Hosted VoIP

To help drive customer satisfaction and entice more people to try out its free, ad-supported international and domestic VoIP service, RingPlus is offering to give its “funniest subscriber” a free Hawaiian vacation for two.

 

To participate, subscribers simply make up anything funny and entertaining, and then call in to RingPlus to leave it as a voicemail. Later, the voicemails will be played as ring back tones ads, and the RingPlus community will cast their votes for the funniest one.

Ad-supported telephony is a relatively new and as-of-yet unproven service provider model where advertisements are injected into call streams to off-set the cost of the call – or to connect it for free. The model has seen some success in generating new revenue streams for telephony providers.

With ad supported telephony, a caller must listen to a short advertisement prior to having his or her call connected. Sometimes the advertisements are “personalized” for the user – for example, using demographics and personal information about the caller stored in the service provider’s database, advertisers can more precisely target ads at those consumers who are most likely to buy their products or services.

Some of the advertisements are “interactive” – for example, sometimes the ad will prompt the caller to use the telephone keypad to complete a short survey about their shopping habits or about certain products they use. The advertisement might also direct the user to a secure Website, providing a promotional code for access, where the user can find additional promotions or perhaps some other incentive, such as the chance to play a free game or participate in some other service.

The advantage for advertisers is that they get to present their ads to a “captive audience:” In other words, the caller must listen to the entire ad in order to place their call. The advantage for callers is free or at least super cheap domestic and international calls. The model can also be utilized by mobile operators – and it has even found a potential place in the call center industry: Call centers can get reduced service costs by playing advertisements to callers while they are on hold. Some call centers have deployed this model simply for the purpose of reducing caller boredom while the caller is waiting in the queue.

RingPlus says the Hawaiian giveaway is one of many tests it runs on its advertising platform to investigate consumer behavior modification and response rates for different advertisements. The company claims that it keeps customer data collected through its platform private (however it does share results with its advertisers).

The company claims it experiences an average response rate of more than 4.1 percent for the advertisements in its system. However, it claims it can boost this to 6.1 percent by combining ring-back advertisements for branding activities with the direct response features of the system.

“Advertising during a recession means you must be more concerned about the quality of your advertising impressions,” RingPlus states in its press release. “Consumer interaction is a must. For this, consumers must be in a good mood so they are receptive to your ad, and the reach and frequency of your ad must be controllable.”

“Targeting at the granular level is a must as well,” the release continues, adding that its service enables targeting based on age, area code, date of birth, income, gender and hobbies as well as by precise time intervals and locations. “RingPlus has well over 20,000 targeting possibilities,” the release states.

RingPlus started offering free calls in October of 2008. The company now connects calls to more than 50 countries. Calls can be completed to any land line or cellular phone.

RingPlus' service is based on the patented software algorithm from Karl Seelig and Anita Erickson (US Patent No. 7,006,608).

For more information, visit www.ringplus.net.