I may be giving myself away as a Millennial here, but I’m going to say it anyway: I am a child of the age of instant gratification. I came of age in a time when information was available at my fingertips: by the time I got to college, half of my senior thesis sources were tracked down on the Internet. I read library books without ever leaving my dorm room. But it’s not just Millennials anymore: as a nation and perhaps as a planet the availability of information has changed our expectations for how quickly we receive it. Technology has both created and now serves those expectations. Smartphones are the portals through which we access an unimaginable volume of data, available quickly and easily. Some of the technology that gives us this access is complex; some of it is astoundingly simple. And that brings me to my favorite thing about smartphones and the world of information they unlock: an astoundingly simple process that makes my life easier at least once a day.
Click-to-calls.
Yes, click-to-calls.
They don’t get enough credit. They sit there in mobile search results and on websites, innocuous and unassuming, while smartphone users like me browse for information on products and services. The click-to-call asks for nothing; just waits there until I need it. And I almost always need it. Because even though I love my iPhone, who really wants to scour a website for information whether that’s hours and locations, info on reservations/appointments or placing an order, or something more important that requires all the details on a tiny little screen, frantically pinching and dragging to maximize and minimize the screen to get the information you need? No one, that’s who. No one.
You see, 30 billion inbound sales calls were made to U.S. businesses last year, and at least 1 billion of them were probably from me. When I want information and I want it now I’m generally on my smartphone. My fiancé nicknamed me Google Bot. I’m serious. I just looked in my iPhone’s Google search history and this is what it lists as recent searches:
That’s just from the last two days, and do you want to know something else? Every single one of those searches led to me calling a business. (Nine West didn’t have the shoes I wanted, but I made an appointment with the physical therapist and ordered chicken vindaloo from the Curry House on Plymouth.)
What made these quick, easy exchanges of information possible? Click-to-calls. The physical therapist had a Contact Us box on their homepage that seemed simple enough, but the idea of typing in all that information about a strained wrist on a tiny screen seemed like it might actually make my wrist worse, so what did I do? I clicked, and I called. It’s easier to just call.
In fact, it’s almost always easier to just call. Thanks in part to the growing presence of smartphones in the hands of consumers who have become accustomed to information how they want it, when they want it, more people than ever before are calling your business straight from search results or your website rather than filling out online forms and waiting for an answer. They’re calling you, and, as DialogTech’s CEO Irv Shapiro says so well in this two-minute video, those leads are valuable.
As a consumer, I am going to call you all day and all night and the only time I will have a problem is when you don’t provide a phone number, forcing me to scour your website where I will likely become frustrated and call someone else, which then becomes your problem. You know what else your problem will be? Not tracking my calls. I hope the Curry House on Plymouth is using some kind of call tracking because they will learn that Google search provides a huge volume of business based on my mobile traffic alone.
Long story short: Inbound calls convert to revenue 10 times more than leads that filled out a form on your website. We’re calling because we’re ready to buy. Are you tracking us? You should be. Download this free webinar to learn how: Riding the Wave of Smartphone-Driven Calls.