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Web marketers have discovered the value of adding audio to websites and sales pages for a number of years now. Used properly, audio can really help visitors connect and get more excited about a product or service (video is quickly jumping into this space too.)
One overlooked use of audio is to help enhance your customer’s experience with you, your products, and services.
- Audio welcome messages on thank you pages or in autogenerated email
- “How to” audio links delivered with products
- Personalized instructions to help get more from a service
- Getting started audios to help a client know what to do next
- Ongoing conference reports that wrap up meeting notes
- Conference call summaries for non attendees
- Assignments for third party vendors or collaborators
Finally, I would love to see this: An FAQ page with the questions posed via audio from real prospects and clients and your expert answers or those of real clients spoken for each.
By the way, I use a very effective service for this type of audio enhancements called Audio Acrobat. I like it most for its ease of use. I can record from my computer or telephone and upload mp3 files. I can also create guest lines and allow clients to record messages via telephone. I’ve also seen podcasters use this feature to take recorded audience calls and drop them into shows. Audio Acrobat makes it easy to publish the audios and place them on web pages and emails.
Once you get the hang of it you may find lots of great uses for audio.
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at May 24, 07 | 10:39 pm and is filed under Referral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great article. I don’t do it enough on my Camping blog. I did put audio of the ghost story “Where is my golden A-a-r-r-m-M-M?” on my post a few months ago, it was fun.
http://www.joyofcamping.com/camping-tips/golden-arm/
Kay
John,
Have you done any testing to see if the audio helped increases? I haven’t and I’m looking to do some testing using both audio & the OddCast talking heads. Any first-hand experiences you’d like to share? Maybe a future blog post?
~ mel
Melvin Ram
CEO, Volcanic Internet Marketing
Direct: 916 743 9369
I have a custome character made to greet visitirs and tell a little bit about the item the customer is looking at. I went on the ebay chatroom Q & A to see if I could get some insight on how to deal with a customer who was complaining about the cost of shipping. The people there assasinated my girl. One even went as far as to say she was not native american and that she was offended by the character. I am native american and the character was made in the likeness of a photo of myself that I supplied the avitar company (oddcast).
Others said that marketing research shows that avitars & audio in general hurt more than help. Where can I find a study that supports this claim? You say here that you like it…what do your customers say?
Cheryl,
I am planning on doing a few tracked experiments to see if audio + oddcast truly helps or hurts. Email me at melvin~at~volcanicmarketing.com if you’d like me to email you the results of my tests.
~ Mel
Cheryl and Melvin,
I’m still not convinced about the avitars as they sometimes are not very natural, even well done ones.
I do know that audio helps a bunch both in terms of conversion and certainly in terms of lower customer service inquiries.
I have tested both and they work well when used properly and in the context of the page.
I don’t know the stats, but I do know that if there is audio or video on a home page that turns on automatically, I almost always leave immediately and never come back. Audio and video have their place, but I don’t like being assaulted with it unexpectedly and have learned to keep my speakers off unless I specifically want to listen to something, rendering welcome audio useless.
They also make pages load slowly, even with broadband.
It’s always best to give visitors the option of listening or not, before the stream starts.