double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Back in February, in my post How to Strengthen Contact Rates , I told you guys about the new inbound-outbound service DoublePositive had recently launched.

As I mentioned at the time, our contact rate is historically about 50% – but early this year, we saw that rate dipping.  We knew the problem had to do with smart phones and the personal firewall they create.  According to the most recent Nielsen report, as of December 2010, 31% of cell phone users in the United States are smartphone users.

Show of hands.  If I called you on your smart phone right now, and you didn’t recognize the number, would you answer?

Probably not.  Over 90% of consumers would ignore an unknown number, according to an informal survey I ran on Facebook.  But those same consumers said they probably would call back if the caller tried to reach them more than once.  Wouldn’t you?

Our new inbound call-back service was born.

So, are they calling us back?

It’s still very early, and so far, we’ve limited our test to mortgage leads.  But I can tell you definitively that we’ve seen a lot of call-backs.  And when they call, one of two things is happening.  Either they hang up right away (“Oh, it’s ABC Mortgage.  I don’t feel like talking to them right now”), or they stay on the phone because they are interested in speaking with a representative.  Those in the second category are transferring at 70%, a very high rate.

What does that mean to lead buyers and lead sellers?

It means we are improving the performance of your leads.  Keep in mind, those call-backs are consumers we previously never would have been able to contact.

As a result of this early success, we decided to roll out our call-back service across all verticals.  Our new test group is 80% of all the leads we are dialing on, and we are holding 20% back as a control group.  I will share the results as soon as comparative data becomes available.

Meantime, we’re still asking ourselves, what else can we do to get people to call us back?

Local versus 800

At LeadsCon in Vegas last month, DoublePositive partner Joey Liner spoke on a panel with Ken Krogue, President of InsideSales.com, a dialer manufacturer.  Ken confirmed what DoublePositive had long suspected.  He said that InsideSales.com had seen a nice uplift in performance by displaying local numbers to consumers, instead of 800 numbers.

In our experience, this seemed true.  Prior the conference, we had conducted another informal survey on Facebook.  We asked, would you be more likely to answer the phone if the caller was a local number versus an 800 number?  Again, over 90% of consumers told us they would be more likely to answer a local number, because it might be someone they know.

DoublePositive decided to test this theory.  We reached out to one of our key clients in the mortgage industry, and will perform a test on the leads we dial on their behalf.  The expectation is that using local numbers will increase our contact and transfer rates.  We’ll let you know how it goes.

Needs evolve.  Buying habits change.  The important thing for all of us is to keep innovating.  Stay ahead of the curve, and you’ll be ready for where the market takes you next.

Your turn.  What are you doing to get consumers to call you back?

In my last couple of posts, I wrote about LeadsCon 2011.  Several of you have asked me about something that happened at the convention, so I thought I’d take a minute to address it.

As you guys know, DoublePositive has a lot of good friends in the space, and we were thrilled to see so many of you in Vegas this year.  We decided to celebrate a special year with our peers and friends by throwing a party.  Our goal was to pay tribute to this great industry we are in right now.

The location of the party was The Rhumbar in The Mirage.  See below for some pictures taken by our friend Steve Hall (also check out his hilarious blog about marketing and advertising at www.adrants.com).  More pictures are on our Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/f1EmnT.

In keeping with our “Rock Star” theme, we gave out guitar picks as tickets to the exclusive event.  They looked like this:

… which inevitably led to the question, “What is the meaning of 42?”

Ah, yes, great question.  As Douglas Adams fans know, “what is the meaning?” is the driving question of his cult classic novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  In the book, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings want to know the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.  They design a supercomputer, which takes 7.5 million years to come up with the answer.  It turns out to be 42.  Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself remains unknown.

So that’s where we stand today.  We may know the answer, but the question still eludes us, challenging us to learn more, care deeper, work harder and push farther into new frontiers.  We figure, as long as we go forward together, with great people like you, we should be all right.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post, DoublePositive is continuing to change the game.  We’re rolling out a suite of innovative products as we speak.  Check back soon and I’ll tell you everything I know.

Because DoublePositive invented the pay-only-per-transfer pricing model, we get a lot of comparisons to innovators in other industries.  For example, a friend recently commented that we were the Jimi Hendrix of online lead conversion.  We laughed.  But when it came time to design our poster for LeadsCon 2011 in Las Vegas, we decided to own up to our rock star status.

What about you, brotherman?  Are you down with the Live Hot Transfers experience?  Let us know in the comments below.  And check back soon because I have one more post coming about LeadsCon.