When planning your initial voice broadcasting campaign it is crucial that you set realistic goals and expectations. What is your main purpose? To generate leads, to get returning customer sales, to reduce customer churn, to generate interest in a product, appointment setting, to survey public opinion, to promote an event, a reminder to members or customers, to get out the vote? Whatever your goal is, write it down in advance and understand that you probably cannot do all of the above at once.
With your main objective in place you must now decide what your target & maximum cost per ____ is. Cost per lead, or cost per acquisition, etc. If you are a carpet cleaning business and the maximum your business can bear is a $25 cost per appointment then make note of this.
Now setting goals is the time to be realistic. Do not set goals so low that they will be impossible to hit, you will only set yourself up for disappointment. You can ask your contact at your vendor company what the average response rates are for a specific industry, but know that there are many factors which can affect overall campaign performance (see below).
Last but not least it is time to test run your campaign to see where you stand in relationship to your goals and expectations. Make sure that your test campaign is run consistently over multiple days (1 week) and try different times of the day /week to see what works best and avoid factors that can diminish results.
Types of Campaigns
Business to Business – Focused on calling other businesses. Voice Mail campaigns after business hours are effective for calling businesses.
Business to Consumer – Focused on calling residences & consumers.
Surveys – Ask question(s) and allow responses by pressing keypad options. Records responses for reporting.
Live Message Delivery Only Campaigns – Plays your message only if the auto dialer detects a live human voice answering. Live messages can give a option to press a key to be transferred to a live representative or a option to be taken off the call list.
Live Message & Voice mail Campaigns – Sometimes call blended campaigns, these play 2 different messages, one for live answers and one for voice mails. Live messages can give a option to press a key to be transferred to a live representative or a option to be taken off the call list & voice mail messages simply leave a 800 number to call back.
Voice mail only Campaigns – Primarily used for Business to Business calls, this is a good way to generate call backs.
The Message
The message you choose to broadcast out to your phone list is very important in generating the results you desire. There are 2 types of messages; a message with a transfer/voicemail option and a message with no transfer or voicemail option.
A message with no transfer option is usually an announcement or promotional message and does not generate an immediate response. This makes it hard to measure the success of this type of campaign. This type of message should be less than 60 seconds because very few people will listen for longer then that.
A message with a live transfer option will allow you to gauge your results the same day you broadcast. Here are some of the general rules for a good message:
A. Keep the message as short as possible while maintaining good content value. A shorter message will save you money if you are billed on 6 – 30 second increments. Meaning if your message is just 30 seconds long you will most likely only incur 30 seconds worth of billing instead of more. Also people only listen for a few seconds anyway so a longer message will generate fewer leads.
B. Be Clear, Concise, and KEEP IT SIMPLE. Remember you are calling people while they are going thru their regular daily routine. If you want them to respond positively you need to keep it simple.
C. Use the AIDA acronym for structuring advertisements. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
- Attention: “Attention recent customer of bobs carpet cleaning”
- Interest: “Does $50 for 2 rooms of carpet cleaning sound good?”
- Desire: “Cleaning your carpets every 3 months will extend their life.”
- Action: “Press 1 now and we will throw in a room for free. Press 1 now to speak to a live rep.”
D. Say “press __ to speak to a live rep” at least 2 times. Remember people are in the middle of their day and might only be listening 50% of the time.
E. Give them a Automatic Do not call option such as “press 8 to be removed from our call list”. This will save you and your customer’s headaches.
F. Tone of voice of the person recording is an important factor too. Try different variations to see what works best for your market. Energetic sales pitches might or might not work for you. Try a calm voice too. Experiment to optimize your campaigns.
Professional voice over people can sometime create a great message for fairly low cost but some have found these canned sounding messages to turn people off because they sound too professional/corporate/used car salesmen.
G. Change your message, voice, promotion, call to action when ever your response dips below average with no explanation. Sometimes a message has been played too much in a certain area and needs to be switched out.
Common Pitfalls and things to avoid
1. Holidays and major events can skew response rates. Major holidays mean people are thinking about vacation or the family get together and are not in a business mode. On the flip side if you change your message to use the holiday as a marketing ploy (July 4th special) then it can work in your benefit. Rain tends to keep people inside and by the phone which will improve results.
2. Dialing at the wrong time of day. Some products are best advertised in the evening while some do well in the morning. Experiment to see what works best for you.
3. Using a message that is too long. Remember people have short attention spans.
4. Calling out too fast which bombards y our call center. This means you are missing calls or they are holding for too long. Putting calls in queue = you will lose calls.
5. Not answering phone live transfers properly. “Hello” is not sufficient. Pretend you heard a promo and hit 1 and someone just said hello. Not too professional. Have a 1 line Opener such as “thanks for your interest how many rooms do you want to have steam cleaned today?”.
6. Calling the same phone list over and over within a short period of time. This will anger your prospects and your response rates will lower if your list is too small.
7. Calling for one day and stopping because it didn’t work out right away.
8. Calling the Federal do not call list when you have no existing business relationship. Do not do this.
Handling Inbound calls
1. Make sure you have enough employees to answer all the calls you generate. Some dialing companies can control the speed of the campaign based on how many agents you have available and how many of them are already on the phone.
2. Answer with a short multiple choice or yes/no question such as: “thanks for your interest how many rooms do you want to have steam cleaned today?”
3. Consider hiring a call center to answer you calls if you cannot manage all the calls. Some call centers can answer, qualify the callers and transfer them to you.
4. As an alternative to hiring a call center you can route your calls through a short recording which prompts the prospect to have their number removed from the call list a 2nd time. This cuts back on the removal request calls you get.
5. If someone wants their number removed from the call list, be professional and take their number down even if they are irate.
6. Gather their basic contact info at the beginning of the call (name, phone number) in case the call is dropped.
Following up with calls that didn’t get through to your office
Some caller might have been interested in your offer but didn’t have the time to talk when you called. This is the case with some of the people who pressed 1 and didn’t wait to talk to you. Check your call logs for the people who pressed 1 and hung up before you answered. Call them back to see if they were interested in moving forward. You may be surprised to find a deal or two.
Voice Broadcasting tips at Voice-Broadcasting.com
