CallingBanners Review: Do Customers Want to call a banner?

in Reviews by Yohay Elam — March 16, 2010 at 10:00 am | 2 comments

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CallingBanners is an Israeli startup that adds an interactive layer for callbacks on existing banners. The user can enter his phone on the banner and receive a call from a sales representative. The goal is increasing leads and sales without redesigning the banners.

How it works

CallingBanners adds a bubble on a banner, showing that the user can receive a free phone call. When the user hovers over the bubble, it expands to a bigger one, enabling the user to enter his phone number in order to receive more details from a sales representative.

Filling only the phone number without additional details increases the chance that this initial lead-generation process will be completed. If the sales team is ready, they initiate a call immediately. By speaking with a potential customer just after he saw the banner and showed interest will probably increase the conversion rate.

CallingBanners can be configured to appear only when the sales team is at work. Another nice feature is the ability to adjust the number of bubbles to the number of concurrent calls. Call centers have a different number of representatives at different times of the day. Both features ensure that a user that enters his phone in the bubble will get a call quickly.

Advantage over traditional banners

Ignoring the bubble and just clicking on the banner sends  the user to the standard form for filling in his details, so no regular leads are lost. CallingBanners claim that the traditional banners suffer from a longer process of clicking twice: first on the banner and then on the submit button in the mini-site.

Slow loading of mini-sites, long forms, fake details and inconvenient times for calling back are also among the disadvantages that regular lead generation banners have in creating leads and completing the sales process.

CallingBanners provide an easy interface for adding their bubble to a banner. The advertiser just uploads his banner and his details, and receives a “Calling Banner”.

Is it really so good?

Turning a banner into a sales call sounds good, though this may not work for all users. Many people surf the web at work. They can perform non-work activity at the office as long as it consists only of engagement with their computers. Having a conversation in an open space isn’t always convenient. A possible solution would be adding another field for a convenient calling time, but the other advantages would be lost.

While the user initiates the sales call in this process, he may still be deterred by having a salesperson approach him. Telemarketers aren’t enjoying popularity at the moment. These users would prefer the traditional form where they only enter their email address. The bubble could overshadow the option to click on the banner, and these potential customers could be lost.

Similar to other start-ups, CallingBanners is still in Beta. Apart from stating this fact, I ran into a few broken links in their website.

Business Model

The immediate clients are advertisers. CallingBanners supports different success-based models: Cost Per Lead (CPL), Cost Per Action (CPA) and various combinations.

CallingBanners doesn’t stop here: they reach out to Interactive Agencies for blending the calling features in earlier stage – before the banner is created. Also publishers and ad networks are candidates for co-operation in building banners.

All in all this is an interesting technology with a very clear business model, something that start-ups don’t always have. They have a few things to tweak, but they aren’t many. Their success mostly depends on their success with sales – their customers’ sales and their own.

Read about CallingBanners in the company index.

Tags: advertisement advertisers banners CallingBanners featured