Pay Per Lead (teaser)

stiofan

Just a little teaser for the next addon in the works 🙂

What is it?
This new addon will allow you to unlock a new way to monetize your directory.
Instead of passing contact forms directly to listing owners, you can send them a teaser and have them decide if they want to pay for it or not. The charge can be a fixed price or a % of the "Budget" entered.

This type of system will allow you to for example, offer FREE listings to users with no strings attached, they only pay for the generated leads they pick.

In theory, if you make the leads FREE, then you also just have a history of the contact forms stored in an efficient way, which I know has been requested a few times 😉

Grant

stiofan Great addition GD team!

justmark

This is interesting because I am planning a version of this but for my Premium Listing owners. The biggest issue in my niche is companies and race teams dealing with leads that are not vetted. It is a waste of time and money. This allows me to do that for them for a price.

morg

This is exactly how all the big pay per lead generation sites do it right? Like Angie's list or home advisor?

a1astair

This looks like a great feature - nice one!

I think it solves a huge problem with directories is that it's difficult to get people to pay for listings as it's so hard to demonstrate the value up front

Looks like you've got some good features built in e.g. being able to review before sending on to listing owner, leaving the budget unscrambled so listings owners can see the value of the lead.

Another couple of thoughts:

Would it be possible to trigger this after sending X number of non-monetised leads? This way a couple of leads could be sent through and then once the value is established, it would be easier to request payment for them
Would a user be able to create one enquiry and submit to several different listed businesses? I appreciate that this is a bit trickier, but it would be amazing if it could work like https://hipages.com.au, where a user lists a job and can send it out to several tradespeople, who can then all get back to them and submit a bid..

Really excited to see you launch this!

paolo

a1astair GeodirectoryExperts.com jobs work that way (custom function). When a job is submitted, a notification is sent to all experts so they can bid. However, I’m not sure how difficult it would be to implement the same for the Pay Per Lead add-on, since this add-on works with the contact form of each listing rather than a CPT. This means the lead is only sent to the specific listing the user chooses to contact.

a1astair

paolo That makes sense, I understand that it is easier to add on a per-form basis

I think the ability to send to several listings using the same information would be a user-centric solution, to avoid asking them to complete the same information several times.. For directory owners, it would likely result in significantly more revenue as more forms sent = more leads for partners = more revenue

But the UX around that could be quite different compared to just a form submitted on an individual listing, which I understand could be difficult to built

Could a workaround be that a user is able to save a form somehow once they have submitted it to one, and then use the same details for other listings too?

Not quite as slick as an experience of building an enquiry and sending to several places at once, but could still deliver 80% of the functionality without a huge rethink of the UX?

stiofan

a1astair the storing the last message sent is something i thought about for the standard blockstrap form.

For the multiple sending, im not sure that's "fair" but it depends on the industry, i think for phase 2 we would look at something like that but once bought it's then not available to others. I guess there are loads of different ways to implement it, we would just need to focus on the ones that work for the majority of people.

a1astair

Hi Stiofan, thanks for the thoughtful reply

Totally agree that it depends on the subject matter.. My directory is jewellers, so I was hoping for prospective customers to be able to specify what they are looking for e.g a 1 carat diamond ring, specify their budget e.g. £5,000 and then send this off to a few jewellers for them to possibly get back to them with a proposal.. Each jeweller may spend £10 to receive the lead and this would be significantly less expensive that paying for a Google CPC ad at £3 with 2% conversion rate

This is a successful business model for tradespeople on sites like https://hipages.com.au/, moving companies on sites like https://sirelo.com.au/ and could be applied across many industries where people need to source several quotes to compare.. Off the top of my heads, this could be photographers, wedding car hire, wedding cakes, elective surgeries, travel agents etc.. Being able to do so from a GeoDirectory would be a great feature and add significant value to the user and the site

In the past I've talked to you about the sign-up and payment process for premium listings as I have found it difficult to get people to pay for listings, but leads with a $ value attached feel like a much easier way to get listing owners engaged and for many industries would be adding a layer of value that they don't get just from Google Map's featured listings

bernardhaasbroek

a1astair I think this could be another great revenue generator, but it may work better the other way around (I'll explain below). We have several lead market place sites like this in the UK and they can be quite lucrative especially when tied to GeoDirectory's location abilities, i.e. house removal jobs etc. But I agree with @stiofan in that this would be a separate plugin extension.

Basically, it could work like this: The customer makes a "Listing" on the website giving all the particulars of the job, i.e the location of the house to be moved, size of the house to be moved, distance to be moved, budget, etc. All contact fields like name, phone no, email, as well as the first line of the address are however hidden by a "Pay Per Lead" button. The various service providers can then search for suitable leads and/or subscribe to this CPT (standard existing GD Saved Search functionality) based on their own unique search criteria like location, min. budget, max size of the house to be moved etc. Whoever first pay for the lead get to see the hidden contact information and the listing itself is then shown as "Claimed" or "Expired".

I am talking to @stiofan and @paolo on how we can make this work as well.

a1astair

bernardhaasbroek The creation of the listing up front sounds great, but are you saying that only one provider would be able to claim a lead and provide a quote?

If so then I don't think that's providing the best experience for the end customer

When sourcing any service over a certain value - say $150, I think it's common practice for most people to get more than one quote..

I always source at least two (and preferably three) quotes for any significant job, whether it's house movers, plumbers or building work.. When conducting a recent garden makeover, this was a very time consuming part of the process, but saved us many thousands of $

Being able to source multiple quotes from several listings providers in one place would therefore be a huge value-add for end consumers.. Rather than having to resubmit the same information to several different sites (which they could do just by going through Google..) or just be supplied one quote by the first person to claim it, if they can receive several (maybe only three people could claim it..), then make a decision on which offers the best value.

@stiofan , if this broader function is something that you are building out, if it would be possible to consult the community on how what features it will include, that would be great

opadalton

That sounds just like the addon we need, but I agree with @bernardhaasbroek that the sender of the reply should also be the one to pay as an option. Besides what Bernard says if people post an ad and you want to prevent them from getting massive amounts of spam, replies from all possible clowns and so on a pay-wall is a great tool to make sure only serious replies get through.

Anyway, I think it will be a great addon anyway. Hope it will be available soon.

bernardhaasbroek

a1astair This is a good point. There could be an option for the website owner to sell the lead X times. So the website owner could allow X number of quotes to come in and then an upgrade listing (which the person making the listing i.e. the "customer" pays) could allow for more quotes to come in like say 2X or 5X or whatever to tie in to @opadalton point above. So the more quotes for the customer, a bit more competition for the service provider (but probably cheaper lead prices to compensate for the leads not being exclusive etc. and more revenue for the website owner as the same lead can be sold multiple times... The website owner may even choose to put some kind of counter on the front-end indicating Y/X leads have been sold to give some kind of indication to the lead buyer how popular and competitive that particular job is.

opadalton

Just out of curiosity: is there a launch-date you can give for this addon?

stiofan

opadalton Likely, we will launch it in beta next week.

opadalton

That would be great, we'll test it for sure. Our only option now is to use Zapier to connect the contactform to a payment-gateway, which is not as easy as we thought, so I am looking forward to it.

justmark

What my clients are looking for is that these leads are vetted. So in the example above I need to make sure that the lead actually has a budget of $400 to spend. This is a major issue with potential race drivers who often do not have the budget required to race and teams get fed up with following up on people that cannot pay. In my situation The lead would apply to each team or service provider individually as they might not want to do business with all the premium listings.

Some great discussions in this thread. Very thought provoking.

bernardhaasbroek

justmark I believe this will be built in. My discussions with @stiofan was that there would be "two modes" (for lack of better wording) for the plugin.

A) would be for low-value mass lead submissions, i.e. the advertiser wants to get as many leads as possible and would pay a fixed commission for each lead. Perhaps it would have some type of spam filter and/or preview of the lead content (without any contact details) but the emphasis is on high-volume rinse and repeat lead generation.

B) is for high-value, low-volume quality lead generation where the site admins can check and curate the lead before it gets offered to the listing provider. In these instances, a separate $amount field on the contact form may be applicable so that a commission on the value of the lead can be charged.

a1astair

Hi GD team,

A couple of additional thoughts on this, which you may have already considered

I think a key feature with this would be to make the acceptance of the lead (and the payment) as friction-free as possible.. If a busy business owner has to get their credit card out every time to pay, there's going to be a lot of friction and it's unlikely that they will do this frequently

Is it possible for the payment details to be saved so that accepting the leads is as close to one-click as possible?

Or is the thinking that people would accept a lead and be invoiced at the end of the month?

Another thing to consider is how to convey to the enquirer if their enquiry hasn't been accepted by any listing owners.. Are they notified after a certain amount of time?

I appreciate that every additional feature makes this more complicated than just a 'pay to receive a form entry', but I think that the UX needs to be quite carefully considered if this is going to be something that listings owners & website customers actually use on an ongoing basis

bernardhaasbroek

a1astair Good points. I think the idea was (and how I intend to use it) that the listing provider could set it up so that the payment comes off their GP Wallet instead of repeated Bank Card transactions. But a condensed once a month/ quarter summarised invoice could be more appropriate in a high-volume lead generation scenario.

Giving the listing-provider a deadline/ultimatum by when the lead would expire is another great idea. This will instil urgency and the enquirer could then be informed if their lead was not taken up by the listing provider so that they may make alternative plans, rather than being kept on the line for a reply from the listing provider.

justmark

bernardhaasbroek This would work for me and I think a lot of others.

a1astair

Hey bernardhaasbroek , could I ask what you mean by GP wallet?