Entries Tagged as home improvement leads

Yesterday I tried to call a potential Client in the home services industry.  As a plumbing contractor, this company is in the business of providing emergency service to customers with plumbing problems. I had misplaced his direct phone number so I went to their company website and dialed the number on the home page.  I got a busy signal.  I figured I must have misdialed so I tried the number again — busy!  What if I had been an actual customer?

I then did the legwork and tracked down his direct phone line and told him about my experience.  What was really shocking to me was that he didn’t seem too concerned about it.  “We only have 2 lines,” he said.  “That only happens if we have 2 people on the phone at the same time, and that doesn’t happen very often.”

We work with a lot of home improvement and home services companies to develop programs to increase their inbound lead generation from the Internet.  Many of these projects involve developing a website and driving leads through organic and paid search campaigns.  More often than not, we find that there is big gap in the percentage of appointments set to overall inquiries generated (either phone calls or email forms requesting information).

Smart business owners spend much of their time measuring the effectiveness of their advertising efforts from a cost per lead and return on investment standpoint.  What they don’t realize is that closing this appointment setting gap is often the single biggest thing they can do to lower their overall marketing costs — but it takes a systematic process (and many times a culture change) to do so.  Consider these facts:

• According to an MIT study, the faster you respond to an inbound Internet lead the better.  In fact, the odds of contacting and qualifying an inbound lead decreases 2100% from 5 minutes of receipt to a half an hour.
• For inquiries submitted via the web, 78% of customers buy from the company that responds first.  (InsideSales.com)
• According to a response analysis done by InsideSales.com, on average 43% of internet inquiries sent in to companies never get responses!

The obvious takeaway here is that prospects who are searching online are looking for solutions to their problems, now! If they take the time to fill out a form on a company website requesting more information, the faster the company calls that prospect back the better.  Similarly if they call you — someone has to answer the phone!  Customers who call a company and get a busy signal, or even a voice mail box very likely will hang up and call someone else.

In addition to calling prospects back immediately, another huge issue we find is over qualification of inquiries.  Often times the person in an organization responsible for setting sales appointments (either a sales representative, receptionist, or sometimes even a project manager) has no idea how marketing costs work, and they take actions that aren’t in the company’s best interest. Many times the sales department either sets their own appointments or has influence over the appointments that do get set because they “don’t want to waste their time” with prospects that aren’t ready to buy.

According to home improvement industry expert Dave Yoho, a qualified appointment is a prospect who:

• Is a homeowner
• Has a need and an interest in the product or service
• Agrees to have all homeowners and /or decision makers present for at least an hour of their time

Sadly, many times we find that as many as 70% of total inquiries to a company from online sources are never set into appointments. As a result, sales representatives never get an opportunity to meet with those prospects!  Keep in mind, these are prospects who sat down at a computer to research a problem, found the company’s website or landing page, and took the time to call or fill out a form requesting more information!  Why wouldn’t an appointment get set?  Some of the most common observed reasons for not setting an appointment are:

• “They weren’t ready to buy yet.”
• “We have a minimum job size of $.”
• “We don’t do that type of work.”
• “We don’t travel that far.”
• “They were just looking for a ballpark price.”
• “They were just starting to shop and didn’t know what they wanted yet.”
• “They just had a few questions, but didn’t want to set an appointment.”
• “They hadn’t had any other estimates yet.”
• “They already had 3 estimates and our prices are higher than the companies they had talked to.”

Do you notice a pattern here?  As an in home sales representative and sales manager myself for over 15 years, I recognize most, if not all of these are objections that could be overcome on the way to closing a sale — if only given the opportunity!  That’s where the sales process starts, with an opportunity!  The job of the appointment setter is to “sell the value of the visit” and get as many raw inquiries set into appointments as possible.  Maximizing the appointment set rate will increase the sales opportunities, leading to increased sales revenue and reduced marketing costs.

It has been estimated the average cost of an issued appointment in the home improvement industry today is now approaching $300.  Generating an appointment is now harder than ever before.  For that reason in order to remain profitable companies must maximize every marketing dollar spent.  Consider the following example of 2 hypothetical companies.  Each company spent $7500 on paid search to generate 100 raw inquiries — either phone calls or email responses.  Company A routes the calls and emails to a receptionist who in the course of the day, in addition to answering calls does various administrative duties.  As a result, getting appointments set isn’t her primary focus.  Company B on the other hand routes all inquiries to a dedicated individual or contact center, who using a scripted methodology is focused on setting and confirming all appointments for the sales team.

Both companies have a strong sales department that follows a structured sales methodology.  In the following example, the success or failure of this same paid search campaign hinges entirely on the number of appointments set.  Company A, with a 35% set rate had a cost per issue over $300, while Company B by setting 20% more appointments had a cost per issue of $195.

What is the opportunity cost to Company A of having an inefficient appointment setting system?  Company B ran 14 more appointments and sold an extra $25,200 – that’s $1,800 per missed appointment!

Lowering marketing costs is all about maximizing sales opportunities.  Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!” 

Recently the team here at Three Deep has been discussing the impact of mobile marketing and SMS text technology on marketing, and brainstorming potential applications for our Clients.  We feel that SMS technology, if properly deployed within the home improvement industry, could become a “game changer” not only from a lead acquistion standpoint, but also by allowing companies to better communicate with its customers, prospects and employees.

SMS is now regarded as the fastest form of communication with a potential Client.  Consider these statistics:

• Text message use has increased 107% just in the last year (1)
• 89% of Americans own a mobile phone (2)
• More than 72% of mobile phone users send and receive text messages (3)
• 90% of all text messages are read within the first three minutes of delivery (4)
• Around the world, SMS is used by four billion mobile users, who sent five trillion messages in 2009, and it continues to grow unabated.  By 2013 the volume of messages sent will double to 10 trillion. (5)

Because home improvement business owners are historically slow to adopt new technologies, there is a huge opportunity for a progressive, marketing focused company to incorporate SMS text messaging into their operations; especially for lead generation.

Many home improvement companies use a sweepstakes as a way to initially gather consumer information.  Companies will promote their sweepstakes online, on TV and radio and at shows and events.  Once entered, companies will market to their sweepstakes entrants and set sales appointments.  By adding a Text to Win option to their contests, a company could add a method of entry and gather additional consumers that may not have responded to their other forms of entry.  If a company were to promote Text to Win at their shows and events, on their trucks, billboards and other advertisements – they could drastically increase the number of entries received.

Text to Win campaigns are now quite common and have received consumer acceptance in other industries.  Such a campaign would entail a company promoting a short code such as Text “Win” to 12345.  Immediately after receiving the inbound text, an automated response text would be sent saying “Thank you for your entry, in order to complete your registration click here.”  The link would take the entrant to a landing page asking the prospect to provide their name, address, phone number, email address, etc.  Once entered, the company would receive this contact information via email.

In addition to lead generation, SMS technology allows a company to communicate with their customers and prospects faster than any other available method.  Possible SMS applications include:

• Send Appointment Confirmations immediately to a prospects phone, rather than an email address that they may not check as frequently.
• Receive estimate requests immediately from neighbors of current jobs who respond to job signs or trucks
• Send special offers, coupons or special invitations to upcoming company events to loyal past customers.
• Receive Appointment results from sales reps immediately following the appointment allowing for faster follow up from the contact center.
• Send or receive information real time from the job site.

If you are a home improvement contractor interested in getting on board the mobile revolution, please fill out the form below for more information.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Sources:

(1) Data from Text Message Blog

(2) Data from Business Insider

(3) Data from Gizmodo

(4) Data from Opt It

(5) Data from Por2o Research

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Three Deep Marketing has a large home improvement client base.   We work with a variety of home improvement companies that are truly a cross section of the industry, helping them with their internet marketing and lead generation needs.  These home improvement companies include some of the largest  companies in the country, as well as companies that are strong regional players in their local markets.

While paid search management (PPC) is usually the first service we engage with a client, we actually offer a full compliment of services, including:

• Website Development
• Landing Pages
• Blogs
• Social Media Campaigns,
• Call Center services (we operate a call center for many of our clients)

  Continue Reading 6 Reasons Why Internet Marketing Isn’t Working For Your Home Improvement Business →

Here at Three Deep, we are constantly thriving to provide actionable insights for our clients. For those who are unfamiliar with our company, we are a very data-centric organization. The name Three Deep actually refers to our discipline of looking past surface-level data, and digging three levels deep into the data at hand to provide the highest quality feedback possible.

We have recently developed a way to tightly integrate phone conversions with web analytics data to paint a more accurate picture of our clients’ marketing efforts, right down to the ROI.

The idea was sparked when we identified a disconnect between the online and offline conversion data of lead generation clients in our home improvement vertical. Nearly every lead generation website (regardless of industry) includes a phone number as a point of conversion, but we never really had a concrete way to tie this to online metrics.

Continue Reading Integrating Phone Calls with Google Analytics Data →

If you were a business owner, would you rather have your sales department closing on average 50% of the leads they run or 35%?  At first glance this seems like a stupid question, obviously the higher the close rate translates into more sales, right?

We recently had this discussion with one of our home improvement clients.  Last year his company ran 2500 appointments and installed about 1200 jobs — 48% close rate.  The sales manager was very proud of the fact that his team’s close rate was as high as it was.  This is a home improvement company that does a lot of advertising on radio and outdoor billboards, so the phone is ringing constantly with people looking to set an appointment.

What we realized very quickly was that the company spent a lot of time on the phone with each caller.  They were extremely selective about which appointments they set and ran.  As a result a lot of potential appointments were never set, because the company determined — over the phone, that the home improvement prospect either “wasn’t ready” or “wasn’t worth running.”  We find this over qualification of sales inquiries to be a common practice among too many home improvement companies today.

Continue Reading Home Improvement Close Rates →

In Why Most Local Search Resellers Fail Their SMB Clients, I reacted to a recent study that revealed 90% of SMB’s quit their search marketing programs after 6 months.  It turns out that the reason why people quit these programs is because they do absolutely nothing to help the company generate new business!

700 clicks per month for $1500 — Where do I sign up????

Caveat Emptor: Clicks don’t mean a thing!  They  aren’t phone calls, don’t generate sales, or pay the rent.  Most importantly, if these clicks are “bad clicks” — meaning coming from people not actually looking for your particular service — your ROI won’t justify the expense.  Bad clicks waste your company’s time, and cost you potential revenue by throwing off your signal to noise ratio.  If you become accustomed to only seeing bad clicks/leads, then you may become jaded toward the good ones.

What do I mean by “bad clicks“?  Here’s a real world example:

Continue Reading Local Search for Small Business – Part 2 – Clicks vs. Leads →

Congratulations to our client Cardinal Builders for being mentioned in the upcoming issue of Replacement Contractor Magazine. Cardinal Builders will be featured in the article To Your Credit.  The story is about how contractors are quickly incorporating the new tax credits that are available to homeowners who make qualifying replacement window upgrades in 2009 or 2010 into their overall marketing strategies. View the article from Replacement Contractor Magazine featuring Cardinal Builders.

Two days after the 2009 Economic Stimulus Bill was signed into law in February, Cardinal Builders VP of Operations Mike Lelasher called Three Deep Marketing with an idea.  He wanted to put a red CNN style breaking news banner across the top the Cardinal website with the headline:

Breaking News: President Obama signs stimulus plan into law, includes up to $1500 tax credit only for windows with .30 u-value or lower. All windows Cardinal Builders offer meet or exceed requirements to earn tax credit. Click here for more information.

Continue Reading Three Deep Marketing Client Cardinal Builders Featured In Replacement Contractor Magazine. →

I have heard a lot of discussion over the last year about nebulous leads, especially in the home improvement industry. What do I mean by “nebulous?”  By definition, nebulous means indefinite.  A nebulous lead is prospective buyer for your product that happens to be early in the educational buying spectrum.  While they might not be at the stage of soliciting estimates yet, (and therefore won’t respond to traditional advertising), these prospects certainly have product needs on their mind and are gathering information preparing to do the project.  Putting systems in place that identify these potential customers presents a tremendous tactical opportunity for savvy companies to make contact with these prospects before their competitors.  These companies are then able to introduce their company and their products to these potential customers; building goodwill that can ultimately be translated into a sale when they are ready to buy.

Marketers typically identify this type of prospect by offering free information such as a whitepaper, or a free sample or through sweepstakes marketing efforts — the thought being that if an individual is interested enough to request a free window brochure, or sign up to win a house full of windows they will become a window buyer sometime in the foreseeable future.  Conventional wisdom suggests that 85% of respondents to these types of offers are prospects for the product.

Continue Reading Nebulous Leads – Can Your Company Turn Them Into Sales? →