The phone call. As much as we like to text these days, we have to admit that it’s the voice-to-voice contact that makes us feel like we’ve connected with people. This is especially true in business. Yes, cold calling can be problematic in the modern era, as you’ll often get sent to voicemail before you have a chance to make your pitch. But what if your goal was to drop a voicemail without the call?
You can create a highly personalized, robust marketing campaign with cold calling—but only if you can make sure it doesn’t feel like cold calling. It’s a unique marketing strategy where you drop voicemails directly into the inbox. And it’s called ringless voicemail.
Ringless voicemail succeeds with salespeople because it creates a better potential customer experience on the other end. Consider that 80% of calls already go to voicemail, to begin with. Why fight against this instinct?
When you use ringless voicemail, your potential customers aren’t annoyed that you’ve interrupted a meeting or a dinner. Instead, they see your voicemail in their inbox and can listen to it on their time. And with a personalized message, you can see response rates that might surprise you. Let’s explore how you can boost your marketing campaign with voicemails that never make a peep—until your customers are ready to hear them
Call it “voicemail marketing.” It’s a bit like cold calling, but without the intrusion. All you’re doing is dropping in a quick voice message into a customer’s voice message inbox. From there, you give them your brief spiel, provide a contact number, and that’s it. It’s minimally invasive, and the fact that they get to hear your voice can make it sound a little more personal than a pitch they hear even on social media.
In telemarketing, it’s easy to create stale scripts that spend too much work simply getting someone not to hang up. With ringless voicemail, it’s more akin to text messaging because someone might get an alert of a message to check on their own time. Even though you’re technically leaving a “sales voicemail,” the fact that you dropped directly into the inbox skirted the process of screening calls entirely.
Of course, there are some key elements that anyone should include in a voicemail marketing campaign:
A voicemail service or platform that lets you drop directly into the inbox gives you an advantage over cold calling that isn’t using one. With it, you can enable an entire sales team to reach more prospects, generate higher rates on return calls, and build a better inflow of customers into your company.
If you want to boost your marketing campaign with voicemails, that assumes that cold calling and ringless voicemails are not the only part of your strategy. You can use voicemails as part of an omnichannel approach, meaning you direct your call recipients to a website rather than calling you back.
For example, imagine you’re a real estate agent trying to drum up a new business in the neighborhood. Yes, you can ask for a callback. But you might also direct someone to a listing page you’ve created specifically for this marketing campaign.
In that way, your voicemails can be more than voicemails. They can be lead magnets, drawing people to a web page that offers them something free if they sign up for your newsletter. They can be appointment schedulers, asking someone to sign up for a free consultation. They can get people to sign up to SMS marketing lists with their mobile phones. Given that you can work from a voice script of your making—if you even want to use a script in the first place—the choice ultimately depends on you.
Ultimately, each voicemail you leave on someone’s inbox has to be more than just air. It has to contain some “next step” that gets someone to look into what you have to offer. One way of doing that is to incorporate the previous section, working in an omnichannel approach to your voicemails.
But each voicemail must contain a call to action of some type. Whether that means calling you back or visiting a website is up to you. And just as important will be the offer you create around this call to action. Why should someone call you back? Why should someone visit your website?
Is there something in it for them, or are you making them do all the work of finding reasons to become your customer?
When you settle on a call to action, you’ll have a far better chance at scoring more conversions with this ringless voicemail campaign. Want to see how it works? Sign up for Slybroadcast for a trial period and find out what you can accomplish with just the sound of your voice.