800 number brands represent the ultimate brand name integration. These are used by many well-known brands.

The reason that vanity numbers, in particular vanity 800 numbers, remain popular, is that they create better marketing results. Studies show that campaigns that use vanity 800 numbers can enjoy up to 68% greater response than similar but random toll free numbers.

Vanity numbers are effective simply because of human memory performance – it’s hard to remember long random phone numbers, but its impossible to forget some catchy mnemonics. How easy is it to remember 1-800-Flowers? Hard to forget isn’t it.

Many brands have decided to build their brand around their phone number, and creating a brand name that can be expressed as a URL and a vanity number. That’s how the three examples in our graphic, including 1-800-Got-Junk, created a brand name around their phone number.

The advantage of this level of brand name integration is that all print, tv and radio, video, packaging, and digital media can use the brand name as a call to action.

For additional details, view a more extensive guest blog post written today for AVOXI.com title Marketing with Vanity 800 Numbers.

Marketing with Vanity Numbers References

• Marketing with Vanity 800 Numbers
• Vanity Toll Free Numbers
• Phonewords
• Toll Free Numbers

The post Marketing with Vanity Numbers appeared first on Optimizing.

Great SEO posts found today will help you tune your campaigns and use a special channel for content marketing you might not have considered.

SEO and Inbound Marketing Tips

Great SEO Ideas

We’re reading tweets, posts, and articles every day to sustain and improve our SEO, landing page optimization, and PPC practices. Today we’re sharing a few in this blog post. Follow us live on Twitter at @brucebrownlee.

So, instead of writing lots of bulk, let’s get you to those articles with a few easy links and comments on what each offers.

Landing Page Optimization

Vidyard Improves Home Page CTR 15% with A/B Testing – read how they did it, and see the surprising page version that won

Create a Landing Page that Converts Well and Ranks Well – good article from Unbounce – they must have put 10 hours into this, worth reading and saving in Evernote

Content Marketing and Link Building

21 Resources to Help You Rock SlideShare for Marketing – How to use Slideshare to build backlinks and build traffic and leads

SEOMOZ Guide to Broken Link Building – worth saving to Evernote or copying as PDF – a good how-to guide

E-Commerce and Shopping Cart Abandonment

Abandoned Carts – Beyond the Lightbox – Three easy ideas to cut down on shopping cart abandonment

Toll Free Numbers

How to reach 17 million customers in LA for pennies a day – Local phone numbers give you a virtual presence to help with customers in LA

Planning for Your Toll Free Number – how it works and how to get started (hint: it’s easy)

VoIP, Cloud Hosted PBX, Virtual Call Center Software

Virtual Call Center Software Captures and Retains More Customers and Revenue – title says it all.  Short case study from actual customer running an international call center.

PPC Advertising

Five Big Brand PPC Ads Critiqued – good and bad points for some major brand PPC ads – even the big boys make mistakes

Web and Social Analytics

Five Real Time Google Analytics Widgets You Should Use – real-time widgets are fun and informative – do you have them in your dashboard yet?

The post SEO and Inbound Marketing Articles – 2013-04-24 appeared first on Optimizing.

Call center performance improvement starts with setting realistic goals, then examining your staff, processes, equipment, software, and facilities.

Call Center Performance Improvement

The success of your inbound marketing campaigns still depends on your staff, processes, equipment, software, and facilities. You may be using toll free phone numbers and advanced features like time of day routing, but staff and how you manage, train, and supervise that staff, is still the key ingredient in your potential success.

Imagine Great Results

Call center performance improvement starts with setting realistic goals that can be achieved within your budget, with your existing or future staff. The question is, “how good can we be?” At this stage you should consider and envision an efficient contact center operation with your well-trained staff fielding calls and converting leads to customers. In your vision, your staff have the knowledge, training, tools, communication, and supervision to get the job done.

Its worth your time here to open a spreadsheet and start listing the salient features of the call center you’d like to have in one column, and perhaps in a second column listing assumptions and notes.

Don’t envision a utopian world, leave that to politicians who claim government can solve every problem. Instead, imagine your call center achieving great results within your budget and assigned campaigns. Write up your vision in the rows of your spreadsheet.

Assessing Your Staff and Staff Training

When we mention “staff”, that always means staff, staff training, communications, culture, motivation, and supportive supervision. A happy, engaged, trained, and fully motivated staff will close more business and provide better assistance for your customers.

A recent article on call center performance improvement by AVOXI points out that “a knowledgeable staff makes happy customers” and points out that transactions go smoother and customers are happier when the staff know what they are doing.

So, the next step in your call center improvement program should continue with listing, in your spreadsheet, all the things your staff members need to know to use their call center software, what they need to know about your products, services, pricing, campaigns, and upsells. Your list may also include knowledge of how to use your CMS software to manage leads and opportunities.

Once you’ve listed the 10 or 20 key broad topics your staff need to know, connect that in your spreadsheet to the training that you are actually doing, and what that training covers. At this point, call out separately with comments or notes, all the training topics that you do not cover. In other words, let’s call out here the missing training ingredients.

Follow up by meeting with your staff to verify or extend your list of missing training ingredients. Also ask open-ended questions to learn more about supervision needs, problems with your facility, with your processes, and with the organization of the campaigns you are handling. No one is going to have the same perspective of your campaigns that your call center staff members will have.

Call Center Performance Improvement – Software, Equipment, Facilities, Processes

Using your call center performance improvement spreadsheet, add new tabs for

• call center software
• facilities
• processes
• supervision
• communication
• performance measurement
• incentives

As you did with the staff and staff training, for each tab, build your first column with the key ingredients you need to enjoy the performance you want. Then, for each tab, fill out second and third columns that call out the good things you have in place, and the issues or shortcomings that you need to overcome.

Meet with your staff, your marketing director, your SEO, your fulfillment team, your VP Sales, and other stakeholders to review and tune-up your list of findings. Your goal here is to improve your list to the point that it has all you need to make a plan of action. A secondary goal, still important, is to get your other stakeholders to commit to the list by offering their own tweaks and getting involved.

Make a Plan

With your spreadsheet updated and reorganized, you have all the information you need to build a plan of action for call center performance improvement. Put on your project manager hat and make a project plan that starts where you are, and ends with all the shortcomings, issues, training needs, and process changes completed.

Your project plan should move training and process fixes to the front. If new call center software is needed, move that to the front as well. No sense training with the old stuff if you are moving on to more feature-rich call center software.

Walk your project plan around and meet with your stakeholders to gain support and to set expectations. Then implement your plan, as you have designed it. As you go along, communicate the changes you’ve made each week to let everyone know things are moving forward. Your staff and your company will be aware of the improvements and you’ll build momentum for your team.

Call Center Performance Improvement References

• 5 Ways to Improve The Contact Center
• Preventing Turnover in the Call Center
• Call Center Recording – Not Just for Training

The post Call Center Performance Improvement appeared first on Optimizing.

VoIP providers have gained trial access to wireless numbers by way of a recent FCC ruling. VoIP provider customers will get new features and lower costs.

VoIP Providers can support most any quality VoIP phones

Expected benefits for VoIP provider customers will include lower cost and greater access to features such as text messaging to wireless phones and other services, ultimately.

VoIP Providers – Learn More

• FCC to Allow VoIP Providers Direct Access to Wireless Numbers
• VoIP – Voice over IP

The post VoIP Providers Get Access to Wireless Numbers appeared first on Optimizing.

How your call queue works and what information it shares determine whether it’s a lengthy bore that turns off customers, or a selling engine for your business.

Call Center Call Queues

Cut, Cut, Cut

Cutting your call queue wait times make customers and prospects believe that you are responsive. Use every tip and trick you can find to segment your traffic, get the right problem to the right person, and complete most tickets on the first call. A good sampler of speed up ideas is shown in the AVOXI article 6 Tips to Reducing Long Call Queues

Better still, anticipate what will generate calls and get rid of those problems. Don’t let your product manager blow off the fact that the instructions with the CD say “blue connector” when you are actually shipping a “red connector”. That’s a sure-fire call center traffic generator that will steal the profit on each sale. Instead, tear down and repackage the outbound CD with the right instructions.

Listen to your call center manager about the types and details of the calls you are getting. Identify common problems and find a way to prevent the problems and the calls they generate.

Provide Incentives and Ask for Referrals

Once you’ve headed off common problems that users face, your call queue wait times will drop and customers will be more satisfied with your service.

Ask your satisfied customers for referrals and provide BOGO certificates and discounts and incentives for referrals.

Work out on paper what your customer acquisition cost has been, and work out a per customer budget figure for customer acquisitions. No two businesses have the same numbers so we can’t give a number that fits everyone – it’s greatly dependent on your pricing and cost structure. But you know your numbers, or should, so work it out. When your done, use that number to size up your incentives to offer for “buddy deals” and BOGO offers.

Script your buddy deal conversations. Keep them short, and use friendly questions. “Do you have friend or colleague who might ….?”

Share Your Product News

While customers are in the queue, they should hear very short messages about product upgrades, new products, free offers for upgrades and training, and answers for the most common problems your help desk is handling.

Just keep in mind that your customers are not on the line for an upgrade, there probably trying to get a document to print 10 minutes before a big meeting, or something similar. So people stressing out on a help line want to know their wait time first, hear fix-it-yourself FAQ’s second, and hear product update or product release information third.

Think how you react – if you know that there’s only 2 minutes waiting and that the help desk can probably fix your problem, you won’t mind hearing a 20 second product update blurb. Reverse the order, and you’ll be stressing out.

Read More About Managing Call Center Queues

• 6 Tips to Reducing Long Call Center Queues

The post Call Center Queues – Potential Selling Engines appeared first on Optimizing.

If Yahoo! staff offsite were mostly part of a distributed typing pool, the criticism we see might be valid. But there’s a lot more to it!

Marissa Ann Mayer, Yahoo! CEO

Yahoo! Castigated in Public

If you were just considering the Yahoo situation from a modern business point of view, you might find Marissa’s plan to be Draconian. All the remote employees who’ve setup home offices and Skype and chat all day back to the home office will be uprooted. Childcare arrangements to be replanned. The daily commute won’t be avoided, so the 08:30 jaunt to Starbucks or Panera becomes the 7:45 run to the office, a longer commute.

Some critics of Mayer’s plan view the situation as a step back to the days of typing pools. A blog post at AVOXI points out business benefits of working remotely. It’s a well-crafted blog post, and would be the definitive answer if, and only if, the Yahoo employees were essentially a distributed typing pool.

We’re going to explain in sections below why there’s a different situation at Yahoo!

The Real Situation at Yahoo

Yahoo! is far more than a web portal. It’s a software and web application company, a digital advertising company, a marketing company, an ad sales company, and a media channel, and many more things.

The company grew strong and made money through innovation, good programming of web services and interfaces, and development of complimentary online services and feeds.

But as Yahoo! grew, it lost focus as it expanded and it failed to continue to innovate. Development and marketing teams were apparently increasingly allowed to work from home. The company’s signature web services and revenue-generating search engine were overtaken by competitors.

Today, Yahoo! has loyal users, but it’s really not been making great technical leaps as it once did.

With so many team members working remotely, Yahoo is bleeding money from lost opportunity – the lost opportunity of rapid development and innovation. Brainstorming and rapid development depend on teams working within shouting distance. Skype and video conferences just aren’t a substitute.

An Earlier Yahoo!

Lotus Development Corp. was the marketing and development company behind the legendary Lotus 1-2-3. This, and Wordstar, were the two applications that could truly sell computers. That’s right, starting around 1983, people starting buying computers so they could run applications. (IBM never understood this, clearly Apple and Microsoft learned quickly.)

Back to Lotus (the part of the company in Boston). Development teams worked closely together and pumped out updates and versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and related products. However, as Lotus gained cash, it stupidly lost discipline it had with its development teams. First, Lotus started breaking up teams after each release, and putting developers back into “the pool”. That mean that nobody owned the code base, and that three releases of code would have three different developers adding changes onto the same set of modules. Gruesome consequences (spaghetti code with strange comments like “what’s this do?”

Second, and this is critical, Lotus gave promotions to development team leads that, by company policy, made the team leads eligible for corner offices, in any building where a corner office was available. Development team leads moved to corner offices in different buildings than the one that housed the team they led. Team communications and morale broke down. Eventually Lotus fell behind and fell apart.

Lotus was reduced to stopping development on its desktop suite to shift all funding into Lotus Notes. The lack of support for its desktop products stopped them from being the door openers they once were, and Lotus started to run out of cash. IBM bought Lotus to get Lotus Notes, and eventually stripped away the unneeded remaining employees.

Lesson learned? If software or web development is at the core of your business, your core development team should work together.

Modern Office Space

Clerical workers, travel agents, bloggers, and insurance adjusters can work from home and do well. Their work is measured by forms filled, reports filed, stories written, cold calls made, and hours worked. The important work they do is like a train that runs on a regular schedule on tracks laid down by others.

But core web and app developers, marketing teams, and inside sales teams, as examples, need to work together, within shouting distance, literally. For speed, for idea sharing, for decision-making with a purpose, nothing is faster than having teams together. These people are literally doing the exploration, surveying, blasting, and construction that is needed to lay down the tracks on which the company train runs. No two days are exactly the same, and in these jobs, one great idea change the whole direction and future of the company.

Go Yahoo Go

For Yahoo, stopping the lost opportunity and lost revenue begins with reassembling teams and getting them moving on new marketing plans, new products and services, and raw innovation. Getting the team back to the Yahoo! campus is going to make it possible to change the company back to an innovative culture. This just can’t be done when so many key team members are working from home.

Marissa – good luck!

The post Yahoo Collects Employees Back to Office – What it Really Means appeared first on Optimizing.

SEOMoz Web Mentions Data for Virtual Call Center and Toll Free Numbers Mentions

What we are seeing is that the direction and magnitude of changes in web mentions, by keyword term, appear to match actual traffic charts we’re seeing for production sites that feature those terms.

In the diagram above, we asked for SEOMoz to show us 2 weeks of data for virtual call center and toll free numbers. The results are very close to what we see in production for some of our outstanding customer sites that we track, such as www.avoxi.com and www.callforwarding.com.

This means that day-to-day ups and downs shown in the SEOMoz Fresh Web Explorer will reflect the same traffic in your site, if your site uses and features those terms.

Going further (speculating), it may turn out that you can use this tool during keyword research, in a way similar to using Google Insights for Search, only with more immediate data – the last two weeks, not all the way back to 1999.

This is certainly worth checking, would like to hear your comments and experience with other sites.

The post New SEOMoz Web Mentions Tool Provides Realistic Traffic Data appeared first on Optimizing.

A good quality VoIP headset or phone gives high call quality

VoIp is “voice over IP”. That means the sound of your voice is captured by your headset or telephone mouthpiece, converted to a series of digital packets, and sent through the internet to the person with whom you are speaking.

VoIP Conversations

You can transmit from you laptop computer with a program called a “softphone”, or from a headset attached to your computer, or from a high quality VoIP phone. The VoIP phone will provide the best sound quality, more like a hi-fi system instead of a transistor radio.

Your packetized voice can go across your LAN to a router and through the Internet to the person you are calling.

VoIP service providers can provide international toll free numbers that let customers overseas call you. They can also provide cloud PBX service that uses a hosted IP PBX that is located in a data center. Your calls go to the data center, then out to the world, and vice versa.

VoIP for Dummies Reading List

If you are as short on time as we are, here’s the quick and easy VoIP reading list to get you up to speed in less time than it takes to get to the first half hour of the “Walking Dead”.

• VoIP Protocols: A Closer Look (Don’t worry, this isn’t too close, it’s a nice 6-bullet overview)
• VoIP: What is it and how does it work?
• VoIP versus Traditional Phone Service – What’s the Difference
• Switching to VoIP: Potentially Painless Process
• Four Crucial VoIP Features
• Selecting a VoIP Provider
• VoIP Call Termination

The post VoIP Technology for Dummies – Resources appeared first on Optimizing.

Classic Car Forum – Forums and Bulletin Boards Still Work

Two recent studies by University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research are reported in emarketing.com. The stories reveal fascinating details about which content marketing tools produce the best results, and about which social media channels actually produce the best results for brands.

The results are surprising, but “old school” marketers will take some satisfaction in hearing that some of the old-fashioned tools, like bulletin boards and podcasts, still pack a wallop.

Content Marketing Tactics – Most Effective Media

A study by the Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research at The University of Massachusetts shows that featured articles provide the best return on investment for generating business.

In order of declining effectiveness, here are the top earners in content marketing:

1. Featured articles
2. Video
3. White papers
4. Photos
5. Interactive media
6. Sales copy
7. Infographics
8. Buyers guides
9. Illustrations
10. Motion graphics

For a full report, see the link at the bottom.

Social Media – Best Results

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research study showed that the most effective social media forms were, in order of declining results,

1. Message and bulletin boards
2. Podcasting
3. Blogging
4. Online video
5. Twitter
6. Foursquare
7. Myspace

This data is from 2009 and 2010 (pre Instagram to be sure). These social media channels were not then the most popular. The most popular media used were, as expected, Facebook Twitter, blogging, online video, message and bulletin boards, podcasting, MySpace, and foursquare. Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicio.us, and the always-hideous Reddit were not mentioned.

Read the Original Stories

• http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Which-Content-Marketing-Tactics-Best-ROI/1009706
• Where Are Social Media Marketers Seeing the Most Success?

Follow us

Follow us on Twitter at @brucebrownlee
Like us on Facebook at Bruce Brownlee Company on Facebook
Visit us on google+

The post Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing Effectiveness appeared first on Optimizing.

VoIP Telephony Through the Internet

When buying into VoIP, you have three key investments: VoIP phones with great voice quality, a good router, and a good high-reliability VoIP service provider. Get these choices right, and you’ll enjoy lasting value, great audio quality, and reliable phone service.

You may think that hooking up to VoIP may be as nasty a job as connecting up a new flat screen TV and home theatre system. Fortunately this is not the case.

1. First, your VoIP service provider will pretty much take care of the whole thing.
2. You’ll get some new VoIP phones that connect to your local area network.
3. Your local area network is already connected to your router, and that’s where your VoIP service provider connects.
4. You can have all kinds of other connections from and to your router to match any needs you have. You can connect branch offices, an IVR with auto attendant, or the public switched telephone network.

When you are all set up, you’ll enjoy having

• Great-sounding VoIP phones on each desktop
• Ability to place soft-phone calls from your laptop when traveling
• Reliable VoIP phone service and one low montly bill

Read More about Going VoIP

• Switching to VoIP – Potentially Painless Process
• Four VoIP Features Critical for Business
• Internet Telephony Service Providers – Wikipedia
• Cost Effective VoIP Call Termination – TMCNet
• VoIP-Info.org Wiki

The post Going with VoIP – Getting Your Business VoIP Phone Service appeared first on Optimizing.