SEATTLE – There’s good news and bad news for financial services and insurance companies across the US in the fast-emerging area of mobile advertising, according to a just-released study by the Marchex Institute, the data and insights team at Marchex (NASDAQ:MCHX). The study is based on more than one million phone calls analyzed by the Marchex Call Analytics platform from consumers who conducted mobile searches or clicked on mobile ads for banks, lenders, auto insurers or life insurers.
Millennials are playing a huge role in this trend that mobile-influenced offline purchases are expected to be the biggest portion of consumer spending from mobile, twenty times larger than m-commerce.
Among the findings announced today:
- 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).
“Our data shows that financial services and insurance brands are already experiencing profound changes related to the broader online-to-offline trend: that it is now typical for a consumer to search on their mobile phone for an insurance provider or bank and make a phone call or an in-person visit based directly on that search result,” said John Busby, Marchex SVP of Consumer Insights and co-author of today’s report. “Millennials are playing a huge role in this trend that mobile-influenced offline purchases are expected to be the biggest portion of consumer spending from mobile, twenty times larger than m-commerce.”
“Today’s study also suggests that insurance and financial services companies could consider some pretty basic changes to address long hold times for incoming calls that are currently resulting in more than a 25% hang-up rate,” added Poom Poochaiyanont, analytics manager at the Marchex Institute and co-author of the study. “Beyond getting a marketplace snapshot, a big part of the value of a report like this lies in what it can identify in terms of challenges and potential areas of improvement that can impact the bottom line.”
Today’s study also provides more information about which consumers are actually calling insurance and financial services companies from mobile search results:
- On average 56% of callers that make at least a two-minute call to insurance or financial services companies are new customers. The rest are existing customers.
- Insurance companies tend to reach low and middle-income consumers from mobile advertisements. This is not surprising, as many young people are still in the early stages of their careers. Meanwhile, financial services companies are attracting consumers through mobile advertising who are both younger than the general population and more affluent.
About Marchex
Marchex is a mobile advertising technology company. The company provides a suite of products and services for businesses that depend on consumer phone calls to drive sales. Marchex’s mobile advertising platform delivers new customer phone calls to businesses, while its technology analyzes the data in these calls to help maximize ad campaign results. Marchex disrupts traditional advertising models by giving businesses full transparency into their ad campaign performance and charging them based on new customer acquisition.
Please visit www.marchex.com, blog.marchex.com or @marchex on Twitter (Twitter.com/Marchex), where Marchex discloses material information from time to time about the company, its financial information, and its business.
