Skinny Jeans and Click-to-Call, A Natural Pair

The call monetization opportunity we’ve chronicled for the past few years varies across different audience segments. The Marchex Institute — a research lab within Marchex — has brought some of these variances to light in a new report.

Specifically it looked at financial services and insurance — both high value verticals that rely heavily on inbound phone leads to close large accounts. It examined more than one million calls launched from mobile search or display ads.

The top findings (verbatim):

— Mobile advertising can be an especially effective way for both financial services and insurance companies to connect with Millennials. Calls initiated from a mobile search for both categories index very highly toward Millennials, and also index highly for Generation X, indicating that both young groups are searching for insurance and financial services companies from their mobile devices, then calling them based on those search results.

–Spanish-speaking consumers have longer and more detailed average sales conversations with financial services companies than English speaking consumers, indicating very strong purchase intent. Marchex Call DNA, technology that analyzes phone calls programmatically, found that Spanish-speakers had more detailed, richer conversations with agents through a proprietary metric, “conversation switch count,” that signals in-depth phone calls. In addition, the median phone call was two minutes longer than calls by their English-speaking counterparts.

–Hang-ups are a significant issue for both local agents and national call centers, with hold-times being a culprit. 25% of calls to national call centers for financial services and insurance companies end in a hang-up (with an average hold time of 2 minutes) while 20% of calls to local agents or branches end in a hang-up (with an average hold-time of 1:39).

These are telling results, particularly in light of the trend towards mobile searches that lead phone calls (72 billion annually according to our data). That trend is pronounced within these demographic segments that are mobile-heavy.

So what does that mean for these and other high-value verticals that close large accounts from search oriented phone leads? Marchex suggests they consider basic changes to lessen those hold times that lead to a 25 percent hang up rate.

These are solid takeaways on the surface and there is still more to unpack. We’ll be doing that in the coming weeks as part of our ongoing call monetization coverage. Meanwhile, read the rest of the Marchex Institute report here.

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Our past aggregated posts on call monetization can be found here and our white paper on the topic is here.