Keynote and last session of day 1 of affiliate management days conference is "Leveraging the "offline" channels presented by Jason Spievak, CEO of Ring Revenue. As expected, it was a very informative session. Here are my key takeaways:
- The "Call" industry is a billion dollar a year industry. Don't turn a blind eye to this industry - it's likely the most significant opportunity that you are not currently taking advantage of.
- $300 billion is spent on advertising in the US every year, and only 15% of that is online. that means 85% of $300 billion is spent offline. So make sure you're looking at this.
- How can you better drive store impressions, phone calls, brand impressions outside of the "storefront"?
- The larger ticket items (insurance, education, cruises, etc) - 90-100% of that business is closed on the phone.
- Insurance (Geico), Retail (Sears), Education (Kaplan University), Home Services (AT&T), Financial Services (Citi) spend exponential budgets offline. Therefore you should be focusing your performance based model offline too - or even more so.
- The new affiliate model is not "calls or clicks" it's "calls AND clicks". There are 1 in 5 Americans employed in a call centre. Leverage the way buyers want to convert and DON'T ignore offline opportunities.
- RingRevenue (as only one company in the space) drove $125 million in incremental sales on a performance base from consumer calls combined with affiliate tracking.
- 5 billion people have mobile devices. 5 years ago almost none did. More people own mobile decides as they own toothbrushes (4.2 billion).
- There is an overall 12% average increase on banners and 15% increase on landing pages on sales that have a phone number on it, even if absolutely everything else stays the same.
- BUY CUSTOMERS - NOT ADS
- Phone calls have a higher conversion rate and a higher average order value.
Are Calls Right for You?
- Do you have a call centre?
- Do you convert some of your business by phone?
- Are you willing to pay for qualified calls?
- Do you want more customers? Because this is how you get them.
Point of the presentation: for most businesses, offline pay per click tracking solutions are probably being overlooked by your business, which means you're leaving a SIGNIFICANT portion of your potential sales on the table.
