customer calls

How to Make a Great First Impression With Your Company Website

Last Updated: March 16, 2016

First impressions are everything. And if you’re a business owner, you want to be sure you’re making the best impression possible on your desired customers.
Most business owners already take steps to ensure this. You give your employees professional uniforms, make your storefront clean and appealing, and conduct yourself in a friendly, personable manner.
However, few business owners realize that first impressions happen before you even meet the customer. That’s because they happen online. From the moment prospective customers discover your company website in a search, they begin forming opinions. Do you appear professional? Do you seem like an expert in your field? Do you relate to your customers? Any visitor to your website will be asking these questions in their minds, whether they’re aware of it or not. It’s your job to answer these questions before they’re even asked.
So, how well are you representing your business online? What kind of first impression are you giving your customers?
In this post, we’ll give you tips on how to improve your company website so it represents your business in the most flattering light possible.

Make Your Products and Services 100% Clear

Have you ever visited a website and left after a minute because you couldn’t quite figure out what that business was offering? It happens all too often. So, to be safe, make your company’s products and/or services 100% clear. List every service in plain, simple terms.
Leave no room for doubt.
Even if you offer lots of different services in different categories, don’t be vague about it. Cover everything. Your site’s visitors should know within seconds what type of business you are and, more importantly, what you can offer them.

Choose Simplicity Over Razzle-Dazzle

Remember: Less is more. Don’t overflow your company website with bells and whistles. Don’t auto-play music upon entering the site. Don’t have Flash graphics. Don’t use hard-to-read fonts or blinding, neon colors. All of these elements run the risk of overwhelming your site’s visitors and turning them away.

Showcase Your Expertise

Prove you’re knowledgeable, reliable, and experienced. Discuss your training, industry-specific licenses (if applicable), and any other qualifications that make you an ideal choice for your prospective customer.

Match Your Image to Your Desired Customers

If you offer manual services like paving, appliance repairs, plumbing, electrical, and so on, then you probably work with a wide range of customers. In that case, it’s best to keep your website right in the middle of the road in terms of design. Don’t make it too primitive, or prospective customers won’t take you seriously. But don’t make it too chic, either, or they’ll think you’re too expensive. Think Goldilocks.
On the other hand, if you work in a high-paying field, like tax resolution or IT consulting, then it’s a good idea to demonstrate your professionalism with a sophisticated, elegant website design. Prospective customers will perceive your value through your website, so take this opportunity to show (not tell) how much your services are worth.

Use a Professional E-Mail Address

Last but not least: your e-mail address. To be clear, we don’t recommend displaying your e-mail address in plain text on your site. This sets you up for mountains of spam e-mails from bots. Instead, we recommend having a contact form for visitors to fill out.
However, just because you aren’t displaying your e-mail address doesn’t mean you don’t need to worry about how it looks! After your prospects have e-mailed you, you don’t want them to see a response from an unprofessional e-mail address. This could seriously lower their opinion of your business.
For this reason, an e-mail address at a corporate domain is ideal. A corporate domain makes you look like an established, successful business. At the same time, though, it’s not realistic to expect every single business to have access to a corporate domain. So, at the very least, you should have a company address from Gmail or Yahoo. These addresses are free and they look way more professional than your 15-year-old AOL address.
Read more about company e-mail addresses in our previous post, “Why You Should Give Your E-Mail Address a Makeover.”

Understand What’s Attractive—and What’s Not

Overall, many business owners misunderstand what’s “attractive” to the average consumer. It’s not about having the flashiest or most elaborate website design. Instead, it’s about having clear content that will make a prospective customer want to hire you. After all, you don’t make money from people spending time on your site. You make money from people who ultimately decide to call you and hire you. And quality content, not those flashy, “gee-whiz” features, is what drives people to call you.
Ensure your site has quality content by knowing who your desired customers are. Know what they’re looking for and what you can offer them. Then, present this to them through your company website. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so make it count.

Why Does Your Business Have So Many Missed Calls?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Have we told you lately how important it is to answer your phone?
We’ve noticed many of our clients have a staggering number of missed calls.
It all started with Google. In doing our day-to-day marketing tasks for clients, we discovered many clients are consistently missing important calls from Google. Not only is this a pain for us—because then we have to schedule another appointment for you to speak with Google—but it also makes us worry about your phone habits in general.

Why aren’t you picking up the phone in the first place?
In this newsletter, we’ll explore two major reasons to answer your phone. We’ll also offer some tips to help you stay on top of incoming calls.
Let’s get started.

Why Should You Want to Answer the Phone?

The caller might actually be Google.
The caller might be an interested customer.

If It’s Google:

You want to answer the phone because missing this call will prevent your listing from being verified. This is especially urgent at the beginning of your campaign, when we’re setting up your listing. However, we’re constantly checking your listings and making necessary changes throughout the duration of your campaign, so Google may call to re-verify your listing at any time.
Without verification from Google, your local web presence will suffer because your listing will not be visible to users. As a result, you could miss out on serious money in lost business.

If It’s a Customer:

You want to answer the phone because missing this call means your customer will be giving their money to one of your competitors instead of working with you. Consistently missing customers’ calls is another way you could be losing thousands of dollars in business. That’s a pretty strong reason to pick up your phone.

How You Can Take Action Without Much Effort

Now that you’ve discovered what’s at stake, arm yourself with the right knowledge and tools to avoid missed calls in the future. Here’s a quick rundown of what you need to know:

Legitimate customers may be calling from out-of-area phone numbers. Thanks to cell phones, area codes don’t mean anything anymore.
Always answer any call from the (650) area code. This is Google.
You can use call forwarding for your CallTrax number so you don’t miss calls while you’re out.
You can also use a professional answering service if you’re bothered by constant disruptions or marketing calls.

Don’t Automatically Dismiss Out-of-Area Phone Calls

Many local business owners might see an area code from out of state or even out of their service area and assume it’s not a legitimate customer calling. However, area codes are essentially meaningless nowadays.
An out-of-area phone number doesn’t necessarily mean the call isn’t coming from a local resident. Many people exclusively use cell phones, and they keep their phone number when they move from one state to another. Area codes only tell you where an individual first signed up for their phone plan.
On top of that, unless your business is located in the San Francisco Bay area, Google’s calls will always register as out of area for you. Remember: Google will be calling from a (650) area code. If you see that number, answer it.

Call-Forwarding for Your CallTrax Number Is a Game Changer

Have you tried out our call-forwarding feature?
When set up correctly, our call-forwarding feature will ensure you never miss a phone call. Without it, you miss any calls that come to your main CallTrax number every time you’re out on a job or leave the main office.
Setting up call-forwarding is easy. Through the Client Portal, you can add the phones you would like your CallTrax number to forward to. You can have calls sent to your cell phone instead of the main office during certain times of day, like when you’re back at home for the night. You can also have calls routed to a second and even third phone number after the main phone misses a certain number of rings.
However you decide to set it up, keep track of which phones calls are forwarded to at different times of day. Don’t leave your cell phone in your office all night if your calls are being forwarded to it after hours!

Professional Answering Services Are Available if the Phone Just Isn’t Your Thing

Some business owners just don’t like being on the phone, and that’s why they avoid answering it. While we totally understand how uncomfortable it can feel to talk to strangers, and how disruptive it can feel when you’re in the middle of a job, we can’t let you miss that many phone calls. It’s harming your business.
If you really can’t stand being on the phone—or you’re simply too busy—hire a professional answering service to do it for you. While we don’t endorse any particular company, we have clients who successfully use AnswerConnect as their answering service.
(Bonus: An answering service will screen out marketing calls so you never have to deal with them!)
Explore other strategies for handling missed calls.

The Good Outweighs the Bad

Make it a policy to answer your phone as often as possible. What do you have to lose?
Even if the caller turns out to be a solicitor, you’ll only be wasting a minute or two on the phone. Isn’t it worth losing just a minute of your time if it means you’ll be there to speak with Google and countless prospective customers when they call? With literally thousands of dollars on the line, we feel it’s well worth the risk.

Phone Package Upgrade: Scam or Necessity?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Has your phone package recently been upgraded? Are you confused about why the phone package upgrade raised your bill by a few extra dollars per month?

Some clients have been vocal about their confusion—which we always welcome—and have even shared their concerns about it with us. Now, we’d like to explain why we have to handle the phone package the way we do.

First, Here’s What You Need to Know

Before we dive into our explanation, let’s make a few points clear:

The level 1 upgrade results in a 2.9% increase (about $9) in your monthly bill.
Your package is only upgraded after you exceed 100 minutes of phone time on your CallTrax™ line.
This is a pass-through cost. We’re not charging this fee to earn more profit, but rather to cover the increased cost we incur by buying more minutes for your campaign.
We don’t automatically build these extra minutes into your plan because we don’t want clients to have to pay for them unless they’re actually using them.

Now that we’ve established the facts, let’s get into why the upgrade is truly necessary.

It Keeps Our Interests Aligned With Yours

Why can’t Prospect Genius just cover these extra costs on your behalf?
The answer has to do with keeping our interests aligned with yours. You see, as your LeadTrax™ campaign performs better and better, it will generate more calls from customers. That’s why you hired us, after all. But if we were to pay out of pocket for all of our clients who exceeded their allotted phone minutes because their campaigns were too effective, then we would be incentivized to do a worse job so that you receive fewer calls (thus minimizing our payments).
Obviously, that would be against your best interests. You want us incentivized to send you as many quality leads as your business can handle. That’s why we pass the phone costs on to you. The way we see it, asking you to pay a nominal fee of $9 to the phone company is worth it if it enables us to continue working hard for your business.
If we didn’t do this, then we would wind up footing the phone bill for some ultra-successful clients, which could actually do some serious damage to our own finances. Take, for example, a taxi company in NYC that we work with. This particular business was fielding so many calls that it once racked up $900 in phone charges in one month! We wouldn’t be able to continue to do good work for all of our clients if we had to pay out of pocket every time that happened.

It Keeps Us Motivated to Do Good Work

The good news is that, as long as you pay the nominal fee for extra minutes, we have only the incentive to provide you with quality advertising services and to send you the valuable leads you want.
That’s what sets us apart from pay-per-lead advertisers. Unlike them, Prospect Genius’s bottom line is not dependent on the number of calls we send you. Pay-per-lead advertisers, on the other hand, earn their profit by charging you for each lead they send to you. This means they have the incentive to send as many leads as possible, even when they aren’t legitimate or relevant to your business. As a result, low-quality leads are common with these advertisers because they’re trying to maximize profits.
Thankfully, our flat-fee model means we’re free to only do good work for you, no matter what. That’s probably why you chose to hire Prospect Genius in the first place. But if our finances were suddenly tied to the number of leads we sent you, this would inevitably change. Again, that’s why we pass the phone costs on to you.

It’s a Small Price to Pay for a Successful Campaign

If you’re still unsure about paying an extra $9 per month, try viewing phone minutes as just another minor business expense. In this context, the phone package upgrade should be a no-brainer.
For instance, let’s say you’re a traveling repairman and you have a set budget for gas every month. In May, you unexpectedly start booking more jobs and, because you’re traveling so much, you end up surpassing your gas budget by the end of week three. Would you increase your gas budget to cover the fourth week, expecting that your increase in jobs will more than make up for it? Or would you pass on any incoming jobs for the rest of the month because you refuse to pay a little more for gas?
Or, let’s say you own a car audio and accessories shop. You have a set budget for the electricity bill each month, but in December, you suddenly get a lot of new customers looking for holiday gifts. Would you take the extra jobs and run up a slightly higher utility bill as a result? Or would you stop accepting new customers as soon as you reached your limit?
In either of these scenarios, we’re guessing you would probably accept the slight increase in costs in exchange for more jobs. Paying a little extra for phone minutes shouldn’t be any different.

Ultimately, It’s About Transparency

Some other advertising companies avoid the issue of a phone package upgrade by building extra phone costs into their monthly prices. As we explained in an earlier blog post,

Every company in this business must pay phone line charges. No matter who you deal with, those minutes must be paid for. If an SEO company never raises their phone package price or never adjusts your bill to allow for more minutes, that means they’ve been unnecessarily charging you for the biggest package from the get-go.

But we don’t think that’s honest or fair to the client. Wouldn’t you rather start with a lower baseline price and then only pay extra for minutes that you’re actually using?
We think our approach to clients’ phone packages is the only way to remain open and transparent. It also keeps us doing honest, good work for your local business. While you may not be ecstatic to see your bill go up, remember that the upgrade is just a side effect of a strong, vital campaign.

Do You Have a Plan for Handling Missed Calls?

Last Updated: August 19, 2015

As a small business owner, you can’t possibly answer the phone every time it rings, especially if you’re on a much-deserved vacation from work. But that’s no excuse for missing all of those incoming leads. The number of sales you close is directly proportional to the number of calls you answer, but for those times when you just can’t get to your phone, you must at least have a working backup plan. Otherwise, you’ll never even have a chance to get those leads back.
Here are some things you can do to make sure missed leads don’t tank your business.

Have a Professional Voice Mail System

When answering your phone isn’t in the cards, having a proper voice mail system will allow prospects to leave a detailed message and enable you to follow up with those leads as soon as you can.
Set up a professional greeting: The first step is to set up a professional voice mail greeting. Whether you’re frequently out on the job and can’t pick up your phone or you’re going on an extended vacation, you must record a detailed greeting so prospective customers know that they’re calling a legitimate business. Include your company name, an explanation and/or apology for not answering the phone, and assurance that you’ll return their call ASAP.
Keep your inbox empty: If your inbox is full of old voice mail messages, new callers won’t be able to leave a message. If they can’t leave a message, they’ll immediately find another local business to call. To avoid this problem, delete new messages as soon as you’ve returned the call or logged the contact info. If you’re consistent with this, you won’t have to worry about your inbox filling up ever again.

Note: A few business owners who use pay-per-call services might strategically keep their inboxes full as a way to avoid getting charged when they don’t answer the phone. However, doing this prevents all incoming leads from leaving voice mails. The amount of business you lose by doing this outweighs any pay-per-call charges you’re saving. (If you’re dead-set on avoiding pay-per-call charges, you may want to consider adding another phone line dedicated exclusively to this purpose. Ask Prospect Genius about how to do this.)

Leverage the Convenience of Technology

Because it’s 2015, you can always count on technology to pull through. There are several different ways you can use technology to keep track of missed calls without much effort. The most popular options involve receiving text and e-mail notifications on your mobile phone whenever your business misses a call or receives a voice mail. This way, when you’re out on the job and miss a call, you’ll be able to follow up right away instead of waiting until you’re back at the office. Your chances of closing a sale are much greater if you can catch that prospect before they find another business to hire.
While we do not endorse any particular company, we know that RingCentral offers great message alert and notification services tailored to small businesses. You can also ask Prospect Genius to set this up for you.

Use a Professional Answering Service

While falling back on voice mail or text alerts is cheap, it also incurs a significant risk that those prospects will find another business or service provider before you get the chance to call them back. That’s why many business owners hire professional answering services.

Answering services are much less expensive than in-house receptionists.
Operating from a remote office, they can answer the phone and deliver messages to you 24/7.
They’re professionally trained for customer service and interacting on the phone, making them especially useful if that’s not your strong suit.
To make sure they get all the relevant information from your leads, you can even give them a script of which questions to ask.
An answering service is also a useful way to screen out marketing calls so you never even have to deal with them.

Again, we do not endorse any particular company, but we know that some of our clients successfully use AnswerConnect as their answering service, so that might be a good place to start.

But Really: Pick Up Your Phone

One of the things that all successful businesses do is answer their phones when prospects call. As we’ve covered before, missed calls mean missed customers, even if you do have a backup voice mail or answering service. Signing up for a missed call notification service shouldn’t be Plan A. Forward calls to your mobile phone, set up an advanced package with multiple lines, reroute calls to ring multiple phones… Do whatever it takes to connect with a lead. That’s the only truly effective way to create new business.

How to Slow Down in the Summer Without Losing Fall Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Summer is a time for family vacations, relaxing afternoons at the beach, and fun adventures with the kids. And when you own a business and make your own schedule, it’s easy to take as much time off as you want and enjoy every last ray of sunshine. However, if you plan to slow down during the summer months, you won’t be bringing in much revenue. That means you won’t want to be paying for things you don’t need, including certain online advertising services. At the same time, you don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize your business come fall.
Here are our recommendations for when you want to slow down in the summer and pick right back up once fall rolls around.

Do NOT Stop Your SEO

Even if you’re planning to take an entire month’s vacation, don’t stop your SEO. It’s not something you can just pause and resume. If you stop your SEO, all of your progress will be deconstructed and, when you want to restart your program, you’ll have to rebuild from the ground up. It may seem like you’re saving money by skipping a month’s payment, but you’ll actually cost yourself more money in the long run when your campaign loses momentum and you have to wait for it to ramp up again. If you want your fall season to start strong, you simply cannot afford to stop your campaign.
Look at it this way: If you were to go away for a month, would you sell your house and then re-purchase it when you returned? We’re betting no.

DO Pause Your PPC

While you can’t pause your SEO, you can feel free to have us pause your PPC campaign. Since you’re not going to be taking calls or booking jobs while you’re on vacation, there’s no need to pay for people to click on your ads. Once you’re back in the swing of things and ready to work, you can have our specialists resume your PPC campaign. The leads will start rolling in again in no time.
This doesn’t just apply to when you take an extended vacation, either. You can do this if you’re taking a weekend off or even if you’re just booked up for the next few days. We have a particularly astute client, Marvel Appliances Service in Miami, FL, who has this down to a science. He runs his PPC campaign during the week and then pauses it on the weekends when he’s all booked up and can’t handle any more calls. He saves money without sacrificing leads.
It’s kind of like turning off your air conditioning when you leave for the weekend.

DO Reroute Your Phone Number

Rerouting your phone number is super easy to do right from the Client Portal. If you’re spending quality time with your family at the beach one day, you can quickly set your calls to forward to e-mail or to a different phone number so that your cell phone isn’t ringing off the hook. Once you’re ready to take calls again, you can return to the Client Portal and set your phone number back the way it was. But don’t forget to follow up with all those calls you missed!
If you’ll be unavailable for an extended period of time, you can take this a step further by “renting” out your LeadTrax™ site to a local friend in the same industry as you. You would forward your incoming calls to their phone number, and they would pay you a small fee for those calls. It could be a great way to earn a little money while you’re away and help out a friend at the same time.

DO Change Your Voice Mail Greeting

Before you go on vacation for weeks at a time, be sure to change your voice mail greeting so your customers are aware of your availability. You can simply tell them the range of dates that you’ll be away and the date that you’ll be back in business. Giving them this information will ensure that they don’t feel ignored when their calls aren’t returned right away. If they’re existing, loyal customers, they’ll most likely wait for you to return. Prospects might even be willing to wait if they know you’re a reputable company and that you’re just on vacation for a short time.
This puts you in a great position for the fall because you won’t leave any former customers feeling spurned.

Remember to Follow Up

No matter what you decide to do while you’re away, following up with any missed calls is a must. Don’t make your prospects or current customers feel unimportant. The best way to ensure recurring business in the fall is to remind customers how much you value them. As soon as you get back from vacation, return their calls or reply to their e-mails and do your best to fit them into your schedule as soon as possible. While some of those leads might have moved on this time, they’ll remember your attentiveness and may very well call you again in the future.

Prospect Genius

How to Make a Great First Impression With Your Company Website

Make Your Products and Services 100% Clear

Choose Simplicity Over Razzle-Dazzle

Showcase Your Expertise

Match Your Image to Your Desired Customers

Use a Professional E-Mail Address

Understand What’s Attractive—and What’s Not

Do You Have a Plan for Handling Missed Calls?

Have a Professional Voice Mail System

Leverage the Convenience of Technology

Use a Professional Answering Service

But Really: Pick Up Your Phone

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