SmallBizResource Blog -- Marketing

MatchPoint.com Offers Yellow Pages Alternative

Posted by Fredric Paul Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008, 12:10 PM ET

I recently had an interesting chat with Peter Adams, CEO of Matchpoint.com, which is dedicated to “providing small businesses with a really easy way to use the Net to acquire customers.” The company’s unique approach piqued my interest.

How does your small business find customers? Traditionally, many small businesses relied heavily on the Yellow Pages. With the rise of the Internet, savvy small companies built Web sites. But Adams contends that many small local retail businesses – often with fewer than 10 employees –still find it too daunting to build a Web site and effectively manage search-engine marketing and email to maximize their online investments.

That’s where Matchpoint comes in. The company uses a simple Web form to let prospective customers enter their needs along with their Zip code and email address. (The forms are shown on MatchPoint.com, and are syndicated on a network of partner sites. Adams won’t say how many sites or impressions are involved, but claims that “hundreds of thousands of people have interacted with the system.”) Once a customer submits a form, the request is automatically matched with up to five local businesses.

So far so good, but which businesses get the lead? Here’s where it gets interesting…

First, Matchpoint checks for appropriate businesses who have signed up with Matchpoint to receive the leads – these businesses can then respond via an HTML email sent by Matchpoint and up to two follow up emails or phone calls (presented as audio files in the emails). To protect consumer privacy, the vendors don’t get direct access to the customer’s email address or phone number -- it’s up to the two parties to exchange contact info if they wish.

A la Google Ad Words, member businesses bid on the maximum they will pay for a lead – Adams says bids range from $.25 up to $15 or more, depending on the category.

If there are no appropriate member companies (and at this point, Adams concedes, there often aren’t), Matchpoint finds matches from a database aggregating Yellow Pages and specialized business directories holding more than 10 million small businesses around the country – and alerts the selected businesses via an automated phone call.

The selected vendor then gets the chance to respond to the consumer via Matchpoint email, just like the member companies do.
Adams acknowledges that company response rates to these "blind" inquiries are “lower than we figure they will be as it ramps” and says a similar company Matchpoint recently acquired was getting “single-digit” response rates. Either way, Adams explains, the consumer gets the contact information of the matches whether or not the vendors actively respond.

I like many parts of this idea. It’s cool to embed phone calls in emails, and smart to protect the privacy of the customers. And apart from a little bit of work, there doesn’t seem to be too much downside for participating companies. You decide what you’ll spend on a lead, and how much you’ll spend overall.

But if there aren’t many companies signed up yet, and “blind” companies don’t often respond to the leads Matchpoint sends them, what’s left? Basically, consumers can enter a query and get back some matched vendors. Useful, but hardly groundbreaking.

And I worry that Matchpoint will face a tough time raising its vendor response rates. Most of the small business people I know routinely hang up on recorded calls long before they ever hear the value proposition. Given all the marketing and political dreck that comes in that way, I usually do too.

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