order systems, it’s time to stop silo-ing voice in something called the “phone system.” But that’s not going to come from the VoIP industry – it’s still too busy making cheap phone calls.
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.
Instead of trying differentiate your solution by making voice communications do something different – like instant messaging or microblogging – use voice to “spice up” other common applications.
Let voice add more information and personalization to business processes. Use it to streamline workflow or capture information like the specific keywords customers use when they call your business. But don’t put the cart before the horse. Voice isn’t the central function, but its addition makes the whole process work better.
Thomas Howe uses the example of paprika to make the point.”…if a paprika CTO faced the same problems as the telecom market, the response might be to produce paprika soup…the proper response isn’t to pretend that paprika is the important part, but to find other recipes that would benefit from its rich, red color.”
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.
The focus is all about bringing the Web experience to the mobile device – which, let’s face it, is the phone. But some funny things can happen on the way to the mobile mecca — like forgetting what phones do well that computers don’t.
This was brought to my attention forcibly by a recent blog post from social media marketing goddess Lasandra Brill, which described using Amazon’s TextBuyIt. It’s a textbook example of just how far clever people can go in traveling the long way round the barn.
Here’s how TextBuyIt is supposed to work from your mobile browser. If you want to buy something you send a text message with the product number or name and Amazon calls you back to confirm the order. Here’s Brill’s report:
“I sent the ISDN number for the book I wanted and Amazon was able to find the title and I received a text back with the pricing info. I then sent back the code to complete the purchase followed by a message with my email address and zip code related to my Amazon account. I then received a message back from Amazon that said ‘We were unable to find an item matching your keywords. Place your order online at www.amazon.com.’ But they had just sent me the item info that I wanted.”
Aside from the fact that the application has some obvious bugs, this is what happens when businesses start drinking their own Kool-Aid. Amazon is so focused on the computer-centric way of doing things they pioneered, that they’ve lost sight of the device this application is being used on.
In the process, they’ve created a complicated Web-centric process to do what phones aren’t good at – typing – instead of a simple one based on what phones do well – making phone calls.
A simple click-to-call in the browser application would transform this into an elegant one-step process that wouldn’t tell customers to place their orders online. Maybe I should phone them and let them know.
Just like your mother used to tell you: You only have one chance to make a first impression and first impressions count. On the Web, that first impression is your landing page.
Yet more often than not, businesses neglect that all-important first impression even as they spend ever-increasing amounts of time and money on PPC advertising, keyword bidding and Web analytics. And that neglect is costing companies big time, according to Web marketing guru Tim Ash who’s written several recent columns on the subject at SearchEngineWatch.com.
Here’s what he has to say in Your Baby’s Ugly - Why You Need Landing Page Optimization Now
“…landing pages typically range from barely acceptable to horrible. They are often at direct cross-purposes with the desired conversion action and stated goals of the business.”
I’ll leave it to Ash to give you the nitty-gritty about optimizing your landing page – not surprisingly, he’s written a book about it.
In the meantime, you might want to check out Optimize and Prophesize blogger Jonathan Mendez’ basic rules for making the right first impression with your landing page. These include a clear and direct statement of your value proposition, a persuasive call to action, and – the one that caught my attention – a Large Red Button
“Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate…most times in our testing if color matters it is red that wins. Also, don’t skimp on button size. Make users notice where the button is…”
This is a perfect fit for click-to-call. But don’t neglect the text that goes with it. Mendez suggests a “soft” call to action like ‘Get a free quote’ — instead of ‘Schedule an appointment’ - because it feels easier and less like a commitment. Even if that visitor doesn’t buy today, by making a connection you can start building a relationship.
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.
I had placed an online order using a PayPal “pseudo” credit card, but neglected to move the money into my PayPal account. The transaction didn’t go through and the retailer emailed, asking me to call.
First I mis-read the number and dialed wrong. Then the phone rang. Pretty soon I had to leave for a meeting and the message went into my “sometime” folder. Now it’s three weeks later and I probably won’t bother.
Now, if that email had a click-to-call, it would have been easy to connect right then and there, while I was still interested. And that retailer’s sales would have been $67 higher.
IfByPhone smart click-to-call could have done a lot more for that retailer, too, using information about where the call was initiated.
For example, the call could have been routed directly to an IVR application to revise the payment information. A customer service agent could be pre-briefed with my name, phone number and information about the problem. Or the business could route the call based on order value or purchasing history.
And after the fact, the retailer would be able to see exactly how much business was saved by click-to-calls coming from those customer emails.
Even where you can’t use a click-to-call – in a letter, for example – the same intelligent call routing and IVR features can be used with IfByPhone toll-free numbers to deliver efficient, personal service. It’s the kind of difference that keeps customers coming back time and time again.
