Businesses Just Want to Hear Your Voice

As director of online marketing for Nutrisystem, Bill Chase has a $12 million annual budget to place advertisements for his company’s weight-loss programs all over the Internet. The effectiveness is modest: Just 2 percent or 3 percent of those who click on a Nutrisystem ad go on to sign up for the company’s 28-day weight loss program, he says. The yield is significantly higher if a prospective customer picks up the phone and speaks with a Nutrisystem representative; 20 percent of those interactions result in a sale. So about a year ago, Chase signed up with Marchex, a company selling mobile advertisements that automatically connect clickers using smartphones to a call center. “It goes against all my principles as an Internet guy, but we can close a sale more often by having people call,” he says.

Online advertising has become a $70 billion annual global business in part by promising to measure how many views turn into clicks and which clicks lead to sales. The problem for many small businesses and service industries such as law and insurance is that prospects don’t tend to become customers until they get on the phone. “The naïve assumption that people made in the early days was that e-commerce was going to decimate other kinds of customer contact,” says Greg Sterling, an analyst at Opus Research in San Francisco. “When there’s a human connection, there’s a lot more that can be sold, and those customers are a lot more valuable inherently.”