By setting up your toll free number to skip your auto attendant greeting and immediately forward calls to your cell phone, you’re effectively adding another line to your mobile service. This line you can exclusively advertise to your business contacts, and gain several immediate benefits to both your work and home life…

1. Look More Professional

While there is a more personal element to advertising your cell phone number on things like business cards, doing so immediately betrays that you’re a small business or one-man-shop. If this isn’t the appeal you’re going for, using a toll free number to mask your cell phone number helps you appear more established and gives your business contacts greater confidence.

2. Screen Business Calls with Call Announcements

Call forwarding through your FreedomVoice toll free number includes the option to create a call announcement – a brief pre-recorded message you create that lets you know the incoming call is a business call when you answer. This way, when you answer your cell phone, you’ll know immediately whether it’s a business call or not and can greet the caller appropriately. You can also have the caller prompted to speak their name and have this played back to you before you decide whether you want to take the call or redirect it to voicemail instead.

3. Stop Calls Outside “Business Hours”

Even the busiest of entrepreneurs needs to disconnect every once in a while and keep their home life separate from their work life. With a toll free number and immediate call forwarding, you can simply temporarily disable your call forwarding number and have all of your business calls instead go to your voicemail. Your personal contacts still call your cell phone number directly, so you’re only shutting off your business line.

If you really can’t stand to be out of contact in case of a critical call, you can still enable text messaging call alerts and even transcribe voicemails, so you can quickly scan any voicemail messages callers are leaving and return any calls you absolutely have to.

Get Your Toll Free Number Today!

Hand-pick your own toll free number starting at under $10 a month. That’s a small price to pay for your privacy and some peace of mind. You can also upgrade to an 800 number or vanity number for a low one-time cost. Remember – immediate call forwarding is just one way to use your toll free number. As your business grows and you find you need features like an auto-attendant, they’ll be available to you at no extra charge.

One of our most popular voicemail features is the ability to set up automated question and answer voicemail boxes. These voicemail boxes prompt callers with a series of your pre-recorded questions, then string their answers together into a single voicemail message. For example, if your automated questionnaire involves five quick “Yes or No” questions, you might get a message in this voicemail box of, “Yes – No – Yes – Yes – No.”

Here are a couple great ways you can use question and answer voicemail boxes with your business…

1. Conducting Call-In Surveys

If callers are dialing your toll free number for the express purpose of taking a survey, question and answer voicemail makes automating these surveys a snap. Simply present any surveys you’re conducting as a extension options from your auto attendant recording. When callers choose their survey extension, they will hear your pre-recorded series of questions and be given a chance to respond to each. When they’re finished, you get a single voicemail message that has all of their survey responses, in order, left in the voicemail box corresponding to the survey they chose.

2. Customer Service Follow-Up

Another very popular form of survey-taking is asking callers to respond to questions at the conclusion of speaking to a customer service or technical support representative. With your question and answer voicemail service, a representative can ask the caller if they wouldn’t mind taking a brief follow-up survey. If they agree, the representative can simply transfer the caller to the survey extension, where the follow-up questions will begin automatically and record the caller’s responses.

3. Automated Order Taking

Using question and answer voicemail to automate taking orders over the phone can be a great time-saver and a real convenience for your returning customers. Since they can reach your virtual phone system 24/7, your customers can get their orders in when it’s convenient for them – even if that’s outside your business hours. Callers simply identify their account information (e.g. first and last name, and a password for security purposes), and what they would like to order with the billing information they already have on file with you. You get a single voicemail message that contains all the information you need to look up their account, verify their identity, and provision their order.

Next Week’s Toll Free Number Tricks: Block Harassing Phone Calls!

Properly executed, landing pages can be highly effective at improving your website’s conversion rate, or ability to turn clicks into new business. When given the chance, I recommend consulting with a good copywriter and designer for maximum benefit.

Here are the four basic elements you should look to include when building your own landing pages…

1. Attention-Grabbing Headlines
The headline is the first thing your visitors will see on your landing page and it sets up the page for the rest of your message. Headlines should be strong, descriptive, and align with the language found on the ad or link your visitors clicked to reach your website.

2. A Strong Call to Action
The call to action should be in an obvious place and be easy to find. It should be larger than other buttons as well as a brighter color to stand out. Button copy is also important, and should tell the visitor what they should expect to happen when they click the button.

3. Captivating Copy
Your body copy should be clear, to the point, and support the landing page’s call to action while summarizing key points with bullets. Credible testimonials can also be a great trust-builder that can get visitors to take action.

4. Overall Flow of Design
The design of your landing page should have a clean layout, appropriate stacking order of information, and plenty of whitespace. The page’s focus needs to be on getting your visitor to take action. Your graphics, images, video, etc., should be used to emphasize important elements. All unnecessary distractions should be removed. Keep it simple!

Taking the Next Step
The four key elements above just scratch the surface of landing page design and optimization, but I consider them good blocks to build on when you’re just getting started. For a more in depth reference, I recommend  grabbing your copy of this amazing book on Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash. The information and tips found in this book will help you take your landing pages to the next level.

800 numbers have grown increasingly scarce for a while – and for that reason every toll free number service provider values them with some kind of one-time premium. Frankly, the upgrade is worth it if the price is right – it’s sure to pay for itself. To say nothing bad about an 866, 877, or 888 prefix toll free number, for my money I’d go for the original, the true value. We think you should to, and to help you get there we’ve dropped our 800 number price to just $10.

That’s right – for the cost of a couple lattes, you get the added value of kicking your virtual phone system into overdrive with an 800 prefix number that’s going to be a rock-solid cornerstone for your advertising. That “8-0-0″ gives your company an instant lift in trust level, a more professional appearance, and virtually eliminates customer misdials. It’s rare in the business world that you find something that costs so little and provides so much in return.

So if you’re looking to get a toll free number for your business, be sure not to miss this golden opportunity. Go get your own 800 number for the low cost of $10 – and that’s after you get a chance to try FreedomVoice service free for 15 days. If you’re already a FreedomVoice customer and want to take this opportunity to switch to an 800 number or add some more numbers to your service, give us a call at 1-800-477-1477 ext. 2 or email us at support@freedomvoice.com and we’ll get you set up.

This quick, free, and effective tool helps you set up tests that distribute new visitors to your old and new pages and track how effective each is at getting your customers to complete an action on your website. Whether that’s filling out a lead form, downloading a report, subscribing to your service, or placing an order – you’ll know which version of your website does more for getting you new business.

Creating Your Website Optimizer Account

If you don’t already have a Google Account for services like AdWords, Analytics, or Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to create one. If you do already have a Google Account, you can log in here and answer a couple quick questions to add Website Optimizer to your account. Once you get signed in and have your alternate pages ready, it’s time to create your first test, or ”experiment,” as Google calls it.

Creating an A/B or “Split” Test

There are two options for testing models: A/B and multivariate testing. A/B testing involves testing two or more different pages (even if they’re mostly identical), whereas multivariate testing allows you to test a large number of elements on a given page. Multivariate testing requires a lot of data (hits to your website) to generate results, and is a little more challenging to implement, so beginners should start with A/B testing.

Setting up your test takes three steps: providing your page URLs, installing your JavaScript tags, and then verifying proper installation. In the first step, you name your experiment and provide the URLs of your test pages and the “conversion” page, or where visitors coming through any test page need to reach to be considered a success. Two things to remember: the more variations you try to test with A/B testing, the longer your experiment will take, and all variations are measured strictly against the original and not each other, like a game of Blackjack.

In the second step, you’ll need to add some JavaScript tags to the code of each page involved in the test. These tags are what cause your test pages to rotate between new visitors and flag successes when they occur. To install these tags, Google gives you two options: install them yourself if you know how, or get a link that you can send to someone else so they can do the installation. Finally, Google will verify that your tags are properly installed and you’re ready to begin your experiment.

Once launched, there are a couple more notable options at your disposal. First, you can choose your percentage of traffic to use for testing. The default is 100%, but you can set this lower to minimize the short-term risk of testing unproven pages. The trade-off is that your testing is going to take longer to produce results. Second, you can choose to auto-disable losing variations to speed up testing. You set a threshold below which losing variations are automatically removed from the test, allowing more website traffic to go to the remaining pages. Even if you don’t select this option, you’re not stuck sending visitors to clear losers – you can still manually disable losing variations at any time. Once you’re satisfied with your experiment setup, sit back and watch the data pour in day by day.

When Should I Stop My Test?

Google Website Optimizer uses a statistical method for determining each variation page’s chance to beat the original version. You’ll be able to see each page’s conversion rate, plus or minus a range of testing variability, and how that stacks up with the original. This range is shown also as a color-coded bar in a box graph. Any overlap is grey – it tells you nothing. If there is some overlapping and some not, the part that isn’t will be colored yellow - meaning you need more data for definitive results. When there is no overlap between between a variation’s conversion rate range and the original page’s conversion rate range, the bar will either turn red (loser) or green (winner).

If you’re testing several pages, red variations should be disabled as they appear in order to allow more traffic to go to the remaining pages. Once you’ve arrived at a green bar winner, it’s time to conclude your experiment. Click on “Stop” on the experiment report, and you’ll be prompted to either choose a winning variation and continue with it exclusively or set up a follow-up experiment if you had several potential winners that you’d like to run on a more narrow test.

The hardest part of knowing when to stop a test is in the case where you aren’t getting conclusive results. If you’ve received a high volume of visits (several thousand) and your variations are still neck-and-neck with the original, you may need to re-evaluate your testing. If there’s something more worthwhile for you to test, don’t be afraid to end an experiment for being inconclusive and move on.

The Next Step

Once you get the hang of testing, you can branch out to using multivariate design instead of A/B testing to get quicker and more thorough results. For further reading, my favorite book written on Google Website Optimizer is Always Be Testing by Bryan Esienberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar. The ideas and inspiration contained therein are sure to keep you busy with finding ways to fine-tune your website. Also, be sure to check out the Google Website Optimizer Blog for the latest news and tips on how to get the most out of your testing!

Next Week’s Website Improvement Topic: Landing Page Optimization!

This week we’ll cover three ways the features of your virtual phone system can cut down the time between when a caller dials your toll free number and when they reach someone that can help.

1. A “Get-to-the-Point” Auto Attendant

Your pre-recorded auto attendant greeting from FreedomVoice welcomes your callers and directs them where to go. For new customers wanting to learn more about your business, this can be a great resource to provide helpful information before they reach someone live – or even answer their question without them needing to speak to someone. For frustrated callers, this greeting can be seen as a barrier between them and getting their problem solved.

To help both types of callers get what they need, it’s important to record your auto attendant greeting in a way that properly prioritizes information. After a brief introduction, include an immediate action prompt like, “if you know the extension of the party you are trying to reach, you may dial it at any time,” or “to hear a directory of available extensions, dial 8 at any time.” Then start to list some shortcut options for your most popular extensions, like ”dial 1 for Sales, dial 2 for Support, or dial 3 for Billing.” This helps your more impatient callers get what they want quickly, and then lets you spend the rest of your auto attendant greeting covering additional information like new promotions, driving directions, changes in store hours, or how to reach your website.

2. Simultaneous Ring for Direct Extensions

All FreedomVoice virtual phone systems come with ACD routing, a feature that lets you set custom rules and rotations for how your calls are forwarded live to your and your team. One of these rules is Simultaneous Ring, which will dial multiple call forwarding numbers at the same time and connect with whichever answers first. This makes Simultaneous Ring perfect for direct or personal extensions. Instead of your caller waiting on hold while we roll through your home office phone, your desk phone at work, and your cell phone to try and track you down, all of your phones trigger at the same time. Your caller gets connected with you immediately wherever you may be.

This also gives you the freedom to choose how you want to take the call. If you’re about to step out of the office and your phones begin to ring, you can choose to answer the call on your cell phone and take the call with you on the go. And vice versa – if you’re just getting into the office, you can take the call from the comfort and clarity of your office phone instead of relying on your cell phone reception or battery life.

3. Managing Your Call Queues

Call queues are a powerful tool to help you manage the peaks in your call volume by keeping callers rotating on hold until a representative is available. But this feature can also be very dangerous, because an improperly managed call queue can result in on-hold times that anger your callers and set the stage for an unpleasant call experience. FreedomVoice provides several tools to help you manage your call queues, including real-time monitoring and the ability to set a maximum hold duration.

Real-time monitoring lets you see how large your call queues get during your peak hours and days, which can help you manage break and lunch periods and staff appropriately throughout the week. Maximum hold duration puts a limit on how long your callers can remain listening to hold music and waiting for a representative until they are sent to voicemail. While it can be tempting to set this to a really long time, we typically recommend against that. Without a reasonable limit for hold duration, you run the risk of piling up a backlog of frustrated callers. It’s usually better to let callers clear out of your queue, leave a message, and allow you to return their call outside of peak hours. Find a balance that works for your business between answering the most calls and keeping callers on hold for the shortest amount of time.

Also, if you’re using call queues and aren’t available to take calls 24 hours a day, be absolutely sure you’ve set your business hours on your call forwarding numbers. While this is good advice even if you’re not using call queues, leaving a call queue live outside of business hours can mean your callers sitting through long hold times and going to voicemail with no chance of their call being answered.

With 866, 877, and 888 prefix toll free numbers, the main cause of misdialing is in the prefix. 800 numbers have been around considerably longer than these other numbers, so “8-0-0″ is the default in the minds of your customers. If they don’t have your contact info handy, there’s a risk they might fill in the blank with the wrong prefix.

Here are some easy ways to prevent prefix misdials.

1. Split the Prefix Up

There’s a growing trend among businesses that use 866, 877, and 888 toll free numbers to strongly emphasize the second two digits by breaking the prefix into two parts. This way, customers can’t gloss over it and go straight to 800 in their minds. For example, instead of reading a number in a tv commercial or radio spot as “1-866-555-1212″, instead use, “1-8-66-555-1212″ (one, eight, sixty-six, five-five-five, one-two-one-two).

This practice does add a little complexity, so it typically works best when used with an attractive word-spelling or repeating-digit vanity toll free number that is already easy to remember.

2. Get an 800 Number

Occam’s razor – the easiest answer is often the best one. If you’re worried customers might be misdialing your toll free number because it’s not an 800 number, the simplest solution is to, well, start using an 800 number. You’ll need to update your advertising, your website, and anywhere else your toll free number is floating around, but once you do you’ll be worry-free moving forward.

The supply of available 800 numbers is as low as it has ever been, causing some toll free providers to start charging outrageous premiums or stop selling them altogether. Not to worry, we’ve made it easy for you to choose an 800 number of your own for just ten bucks.

3. The “Superfecta”

Some businesses are really really worried about misdials because they fear competitors might pick up a similar number with a different prefix to try and confuse customers. To prevent this from happening, they pick out a toll free number that is available in every prefix and get them all. For example, why stop at just getting 800-555-1212, if you can get 866- 877- and 888-555-1212 as well and point them all to the same virtual phone system? Some might call this method overkill, but it definitely works.

Next Week’s Toll Free Number Tricks: Cutting Down Hold Times!

Bring carrots.

In last week’s installment of this segment on using heatmaps, I mentioned that live user technology was expensive. In general, this is true – any time you’re involving live people in your testing, you have to willing to pay them for their time. And, well, people can be expensive. But there are affordable solutions out there that have flipped this idea on its head by making it simple for businesses and website testers to come together. Today I’m going to shamelessly talk up my personal favorite of these services, with which I’ve been continually impressed:

UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com is exactly what it professes to be, “low cost usability testing.” For $29 a tester (lower if you prepay), you get matched up with well-screened users that, from the comfort of their own computer, will visit your site and record their audio and visual experience.

Getting started is very easy – you provide your website URL, a “scenario” that describes the typical mindset of your visitors, what “tasks” the users should try to accomplish in about 15 minutes of using your website, and how many users you want. If it helps you, you can specify demographics for your users such as gender, age, country, household income, and level of computer savvy. You can even specify a particular user if they’ve performed well for you on past tests.

What You Get Back

Within a couple hours, you can log in and start watching your videos of users navigating your website and articulating their thoughts. They’ll narrate exactly what they’re reading and why, why they’re clicking on certain things, what catches their attention, and what, if anything, raises red flags or confuses them. There are also text summaries available, breaking down into concise points what users like and don’t like about their experience with your website.

The idea is that you get actionable data – thoughts, feelings, and experiences of real live humans that tried to do something on your website. With this information, you can start to identify trends and make changes like fixing places where multiple users get lost or confused, reworking buttons that to you seem obvious but everyone seems to miss, or making your hidden toll free number more visible.

5 Tips on Successful Usability Testing

1. Invest in a good number of users. Less than three users is probably not going to do you much good. A single person might respond negatively to a certain aspect of your website that to everyone else likes. The name of the game with website usability testing is trends, and trends require several unique experiences. Dig a little bit deeper into your wallet and you’ll get a lot more return on your investment.

2. Don’t take it personally. I’ve met a handful of web designers that despise usability testing, reacting to users’ negative feedback with quips like, “they’re not web designers, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” That’s neither constructive nor remotely relevant. The people that use your website day-to-day aren’t web designers either (unless that’s your audience).

3. Don’t overreact. Too often with any kind of testing, first-time users respond to the results by making sweeping changes to every little thing they can. Move slow, start with things that are most obvious from the results, areas of concern or dislike that are shared by several users. You can become more picky with future tests, once you have a feel for it.

4. Give your own feedback. On UserTesting.com, you can rate the quality of your users on a 5-star scale and leave a description if you want. Don’t underestimate the value of this feature. By rating users, you’re helping the service keep its pool of users strong. If there are some users that are more helpful than others (and that doesn’t just mean nicer), remember them for your next test.

5. Shop multiple usability services. I’ve made no secret about it – I’m a fan of UserTesting.com for being quick, affordable, and thorough – but there are countless other solutions out there for website usability testing. I’d wager others are probably going to cost you more in both dollars and hours, but you may find what you get back is worth the extra investment.

Next Week’s Website Improvement Topic: Google’s Website Optimizer!

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits of each type of virtual phone number to help you make an informed choice.

Local Virtual Phone Numbers

The main feature (or drawback) of a local virtual phone number is that it betrays the size and scope of your business. To a potential customer, your local number is indistinguishable from a cell phone number until they call and hear your professional virtual phone system. The key is to know how and when that small size appearance is appropriate and beneficial.

In many types of business, the appearance of local presence is crucial to gaining new business. These verticals typically include areas of our lives where we place a large amount of trust in the companies we choose to work with, such as insurance, real estate, banking, legal counsel, and health care. These can also include areas where we want to feel like we’re giving back to our community, such as local retail shops or restaurants. We want to know that these companies aren’t big, faceless corporations and that there’s someone nearby that is working for us and shares our concerns and interests. In these cases, a local virtual phone number is better than a toll free number for establishing a lasting connection with a local community and its residents.

Toll Free Numbers

A toll free number immediately suggests to callers that you are an established and professional business, especially if you have an attractive 800 number or vanity toll free number. It implies a nationwide reach and the size, stability, and resources necessary to support that reach — even if reality is closer to a small local office of dedicated professionals or a savvy entrepreneur working from home. A toll free number helps your business stand with the pack against your larger competitors, getting your foot in the door so customers can see your unique qualities and value.

A toll free number also offers a scalable one-number solution. Your business might be tied to one area now, but what if you expand? With local numbers, every time you open an office or simply start doing business in a new city, you’re going to need to get another number for that area. And a new number could mean all-new marketing materials, such as fliers or business cards. Toll free numbers work nationwide, meaning you can scale your business up and expand anywhere across the country without needing to change one thing about how your customers reach you over the phone.

So Which Is It?

Ultimately, the decision comes down to perception. If there’s value to your business in being seen as smaller, more personal, and more in-touch with a local community, then a local virtual phone number is the right choice. If you’re up against larger competitors or have plans to expand, you’re better off with the professional image and scalability of a toll free number.

It’s time to stop guessing and know exactly how your visitors see and use your website. It’s time for heatmaps.

What Are Heatmaps?

Heatmaps are a tool to help you visualize which elements on your website are more demanding of a visitor’s attention. This can help you identify potential flaws in design, such as images that distract visitors from taking your desired action. There are three primary types of heatmaps: image file, click-tracking, and eye-tracking. Eye-tracking heatmaps involve using live testers and sophisticated headset equipment to gather data, and are generally cost-prohibitive for small business use. For this reason, I’ll focus on the first two instead.

Image File Heatmaps

An image file heatmap, like the one generated above by Feng-GUI, analyzes an image and shows you what parts should theoretically stand out to visitors. When looking at these heatmaps, you’re mainly trying to figure out if there’s anything that distracts visitors from the main purpose of your website. If the focus of your website is to get subscriptions, for example, a large image or advertisement below the subscribe link may cause visitors to look past the action you want them to take and let their focus wander elsewhere. Scrutinize any attention-hogging elements like oversized pictures, 3rd-party advertisements, or excessively large font and adjust your design so that your images complement rather than block your goals.

In practice, I’ve found image file heatmaps best serve to point out any glaring potential distractions before a website launches. Using them to diagnose problems with an existing website can be a bit risky, since they rely solely on visuals and don’t speak to the visitor’s actual intent in the context of your website.

Feng-GUI has both a free-to-use version found here that lets you upload image files (.png or .jpg under 1MB in size) and receive an instant heatmap. They also offer paid services that give you more control and better maps.

Click-Tracking Heatmaps

Click-tracking heatmaps, like the one above from Crazy Egg, use click-tracking over time to show you the hotspots of where your visitors are actually clicking on your pages. When looking at these heatmaps, you’re looking less for major visual distractions, and more for contextual attention derailers. It’s not so much what your visitors are looking at, but what they’re finding that causes them to click. Is there a link to another page that gets your visitors off the correct path? Is there a search bar that’s drawing people in before they even see what’s on this page? Is there an important link that’s not getting any attention at all?

Crazy Egg is, well, crazy good in that it goes way beyond simple heatmaps. As you get more comfortable using heatmaps to analyze your webpages, Crazy Egg offers a strong array of additional reports, including a click map overlay and their amazing Confetti map. Confetti not only tells you where visitors are clicking, but also where the visitors that made those clicks came from, including what search engine terms they used or what referring sites sent them your way. You can get all this from just $9 / month. Considering how much it can do to help you get more out of your online business, this small investment can have immediate and dramatic ROI.

Starting Slowly, Work with a Designer

It’s easy with heatmaps to jump to conclusions and start pointing fingers at what’s not working and why when it comes to your website. My greatest advice when it comes to heatmaps is to get started slowly with small changes and, if you’re not a designer yourself, enlist someone who has a keen eye for such things before making any broad or sweeping changes to your website. Heatmaps are a tool, and without proper expertise, you can easily do more harm than good.

Have you used heatmaps before? Share your results!