Business owners who use telephone marketing to sell their products and services – this is for you!
Pay Per Call is a relatively new digital advertising method that fits the needs of many advertisers, both those who rely on digital marketing era.
Nowadays, customers normally make a research before buying a product or booking a service. Search engines (such as Google, Amazon and Yelp) provide convenient possibilities to make a market research easily.
Anyone can compare prices, different sellers’ average feedback score and reviews that other customers write, before the option that makes the best impression is chosen.
Once the choice is made (unless the purchase or the booking is done online), the next step is calling the company, asking about conditions, providing the necessary payment details and finalizing the deal.
The Importance of Phone Leads
Phone leads are phone calls, made by potential customers, as a result of advertising campaigns. Being the last step in the sales funnel, their importance cannot be overestimated.
They make the difference between potential customers and paying consumers, who deliver income to the business.
The demand for phone leads, combined with technological progress achieved in recent years and the rising popularity of smartphones, created the advertising model called Pay Per Call.
In a similar way to the Pay Per Click method (which brings direct traffic to a website), Pay Per Call lets businesses receive direct phone calls from potential customers.
The rate paid by an advertiser depends on the number of leads that are received.
Who Should Use Pay Per Call?
So far, the ROI-focused method that is Pay Per Call has proved to be a very cost-effective and beneficial advertising model.
This is a growing industry that keeps evolving. It serves well the needs of small, medium and large-sized businesses alike, in numerous different industries.
Some examples of industries and businesses that can benefit from this advertising model are the following:
- Home service providers (such as plumbers, landscapers and carpet cleaners)
- Dental and cosmetic surgery
- Mortgage companies
- Lawyers
- Travel agencies and hotels
- Restaurants
- Real estate companies
- Directory website owners
- Universities and colleges
From a single entrepreneur who attempts to make a living from being an event photographer, to the largest companies that have already gained a thought leader’s reputation, any phone marketing based business can take advantage of this advertising model and benefit from it.
Well established businesses that have already gained a large clientele through ads in printed media, PPC (this abbreviation refers to “Pay Per Click”, exclusively) and other advertising platforms – can use Pay Per Call as an additional source of income.
What about new businesses that still haven’t raised much brand awareness and have a tight advertising budget?
For them, it can spare the expensive and risky trial and error phase, provide great ROI and help to establish the business.
The Advantages of Pay Per Call
Better ROI
As it was mentioned earlier, Pay Per Call can spare the business a long trial and error process that would be needed if the money was invested in such advertising platforms as Pay Per Click.
It takes time to detect the negative keywords, gain a high quality score, raise the CTR (Click Through Rate) and optimize the PPC campaign in general.
On top of that, paid clicks guarantee only traffic, not calls. A website visitor is still not guaranteed to make a call, let alone become a paying customer.
Once the math is done, the obvious conclusion is that a Pay Per Call campaign will bring more clients, for a lower price. That leads us to the next advantage of Pay Per Call, which is conversion.
High Conversion Rate
And that’s an understatement. It would be fair to write “higher”, because the conversion rate of phone leads is higher than that of any other method.
Recent researches show that phone calls convert significantly better than contact forms, outbound calls campaigns, e-mail newsletters and other platforms that are used for communication with customers.
Not a Single Dollar Wasted!
Let’s get back to the PPC campaign scenario and give Google AdWords and Bing Ads the well deserved credit for being honest.
The better campaign performs and the higher its quality score gets, the less will the advertiser be charged per each click.
Furthermore – should a PPC ad get attacked by spam bots, once the issue is detected – it will be examined by the search engine’s staff and the money will be returned.
On the other hand, the same cannot be said about the money paid for clicks made by those visitors who decided to leave the website too early.
In the case of a standard Pay Per Call campaign, an inbound call that was too short means no money wasted by the advertiser.
Why Call Duration Matters?
When it comes to Pay Per Call, the duration of a phone lead is one of the main factors that impact its quality.
For example, it’s pretty obvious that a five seconds long phone conversation is not enough to close any deal, right?
It wouldn’t be fair to consider a conversation such as “Oh, sorry, I dialed the wrong number!” as a lead that could convert the caller into a paying customer.
A longer conversation is, for the most part, a reliable indication of a call that was made by someone who didn’t dial the number by mistake and was actually interested in the advertised product or service.
For that reason, the advertiser and the Pay Per Call service provider usually agree on a certain minimal duration of leads that should be paid for.
This helps to filter leads that had no chance to be converted. It’s a win-win collaboration method, because it lets the advertiser invest his budget in leads that really pay off (rather than waste it on leads with zero potential) and motivates the Pay Per Call providers to do a better job.
Pay for Calls that Pay Off!
When all is said and done, Pay Per Call is a big and rather successful step in the history of holistic marketing.
It fits low and high technology companies, big ones and small ones, and brings immediate results.
Moreover, these results are more likely to be positive than those of other advertising methods, in terms of conversion and ROI.
Judging by how popular and successful it became in recent years, this advertising model is here to stay. If you are a business owner, the use of Pay Per Call might be the missing link that can bring your business to the next level.
