Click-to-Call Mythbusting: Why the Marketing Strategy is More than Just a Flavor of the Week
In the past year, click-to-call has been cast in the limelight, and for good reason: enterprises, search engines, online publishers and interactive agencies have all found new and exciting applications for the technology, and are leveraging it in innovative ways to proactively connect buyers and sellers. But with any new technology there will be both early adopters and early detractors.
In a recent report on click-to-call technology, market research firm Pike & Fischer concluded that while click to call technology could open up new areas of Web marketing, several factors, including lack of consumer adoption, privacy concerns, lack of industry support and bandwidth constraint, may drive the technology into relative obscurity.
When a technology such as click-to-call is being adopted as quickly as it is, it’s important to constantly evaluate both the benefits and the potential drawbacks/pitfalls. But I wanted to take a moment to address several of the points that the research firm positioned as threats to the survival and growth of click to call. Strong backing from industry analyst such as Forrester Research, plus demonstrable ROI from click-to-call deployments for some of the world’s most recognizable brands indicate that the Pike & Fischer’s speculation that these perceived threats may not come to pass. In several instances, in fact, they are fueling its adoption.
Let’s break these issues down point by point.
Customer Buying Behavior
The report indicates that some Web shoppers have well-established patterns for online purchases and prefer the anonymity of the Web. The implication being that click-to-call does not fit into their online purchasing “workflow.”
Counter argument: It is true that for many types of purchases and many types of buyers, click to call is not necessary to complete a purchase. However, recent reports by both Jupiter Research and Gomez, Inc. have found that when customers are having a poor experience with an online store, not only do they abandon the online purchase, but they are less likely to purchase from that brand offline aswell. In an environment where 6 out of every 10 website visitors are abandoning their shopping carts, wouldn’t you want to implement tools that addressed this problem? At this point, we’re not just talking about your web channel, we’re talking about your brand!
Often times, Web browsers find information about complex products online, and then have additional follow on questions that only a human can answer. In fact, analyst surveys repeatedly show that customers are much more comfortable researching online, but buying offline or over the phone.
Click-to-call is a seamless way to bridge customers to the voice channel, and maintain the context of the user’s online session so that the time they did invest online does not go to waste.
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