Andrew Shotland is No Leaking Bucket

Its always good to connect with Andrew Shotland at Loc@l SEO Guide. He wrote a great review of ReachLocal, Yext, Yodle, ect. and the difficulty in keeping merchants signed up after they've been acquired. I agree - within reason - you can't please everyone in a volume business. Acquired merchants may not always have their lead generation expectations met.

The churn problem can't be explained away as overly aggressive sales by the local search industry. There is a supply and demand problem within local search: Consumer demand doesn't always equal merchant supply. The local search marketing cos (Reach, Yodle, Yext, etc) do a fine job at acquisition, but without prior insight into consumer demand for that particular business, lead delivery to the merchant is going to be spotty. Thus local marketers deal with merchant churn. I previously called this problem a leaking bucket and it is.

With the VC activity in this space - there are still many that are bullish on this business model. WebVisible has another $20M to put toward solving this problem.

FastCall411 also has a solution with HotLeads! We solve the demand and churn problems for our clients by first identifying consumer demand, teasing the merchant with a few free trial consumer leads, then offering a targeted, precise value prop to the merchant: "we've proven we can deliver demand - just say yes and we will sign you up."

BTW, Andrew also wrote an interesting post on MerchantCircle.

Fix the Leaking Bucket and Increase Local Search Sales

The other day my friend and industry luminary, Dick Larkin posted on Facebook that his business is picking up. Calls to HomePage Directories’ 300 metered lines were double the volume from this time last year.

The term “metered lines” is a yellow pages throw back. We also use call tracking or call measurement, though I don’t really like any of these terms. The assumption is that the local search industry, including yellow pages is metering ROI to the advertiser.

Virtual Numbers (the term I use) can do so much more. Followers of FastCall411 know that I believe there is a significant opportunity for innovation in the “calls to local merchants” space.

For example: our IVR application, TryAnother, offers a call redirection to a 2nd seller if the first vendor is not available, or if the caller wants to keep shopping after the first call (we launched this at DEMO).

If the phone rings and the merchant does not answer, the lead was delivered but not received. And merchants only give credit for leads received. The bigger picture here is not just metering ROI to the advertiser, but metering and improving the experience to the consumer.

When a merchant doesn’t answer a consumer’s call they are falling short on their “quality of service”. I don’t need a Yelp review for that – if I can’t speak to the merchant, he can’t answer my questions. This customer service issue is a leaking bucket for online local services. FastCall411’s metered lines / call tracking / measurement / virtual numbers – whichever term we use - not only prove ROI, but improve the consumer experience by matching ready buyers dynamically with available sellers.

Further, FastCall411 identifies merchants who don’t answer their phones – your cold sales leads. We use Virtual Numbers to find and eliminate your cold leads so that we can focus your sales efforts on the warm pipeline.

FastCall411 is seizing this opportunity for innovation with Voice 2.0 applications that take phone calls initiated from mobile local search and classifieds to the next level with consumer reviews, merchant acquisition and much more.

David Jones joins FastCall411 as CTO

David Jones is joining FastCall411 as CTO. David will help us build innovative web telephony applications to link consumers with merchants in the local search space, in combination with advanced call analytics to drive increased sales. David is a rock star technologist with a PhD in Computer Science form Stanford.

Find the Good Eggs and Find Your Best Advertiser Prospects

FastCall411's customer service studies reveal that often 50% or more calls to local merchants fail to result in a meaningful interaction with the called merchant. Better service drives performance marketing. The Good Eggs who serve their customers win as interactive mkting takes over from traditional media.

Focus your sales efforts on the 50% of your prospects that are Good Eggs and find your best advertiser prospects. This doubles your sales effectiveness.

Jack n Jill Went Up the Hill and Came Down w ~4700 Groupons!

2000 3500 4674 new customers! What if they eat an average of 2 times a year? And each tell 2 friends? These Groupon subscribers are plugged-in, early adopters. Jack 'n Jill would be two smart kiddos if they capture the email addresses, became Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc. of all the Grouponers and encourage all to write reviews. What an amazing customer acquisition play for Jack 'n Jill when they think of the lifetime value of these clients. Well done!