Today an article by John Federman, the CEO of click-to-call provider eStara, appeared in iMedia. It is entitled “Pay Per Call: The Answer Is Choice”. In it, Mr. Federman comments that Google and Yahoo! have brought a lot of valuable media attention to pay-per-call recently. He goes on to make the point that their C2C communications services such as GoogleTalk, YahooIM, and Skype are ill-suited for C2B applications such as pay-per-call. His logic is good and I recommend the read. He’s right, of course. But he stopped short of the “whole truth”.
The answer is indeed choice but, ironically, the very internet savvy site visitors that everyone hopes will be making the phones ring upon seeing pay-per-call ads are the least likely to pick up a phone. They want choice in communications channels and are as likely to IM the advertiser as they are to call. Moreover, the Internet-savvy demographic is time-starved. Tthis demographic responds very positively to graphical cues within ads that indicate the availability (i.e. “presence”) of the advertiser. Knowing someone is there to answer their question, site visitors are more likely to click and/or call because they rightly assume that the probability of wasting time in IVR or voice mail hell is much lower.
Do I know something that Mr. Federman doesn’t? Not likely, but Mr. Federman would be silly to talk about capabilities that his service can’t currently deliver. ContactAtOnce! can deliver more than click-to-call, and we’ve proven that our presence-based visual cues increase ad response rates by 25%, so I am happy to talk about them.
eStara CEO Has It Right (Almost)
Today an article by John Federman, the CEO of click-to-call provider eStara, appeared in iMedia. It is entitled “Pay Per Call: The Answer Is Choice”. In it, Mr. Federman comments that Google and Yahoo! have brought a lot of valuable media attention to pay-per-call recently. He goes on to make the point that their C2C communications services such as GoogleTalk, YahooIM, and Skype are ill-suited for C2B applications such as pay-per-call. His logic is good and I recommend the read. He’s right, of course. But he stopped short of the “whole truth”.
The answer is indeed choice but, ironically, the very internet savvy site visitors that everyone hopes will be making the phones ring upon seeing pay-per-call ads are the least likely to pick up a phone. They want choice in communications channels and are as likely to IM the advertiser as they are to call. Moreover, the Internet-savvy demographic is time-starved. Tthis demographic responds very positively to graphical cues within ads that indicate the availability (i.e. “presence”) of the advertiser. Knowing someone is there to answer their question, site visitors are more likely to click and/or call because they rightly assume that the probability of wasting time in IVR or voice mail hell is much lower.
Do I know something that Mr. Federman doesn’t? Not likely, but Mr. Federman would be silly to talk about capabilities that his service can’t currently deliver. ContactAtOnce! can deliver more than click-to-call, and we’ve proven that our presence-based visual cues increase ad response rates by 25%, so I am happy to talk about them.