New Feature Gives Website Visitors the Power to Launch Free Phone Calls From the Internet to Connect With Sales or Customer Service Representatives
San Diego, California and Reston, Virginia - December 3, 2003- Aplus.Net, a leading Internet presence provider to small and medium-sized businesses, and eStara, Inc., announced today that Aplus.Net is now offering eStara Push to Talk services to customers to help increase online sales conversions and reduce website abandonment.
Aplus.Net customers can easily and affordably add eStara Push to Talk buttons to their websites right from Aplus.Net’s Control Panel. The Push to Talk buttons give website visitors the ability to speak with a company’s sales or customer service specialist by simply clicking on a Push to Talk icon.
Push to Talk technology enables a website visitor to place a free call from anywhere in North America via the Internet. Push to Talk connects both PC-to-phone and phone-to-phone calls and requires no additional hardware or software installation by either the website visitor or Aplus.Net customers.
A demo of the Push to Talk service is available at: http://www.estara.com/livedemo/aplus.net/.
"With Push to Talk, Aplus.Net is offering customers the ability to add a powerful new ‘call to action’ on their websites that will drive higher online sales and lower website abandonment,” said Ivan Vachovsky, chief executive officer of Aplus.Net. "We are proud to be the first and only web hosting company offering this service to benefit our customers.”
The eStara Push to Talk service is currently being used by over 350 global customers and over 60,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. These customers report that:
*Push to Talk increases online sales closing rates between 28% and 64% compared to traditional contact tools.
*Push to Talk cuts website abandonment by up to 25%.
*Over 90% of Push to Talk callers say the service "greatly" or "significantly" improved their online experience.
(Results from an online survey of 5,000 Push to Talk users conducted in 2002-2003).
"Aplus.Net is the first Internet presence provider to offer the Push to Talk service to help small businesses capitalize on the convergence of voice and data," said Tom Natelli, chairman and CEO, eStara, Inc. "Based on our strong track record with hundreds of direct and thousands of SMB customers, eStara Push to Talk will drive higher online sales for Aplus.Net customers and increase customer satisfaction for website visitors."
About Aplus.Net (www.aplus.net)
Aplus.Net is a leading provider of Internet services to small and medium-sized businesses. The company’s headquarters are located in San Diego, CA with other offices in Anaheim, CA, Sacramento, CA, Atlanta, GA and Europe. Aplus.Net specializes in providing a complete Internet presence, including domain name registration, corporate identity on the Internet, matching e-mail addresses, web design, web hosting, e-commerce, credit card processing tools, and website maintenance. Aplus.Net is among the ten largest privately held web hosting and domain name registration companies in the USA and is a facilities based provider. The Company owns and operates its own data center and its own ICANN accredited domain names registrar (Names4Ever.com).
About eStara Push to Talk
eStara Push to Talk is the most widely deployed "click to call" service in the world with over 350 global enterprise customers and over 1,000,000 users in 113 countries. eStara Push to Talk gives users the ability to make PC-to-Phone and Phone-to-Phone calls from the Web. The service requires no additional hardware or software. Survey results of Push to Talk users suggest at least 25% of Website visitors were “saved” from abandoning their online transaction by clicking on the Push to Talk button.
About eStara, Inc.
Headquartered in Reston, Va. with offices in France and Oregon, eStara builds online communication tools that drive bottom line results. With over 350 customers including, Verizon SuperPages, Martindale Hubbell's lawyers.com, J.Crew, Club Med, Federated Stores, Household Bank and Sprint, eStara Push to Talk service is the most widely deployed service of its kind in the world. Experience the quality of eStara Push to Talk at www.estara.com.
For More Information
Ronan Winter
Marketing & Business Development
Aplus.Net
(858) 410-6908
ronanw@aplus.net
Ian Halpern
Marketing
eStara, Inc
(703) 648 8292
ian.halpern@estara.com
Jennifer Clark
Marketing Manager
Aplus.Net
858-410-6984 phone
858-410-6927 fax
www.aplus.net
