One very common call to action (CTA) that businesses use a lot on their website is “Request a Callback.” Lucep has written previously about why your website visitors may not be contacting you. One of these reasons is that buyers don’t want to be the caller. They want to be called and chased by sellers, as a demonstration of the seller’s need and sincerity. The solution is to add a request to callback mechanism that allows you to talk to your visitors without making them call you.
Now you can add a form that just says “Request a Callback” and ask people to enter in their name, phone number and whatever other optional info you want from them. But then there’s no point to it if you don’t get that notification instantly and call back. Right?
A better and more efficient system is a callback tool that does pretty much the same thing, but in real-time, while the visitor is still on the site. Why is this important?
Lucep has a lot of blog posts about the paramount importance of responding to a lead in under 5 minutes. Ruby Newell Legner’s “Understanding Customers” states that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. So you can imagine how valuable it is if you happen to reach out to a lead before anybody else does
In any case, let’s discuss the pros and cons of a request a callback tool vs the website form.
Request a Callback Website forms Pros
Notification – Whenever a visitor on your site fills up the form, a notification is sent out to your sales team. This inbound query is more likely to turn into a lead than the outbound cold calls your sales team makes to strangers who haven’t shown any interest in your company or products.
Positive Customer Experience – An American Express Survey on customer service shows that 78% of consumers bail on a transaction or an intended purchase just because of a poor service experience. Providing a request for callback form, and then calling back the customer, is a surefire way to ensure a positive customer experience.
Fields – The fields of information you get through a website form let you understand the lead’s needs and demographics. Having a lead’s pain points in front of you while calling them for the first time is a powerful tool that typically results in a high conversion rate.
Sales Enablement – Your sales team will be thrilled when they get a lead that has actually indicated an interest in buying. It makes it far easier for them to initiate a conversation by pointing out that they’re only responding back to a request for a callback. It means people won’t be slamming down the phone, or refusing to listen to the sales pitch. A call back (as opposed to a cold call) makes the conversation more productive right from the start, and it makes the sales process more efficient.
Cons
Too Many Fields – Over 40% of marketers believe people are uncomfortable filling up forms on their mobile devices. Well-known online marketing expert Neil Patel, in an attempt to find out why people were not filling up his forms, managed to increase conversions by 26% just by removing one field from his contact form.
Privacy – It’s virtually impossible to make people provide anything more than an email on a web form, unless you’re giving them something exceptionally valuable right away. If you place an overly complicated form in front of anyone on the web, chances are they will move on without filling it up.
Testing – You need to go through a lot of changes (A/B testing) to find out exactly what kind of form your leads and customers like. The color of the form, its placement on the page, number of fields, and the submit button are all small things that have a great impact when it comes to conversion rates.
Customizing – Making the form blend in with your default templates is a lot of work, and requires assistance from a designer and/or developer.
Accessibility – At the end of the day, the form is still available only the contact page of your site. Visitors still need to click through to the page to see it, and then decide if they want to fill it up. It’s an unnecessary extra click that you can eliminate if you use a tool that’s accessible on every page, as you can see on the right below (Lucep ‘Click here to get a callback’ widget).
Fields – The required fields are minimal in a callback tool, as the primary functionality of this tool is to connect you to the lead. The relevant information you want is collected through traffic analytics, and also from the customer while speaking to them.
Accessibility – When you add a callback widget on your website, it appears on all the pages. Website visitors don’t have to waste time to find out where your contact page is, and then go through the hassle of filling out a form.
Customizing options – A customizable callback tool is kind of like the icing on the cake. You don’t have to be a developer to make design changes to the tool to set the colors, fonts, text and position on the page. Anyone in your organization can easily use the tool’s dashboard to set all this to match your website template.
Time Management – It’s extremely critical to manage your time in sales, and focus on revenue generating activities. If you don’t want to spend all your time talking to prospects and leads, then you may want to choose an option that’s not so effective at generating leads online
Availability – On a related note, a callback tool can connect you instantly to a website visitor from any part of the world. If they’re not in your time zone, you can expect requests for callback in the middle of the night, or when you’re in your bathroom, or on the commute. If you don’t have a sales team to handle customer queries and leads flowing in 24/7, then make use of an option that doesn’t work while you sleep.
Cost – A website form doesn’t cost you anything other than the initial design and development costs. A SaaS click to call subscription service will cost you a small amount every month if you have multiple sales team members taking calls.
The Ocean Agency website tried to find a solution to this problem by adding a contact us box on almost every page of their footer. It’s a cumbersome solution that doesn’t address the other issues listed above, but it still worked. Almost half of their form submissions were now coming from pages other than the “contact us” page.
Goes to show that it’s important to make it easier for website visitors to talk to you by offering the callback mechanism on every page of your site. It’s easier and more efficient if you use a request for callback tool instead of a form, as you’ll see below.
Request a Callback Tool
A callback tool or widget on every page of your site let’s your customers talk to you quickly and easily with a single click after entering their number on the same page. There are many more advantages to using a request a callback tool:
Pros
Instant Notification – When they fill in a form, you can’t get back to them until you get the email, read it, and then decide if and whether to call. But with a callback tool, the notification to your phone is instant. You call them back right away, while the person who requested a callback is still on your site. Responding quickly to a client’s request for a callback shows that the business is interested in you and helps build trust. This will increase website lead generation by up to 48% and your lead conversion rate by up to 72
Cons
No matter which option you prefer, we recommend that you start using Request a Callback right away. It will instantly increase the lead generation and conversions from your website, provided you make it a habit to respond instantly to every callback notification.
Lucep Pte Ltd,
Call Us
