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The First Call Imperative
Slide show version (Opens as pop-up)
How important is it to get the first call on your Yellow Pages ad? How important is pole position to a race car driver? How important is it to get a fast start in a footrace? How important is it to score first? The answer to all these questions is, “Very important.” To get a firm understanding of just how important, we need to dig a little deeper into how and why people use the Yellow Pages.
This year in North America, the Yellow Pages will be consulted about 20 billion times by 240 million people. So, while it is certainly true that online searches have bitten into the Yellow Pages dominance, the Yellow Pages are, by no means a dying medium. They are alive and well and still making money for their advertisers and shareholders.
This Year: 20,000,000,000 Yellow Pages
references by 240,000,000 people
Out of those 20 billion references, the reader will call at least 1 advertiser in 88% of these Yellow Pages visits. That makes a 17,600,000,000 first calls made to advertisers, generated by the Yellow Pages.
This Year: 17,600,000,000 First Calls
on Yellow Pages ads.
Of those 17,600,000,000 callers, 90% will lead to a sale. That’s 15,840,000,000 individual sales. Bear in mind that that figure would be for the number of sales, not the dollar amount. The actual dollar value amount of annual business generated has never been calculated, but our guess would be a number in the trillions.
This Year: 15,840,000,000 Individual Sales
will be Generated
Of those 17,600,000,000 callers, 47% will be new to the business they are calling. That makes 8,272,000,000 potential new customers brought to advertisers by the Yellow Pages. Some of those will have never used your product or service, but many will be previous customers of your competitors. We all love new customers, but, isn’t it just a little more satisfying to bring a competitor’s customer into our fold?
This Year: 8,272,000,000 Potential
New Customers will be introduced
Out of the 20,000,000 references to the Yellow Pages that will be made this year, 53% of them do not know any supplier of the product or service they are looking for, and can be influenced by what they see in the Yellow Pages. That’s huge! That means that, every year, 10,600,000,000 people open the Yellow Pages and say, “Convince me to do business with you.”
This Year: 10,600,000,000 people will say,
“Convince me to do business with you.”
The flip side to this piece of information is also crucial. If 53% of Yellow Pages readers didn’t know a supplier for the product or service they were looking for, that means that 47% of readers did know a supplier, but consulted the Yellow Pages anyway! Why would they do that? Why not just call them directly?
The Yellow Pages Give You an Opportunity to
Swipe Your Competitors’ Ad Budgets
The most likely answer to that is that they knew of the supplier from some other form of advertising. Maybe they heard a radio spot or TV commercial. Maybe they remembered seeing one of their trucks driving around. Maybe a friend told them about the company. Maybe they saw a billboard. Maybe they saw a newspaper ad. Whatever the medium was that they first heard about the supplier, they came to the Yellow Pages to find their phone number. Once they get to the heading, they are presented with a whole slew of choices. No matter who paid ad dollars to bring them to the Yellow Pages, once they get there, it’s a whole new ball game.
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