The following article is a guest blog from Receptional
They submitted the article to me and I was happy to share it with you, as I agree with its sentiment. It is far too easy to neglect the importance of a phone call when you are considering your digital strategy.
I am not an advocate of mass outbound telemarketing, but enabling your web site users to contact you by phone when they wish to do so, is a very good way of closing the loop between interest and action and therefore enhancing the customer experience.
Here is the article as submitted by Receptional:
5 reasons you should encourage your website users to call you:
Many business owners tend to overvalue the importance of converting customers via their website while forgetting about the good old-fashioned telephone call. Encouraging your website users to call you can not only boost your conversion rate, but the value of those conversions goes up too.
Here are five reasons you should be asking your website users to pick up the phone today:
1. Phone calls are businesses’ best quality leads
BIA/Kelsey discovered that a significant 64-86% of local marketers rate incoming calls as an excellent source of leads, while Invoca similarly found 61% of businesses saying the same thing. Respondents said that calls are actually better than any other inbound source including clicks, traffic, form fill-outs and social media leads.
2. Calls are worth more money
Convirza say that the more considered the purchasing decision, the more important a call is to a business. When it comes to expensive items or signing up to a new service, for example, customers favour human interaction and so are more likely to call – meaning you have the chance to upsell. Convirza also found that while your digital efforts produce up to 95% of your leads, phone calls generate a substantial 25% of businesses’ revenue.
This means you could convert fewer phone calls to yield the same amount of revenue you get from your web leads, so it’s well worth using your website to encourage more calls.
3. Customers convert more over the phone
Marketing Sherpa and Hubspot found that only 2% of people who fill out forms on a website go on to convert, whereas 25-40% of callers go on to buy from a local business. That’s across a range of industries and it often takes just a few minutes to produce revenue. It was even found in a recent retail call tracking case study that callers who talked for longer on the phone produced a higher conversion rate and that consumers converted more quickly after a phone call.
Keep in mind that it’s easier for mobile users to click the call button than fill out a form using their tiny keyboard. Shift your focus from form fill-outs to driving calls and use call tracking technology to properly attribute your offline conversions.
4. Calls provide valuable data for your marketing team
Call tracking software makes it possible to track your web visitors’ activity in the run-up to them calling you. You’ll be able to see where visitors landed on your site, the piece of collateral which led them there and which pages they visited and actions they took before their call. The technology also provides useful demographic details about your customers.
All this allows you to hone in on your most lucrative target markets and channels to maximise the ROI of your budget, as well as identify any issues with landing pages which aren’t converting visitors.
5. You can even cut your website out altogether – sometimes
Offering an informative and optimised website which encourages customers to call you is essential. However, mobile phone searches have now exceeded desktop and users are now nine times more likely to call directly from their search engine results page, so you’ll need to cater for customers who want to cut to the chase.
Google has revealed that 71% of people searching on their mobile regularly go on to call businesses directly from their search engine results. In fact, mobile searches now generate so many phone calls that BIA/Kelsey has forecast that they will produce 73bn calls to businesses in 2018 – 43bn more than in 2013. With this in mind it’s a good idea to invest in Google’s call-only campaigns for mobile devices – help your customers who want to call you directly from the SERP and don’t try to force them to take any unnecessary steps in their buying journey.
Conclusion
The profitability and quality of phone calls makes it all too worthwhile for your business to start generating more of them. To drive higher volumes of these valuable leads for yourself, design your campaigns and landing pages specifically to drive calls. Make sure your call to action stands out on the page through the use of contrasting colours, larger fonts and prominent positions. You could even try offering an incentive to call, whether your number is free to call or you’re offering a discount on your product or service. Irwin Mitchell, for example, place their phone number in prominent positions on their homepage with a clear call to action:
From mobile-friendly layouts to click-to-call buttons and calls to action such as ‘call us free today’, it’s essential to encourage calls across every touchpoint with simplicity and immediacy at the heart of your communications.
NB: Do you agree with Receptional's comments? I'd love to get your feedback...
