Ifbyphone Blog

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?

Mike Cooch outlines six basic essentials for a good website and delivers solid information on how to achieve it in this month’s Everon Technology Insider. Rule number six is: “Clear “conversion” path/instructions.”

It’s a sad commentary that ten years after the Internet revolution many websites are their own worst enemies when it comes to conversion. Conversions go down when the number of steps goes up. Click-to-call cuts those steps — especially when there are several choices. As someone once said: “Systems run best when they run downhill.”

Venture Beat 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. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end of the click-to-call to increase the efficiency at the other end — think about changing travel plans — and to eliminate typing on tiny keyboards.

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.

The reason? An “engaging” user experience, Baker says. An experience that’s connected to what you’re doing right now.

Think about that. If you’re surfing the Web on your phone, chances are you’re looking for something specific and entertaining — you’re not doing research for your term paper on your phone, right?

Perhaps you’re looking at Daily Show clips or listening to music. Or maybe you want to find a restaurant or a store. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure out that someone searching for “Chinese food” on a mobile phone has a higher-than-average probability of clicking on an ad for a nearby Chinese restaurant. To make that experience even more engaging, put a click-to-call in the ad so making reservations and getting directions are as easy as rolling downhill.

Customer service is an often overlooked opportunity to turn browsers into buyers and buyers into return customers. In How to Mine Your Customer Service Department for Nuggets of Marketing Gold, Marketing Sherpa provides detailed guidance on how to do — including the value of click-to-call to make your company easily accessible, and to give agents a leg up on caller information.

I’m a big fan of Social Media in general.  Anything that can bring people together and help create interesting conversations has a great deal of value.  I’m on Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, keep about 3 blogs besides this one, am online on about 5 different IM platforms, and I put my click-to-call in almost every email I send out.  I like having conversations with people.

But for many people, Social Media is a little too much.  It’s hard to keep up with all of the information.  Based on the way these services are setup, it IS hard to keep up with all the different conversations.  It’s hard to even explain the differences to people who aren’t already among the early adopter crowd.

So I’m starting to try and explain  them as distribution methods.  What does that mean exactly? These services simply assist in facilitating, recording and delivering conversations. Take Twitter for example.  You can get information into and out of Twitter in several different ways (IM, Twitter clients, the Web, SMS), and you can get the information out in the same ways (plus Email).  Twitter is just a service that allows you to find people and talk about things of common interest.

Much in the same way that IfByPhone makes dealing with Phone applications easier, Twitter makes dealing with delivery of messages easier.

So it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to use Twitter as a way to notify me of incoming calls.  So I used IfByPhone technology and the Twitter API to post messages my Twitter account. Now when someone hits “connect” on my Click-to-call, I will get a secure, private message from Twitter saying “Inbound call from ……”  Since our API (and Twitter’s) are so easy to use, the whole project took about 30 minutes (for a non-developer like me).

And if you’re the enterprising type, seeing how easy it is to integrate IfByPhone with Twitter, it’s just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from writing a snippet of code that checks inbound phone calls with your CSR database.
Interested? Let’s talk.

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.

Click-to-Call isn’t just for business. With the ubiquitous mobile handset morphing into an on-the-go media center, click-to-call offers a simple and elegant user-interface for any mobile Web application.

National Public Radio apparently sees it that way.

The recently debuted NPR Mobile Web is a partnership with ten local stations that delivers specially formatted text, pictures and audio - including streaming audio — to Web-enabled mobile phones.

To listen to news stories, or play the interactive version of NPR’s popular quiz game, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” simply click on the “call’ icon and start listening. The free service is carrier- and device-independent.

Think of how useful this could be for GPS navigation or any other service people look for when they’re on the move. We keep saying this: keyboards are for typing - phones are for talking.

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.

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.”