How big of a problem is shopping cart abandonment, when consumers ditch an online purchase right before completing it? According to Forrester Research, the number could be as high as 71 percent of all online shoppers. Jason Spievak, CEO of RingRevenue, added that the report cited not being able to get someone on the phone as one of the reasons people don’t complete online purchases. This may explain the growth of Santa Barbara, CA-based RingRevenue, providers of call marketing automation software, which announced today that it has closed a $3.25 million Series B funding round from previous investors GRP Partners and Rincon Venture Partners.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its product development, sales, and marketing efforts to keep up with what it cited as rapid growth over the past two years, having tripled revenues year-over-year. The team behind RingRevenue brought with them the success of a prior startup in the same space, CallWave, which they saw through to an IPO. “We know the call market very well, and we know the online advertising market very well, two areas where we have deep expertise, so we took that to address a larger market opportunity at RingRevenue,” Spievak said in an interview with BetaKit. “The big challenge is that unlike in the online world there is no effective way of knowing where your best inbound phone calls are coming from and a platform for managing them.”
Enter RingRevenue, which operates on the belief that when a customer calls in to get more information about a product they are more likely to convert, and aims to cut the costs associated with have a phone-based support team. The company’s solution aims to increase the number of customers that call in, pre-qualifying them as high or low conversion potentials, which then allows companies to focus on customers most likely to purchase something.
Advertisers can create campaigns on the platform, assigning a unique phone number to their online, offline, and mobile campaigns so they know where calls are coming from. Then companies can set certain criteria to pre-qualify callers, such as the geographic area the call is coming from, the time zone and range, how often they’ve called, and more, so only calls that meet pre-set criteria are routed to call centers.
“If you look at certain categories like financial services, education, home services, and dozens of others, advertisers are paying a couple of bucks per clicks, and clicks convert 1-2 percent depending on the category…phone calls convert 30-50 percent of the time. When a trained agent gets you on the phone…the order value goes up quite a bit. As a result advertisers are willing to spend up to $100 per call,” Spievak added.
While online advertising drives potential leads to the right place, the company believes it’s a phone call that most often helps close the deal when it comes to big-ticket items, like insurance, jewelry, and mortgages as opposed to clicking the ‘buy now’ button. Another startup, NYC-based SaleMove, is also looking to help those high-end retailers and service providers with its platform, which allows internal sales teams to pre-qualify and gauge the interest of individuals as they’re on their website, letting them call customers for an audio or video walk through.
To keep up with its growth, the company will be adding offices in New York City and the San Francisco area, in addition to ramping up its hiring efforts. The company has an existing customer base and past industry success behind them, and appears to be on a steady pace to capture a growing cut of the advertising budgets of both SMBs and large enterprises. With the company reporting that U.S. consumers make an average of 30 billion calls to call centers every year, finding a way to manage and optimize inbound calls will likely only become a bigger priority for ecommerce companies going forward.