Commission Junction (CJ) shared a stat from an August 2009 Harris Interactive Poll that 54% of online consumers want human interaction before making big-ticket purchases.
That’s the bad news for online retailers and the affiliates who promote them.
But CJ follows up this information with some compelling data on their PayPerCall service, which they say “is a solution that accommodates this cross channel buying behavior, when a customer browses online or offline but completes the sale over the phone.”
One of the benefits of PayPerCall, according to CJ, is that it gives consumers the option to call for a consultation while giving advertisers an opportunity for an upsell.
And CJ reports that calls convert on average 20-50% of the time.
More information on CJ PayPerCall at https://www.cj.com/20110125paypercall/.
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I have applied to several Pay per call at CJ.
I think some of the people at those companies are weird.
I had allstate the insurance giant turn me down a few days ago.
Why… i don’t know.
There is no reason for them to be so selective…
these insurance idiots will sell an an insurance to anyone
anytime.. anywhere… but they turned me as a seller for them…
Funny thing is that i have insurance experience.. i was going to take
the certification test and all that. Anyways, I get over 10,000
unique hits on just one of my web sites..
I know i could of brought them some solid customers.
I guess they have their reasons.
funny thing is .. i went to a local allstate insurance agency
and told them i could get them leads and
they were all over the idea of me sending them leads.
So now I will come up with a proposal for them…
hahahaha….. go figure…
CJ accepted me into the Pay Per Call area pretty quickly. Link Share denied me for some reason but I have been able to start promoting 4 different CJ programs on my sites.
This is very interesting. Human interaction would definitely generate more revenue for online spending. If there is someone to help you, give you details, and even persuade you a bit I know I would be more prone to buying something.
Great observation and great question. Before a phone number is issued to one of our publishers, their system makes sure that phone number hasn’t received more than a couple of calls for at least 60 days. So the likelihood of that remnant call traffic being received by an advertiser is pretty low.
In addition, using our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, advertisers can screen and filter the calls before they get transferred into a live agent. So, in the rare case that a caller calls the number and realizes it’s not the person they intended to reach they likely end the call before it gets to the call center agent and the publisher doesn’t get a commission for the call.
If you’d like more information, please visit http://www.cj.com/paypercall or email us at paypercall@cj.com.
Pay-per-call is definitely an interesting concept. One concern I have is the cleanliness of the numbers used in the campaign. Since there aren’t that many possible toll-free numbers, there’s a good chance that any given number has been used in the past.
What if one of these numbers was printed on millions of direct mail pieces in the past? There’s a good bet that calls will continue to float in from those old campaigns for some time in the future. For the current user of the number, that will result in bad stats and extra costs.
I’d be interested to know how CJ handles this problem.
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