Pay Per Call  - High Performance Marketing

If marketing were a round of golf, running the whole campaign from the start would have you starting at the tee. Using pay per call puts you inches from the cup. The better qualified your prospects are, the shorter your putt, and the more likely you are to get a sale. 

Why Growing Businesses Turn to Pay Per Call

You’ve most likely heard of pay per call marketing, but what is it? Why are so many people talking about it? How come some people seem to get rave results when using it, while others feel frustrated and quickly give up? What’s the deal?

The truth is, as with any other type of marketing, pay per call marketing works well when it’s thoughtfully done. Conversely, it has lukewarm results at best when it isn’t carefully carried out. Let’s discuss the ins and outs of pay per call marketing. We'll cover what it is, how the process works, how costs get calculated, and why the resulting leads are so powerful.

Pay Per Call Marketing Game Plan

Pay per call marketing uses a straightforward system to create compelling results. It leverages the power of phone calls. They are up to 25 times more likely to convert than click-based methods – to draw in prospects and turn them into customers. Here’s how it works, in seven simple steps:

1. A publisher runs an ad campaign where an advertiser’s ideal customers are most likely to see it – and to be able to respond in the moment. This can include newspapers, radio or television, billboards or print publications, in online search or display networks, or on social media. The ads include the offer to help a prospect solve a problem: providing for their loved ones through final expense insurance or getting into an addiction treatment program, for example.

2. Consumers notice the ads in the course of searching for a solution – or in the case of display ads, just living their lives like usual.

3. Those who feel interested pick up the phone and call the number in the ad.

4. Their call gets picked up at a call center, where trained call center agents or an interactive voice response system (IVR) do an initial round of qualification. The caller answers questions about their interest in the offer, their readiness to make a buying decision in the near future, and any other qualifying questions the advertiser specifies.

5. If the caller answers in ways that qualify them to take the next step, the call is transferred to the advertiser’s sales team.

6. A member of that sales team receives the call, talks with the prospect for a minute or two (duration time) to further qualify them, answers any remaining questions, overcomes any objections, and closes the sale.

7. The publisher only gets paid for calls that qualify (meaning, they last a certain amount of time because the caller fits the qualifications specified by the advertiser). The advertiser only pays for calls that qualify (and they have the last say on that, during the duration period).

Voila: You have a reliable, repeatable and effective marketing strategy. You can use it year after year, product after product, service after service. All you have to do to scale up is to buy more calls from your pay per call partner.

Is Pay Per Call Affordable?

The cost for using pay per call is easy to predict. You pay every time your sales team talks with a prospect for a designated length of time, called the duration. The duration period varies from situation to situation, but with Digital Market Media, you typically get 1-2 minutes to confirm that the call qualifies. At the end of the duration period, the call becomes billable. By then, the caller has indicated a strong level of interest and shown that they meet your specifications for an ideal customer.

Your cost per acquisition (CPA) is typically much, much lower using pay per call than if you ran the entire campaign from start to finish in-house. Like tackling a home improvement project on your own, doing it all internally might seem to be more affordable than outsourcing. But in the same way that a DIY project can easily turn into an expensive mess, running an advertising campaign to generate leads sounds a lot easier than it is.

Working with a call provider shifts the hardest parts of lead generation to the performance marketing agency you choose as your partner. In our home improvement scenario, it’s like hiring a general contractor to manage all the tradespeople for you to ensure your kitchen remodeling project gets done right. Rather than straining your back, spilling paint all over the floor, and wasting time and money with multiple trips to the building supply store, you just specify what you want and come back when it’s ready. The hard part is done for you – and all that’s left for you to do is to decide which drawer to put your silverware in.

What Counts as a High-Quality Lead?

Not everyone who calls is a fit, of course. There are the tire kickers who radiate interest in a product, ask a ton of questions and make motions toward buying, but never actually do it. There are those who want someone with whom to chat. They don’t care what it’s about – and usually, it’s not about your product.

Then there are those who want to quibble about price. They are still in the price-shopping stages and have no intention of going for your product or service. They merely want information against which to weigh their other possible companies. They'll grill you on every tiny price detail without actually converting – then or ever. Lastly, there are those who resent that your offer isn’t lower or doesn’t include more offerings or is presented wrong.

If that sounds fun, more power to you. Most people, however, would prefer to avoid all that – which is where a call qualification process comes in. By working with a performance marketing partner to buy calls, you can protect your sales team’s bandwidth and morale. After we do the initial qualification, the only people your team ends up speaking with are the ones who are ready to do business. Such leads:

• Are pre-prepared with information about who you are, what you offer and how you can meet their needs

• Have an actual need that they are actively looking to overcome at that moment – a need your company can fulfill

• Have already committed to finding out more and potentially buying by merely picking up the phone and contacting the call center

• Are open to price quotes, so long as your product or service seems as though it will meet their needs

• Are ready to make a buying decision sooner than later

Pay Per Call Cuts the Risks and Costs of Advertising Campaigns

One of the worst things about marketing is all the research, funnel construction, and trial and error. Before the phone ever rings, you’ve got to spend time and money:

• Researching the target audience’s needs and preferences

• Finding the best advertising platforms for each ad, whether that’s traditional broadcast media, print or online (or even billboards!)

• Writing the ads

• Designing the ads

• Buying media or ad space

• Mastering pay per click best practices

• Split testing

That’s a lot of work and expense – and you’d still have no sales to show for it. It’s also possible that all that time and money could be for nothing, if any of the initial research was “off” or the offer ends up not appealing to the market you have in mind.

Do you want to take these risks all on by yourself? Or would you rather step in for the easy final parts, when you close the deal and fill out that satisfying paperwork that translates directly to cash? If you’re like most companies, you’d prefer the latter.

That’s where a call center partner comes in, allowing you to avoid the intensive research and planning stages, and merely take over once prospects are nice and warm and ready to buy. That’s the main benefit of pay per call marketing, so let’s take a closer look at that now.

What Benefits Does Pay Per Call Marketing Offer?

Pay per call marketing brings one significant benefit that most other types of advertising can’t offer. It removes you from the early stages of the vetting process. According to HubSpot, six out of 10 buyers want to talk business on the first call. That means of the people who end up pulling the trigger, 60 percent want to know how much this is going to cost. Keep in mind, that’s not even including the people who don’t buy. The takeaway: Tons of people get weeded out at this stage, but you don’t have to do the weeding.

Inbound Calls Beat Cold Calling

That same HubSpot study shows why outbound telemarketing is so hard. In the last month of the quarter, far fewer cold calls are effective. The desperate rush to make quota as the quarter comes to a close doesn’t pay off. Think about how awesome it would feel to avoid that whole nightmare in the first place and greet warm buyers as they come in. You'd never have to work to prep them yourself.

Plus, it saves you tons of time. Did you know it takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer? And that less than 25 percent of emails get opened? The traditional route to sales – lots of contacts over time – doesn’t tend to lead to the results you want. This way, your money goes farther, and you have to spend less to get those conversions.

Most important is the fact that calls convert so highly. They convert at 15 to 25 times higher than clicks and other digital advertising methods. You spend so much less money getting those high-converting prospects than you would if you relied solely on digital means.

When Can You Get Started with Pay Per Call Marketing?

If you’re worried about your ability to generate high-quality leads that help you scale so you can meet – and exceed – your sales projections, we’re here to assist. With long experience driving callers to businesses in a range of verticals, we have the expertise you need to acquire leads quickly and convert them profitably. We use a wide range of advertising methods, from paid and voice search, to organic online traffic and print publications, to old-school media strategies. If you’re looking for profitable calls and wouldn’t mind if you got all you needed without lifting a finger, you’ve come to the right place.

Ready to get started with pay per call marketing? Get in touch with us now. We’ll help you cultivate a profitable pay per call plan that brings you customers and helps you build your business today. All you have to do is get in touch, so don’t wait any longer!