Hello, Ruth. This is Susan Doe from Acme Widgets calling. I'd really like to speak with you. Would you please call me back? You can reach me at 1-800-555-5555.
DELETE!
This recent message on my voice mail got me thinking. Why did I delete it so quickly? Was it because I didn't know her?
No, that wasn't it. I often reply to voice mail from people I don't know. So what makes me respond to some and not others? A well-crafted voice-mail message can be a potent opportunity to begin, or strengthen, a business relationship. There ought to be better ways to motivate a response than what our hapless Susan Doe demonstrated.
What should business marketers do when confronted with a voice-mail greeting?
After a bit of investigation, I didn't find much. Voice-mail marketing is nowhere as a discipline. As far as I can tell, no one seems to be talking about it. No one's researching it, setting up tests, or figuring out best practices.
I believe this is a lost opportunity, because outbound telemarketing is huge in B-to-B. And business marketers find that upward of 85% of outbound business calls go to voice mail. If you don't have a clear strategy for how to manage voice mail as part of your campaign, you'll be squandering a major chance to connect with customers and prospects.
The place to begin, naturally, is with your aim for making the call. A sales rep cranking through a series of cold calls will have a different strategy than a marketer who uses the phone as a follow-up to direct mail. Do you want to gain awareness? Is the message intended to motivate a return call? Is it part of a series of touches, or does the message need to pay off on its own? The answers will help identify the right approach to voice mail.
When asked for his recommendation on voice mail, LinkExperts' vice president for revenue Mike Chaplo says firmly, “Don't leave one. Hang up. Call back again, and keep trying. If after five or six attempts you still can't get through, then send an e-mail asking for the best time to call. Your objective in business is to have a conversation, not to leave an annoying message.”
But voice mail does have its applications, in both sales and marketing. Let's look at what's working and what the experts recommend.
Depending on the strategy, voice mail's use will differ widely. Experienced users recommend it as particularly effective for:
- Event invitations or reminders.
- A follow-up to direct mail or e-mail.
- Lead qualification and nurturing.
- A pre-campaign touch prior to direct mail or e-mail.
- Announcements, such as regulatory compliance.
- Pricing or promotion updates.
- Live telemarketing as part of a marketing campaign
Phone follow-up to mail or e-mail, and phone softening prior to mail, are time-honored techniques for improving response and campaign ROI. So what do you do in the likely event that you reach a voice-mail box instead of a live person?
According to Rob Lail, founder and president of MarketMakers, a B-to-B teleservices firm in the Philadelphia area, voice mail has a powerful role to play in a campaign — if you plan for it. “The most important thing is to prepare a superb script,” he says. “It has to be professional and not sound canned. We provide our reps with scripts, but they only use them as a guide. They need to know the material cold and speak to it naturally, so they sound confident.”
Lail observes that a great voice-mail script gets to the point fast. “You need to cover the ‘who, what, where, when and how’ quickly. You need to use a conversational tone. And above all, the message has to be relevant to the target's industry.”
Another key is the application. According to Lail, the single most effective use of voice mail is in event marketing, for extending an invitation or reminding prospects to attend a seminar, conference, Webcast or some other live appointment. “Reminder calls to seminar attendees who've agreed to come can improve their actual attendance by 40%,” he says.
The phone is also a big part of effective lead-qualification and lead-nurturing programs. John Hasbrouck is president and CEO of NewLeads, which offers trade show contact follow-up services. He encourages his reps to make the decision about leaving a voice-mail message based on their level of energy and enthusiasm at the moment.
“Enthusiasm is contagious,” Hasbrouck says. “If you don't feel like leaving a message, just hang up. You need to be in the right frame of mind. If you don't sound like someone they want to talk to, they won't ever respond.”
- Using the phone as part of business development or sales
In this case the voice-mail option is a function of where you are in the process. Sales/marketing trainer and consultant Sherri Sklar says it can take seven to nine touches to get through to business buyers today.
She recommends planning the touch sequence up front. “I might begin with an e-mail saying I'll follow up with a phone call. If I get a voice mail on that call, I will have decided in advance whether I'll leave a message or not. It depends on whether I want to use up one of my touches. Generally, a voice mail is less effective if the prospect doesn't know me yet.”
But if she does decide to leave a voice mail at the early stages in the relationship, Sklar stresses the importance of mentioning, early in the message, the critical business issue that's likely to be on the recipient's mind. “After I say my name and my company, and a few words about our competency, I get right to the point about how we can help the prospect. And I leave my phone number. But I don't expect a call back.”
Sklar assumes the next touch — whether it's another call or an e-mail — will be the one that connects. She cautions that callers need to plan for any possible outcome. You need to have the scripts in mind to cover those instances when you get voice mail, when a prospect picks up, or when a gatekeeper answers.
- How to structure a voice mail
For maximum attention and response, Hasbrouck recommends the following path for your voice message:
- Pain
Start with their problem. Don't start with yourself.
- Hope
State your offering: “We can solve that problem.”
- References
Name some customers that will be familiar and credible.
- Features
If you can squeeze in one or two supporting features, do so. But hold it to 30 seconds.
- Response
Tell them what to do and how. “If you want to know more, please give me a call.”
- Pain
- New tools
Voice mail has been around for a few decades, and while it's not a hotbed of marketing innovation, a few enhancements have emerged.
- Guided voice mail
Boxpilot pioneered the idea of pre-recording a message, then using live operators to network around the target company and “guide” the message to the right person's voice-mail box. Mike Kytell's team there has done a variety of tests to prove the concept's effectiveness. One client using guided voice mail as a follow-up to a direct mail piece lifted response 145%, from 3.1% to 7.8%, doubling campaign ROI. James Pennington, vice president of strategic marketing at The Kern Organization, has used Boxpilot successfully for its clients. “It's more expensive per touch than direct mail, but cheaper than outbound telemarketing,” he says.
- Automated voice mail
Used primarily in consumer marketing, automated delivery of prerecorded messages via auto-dialing is making some strides in B-to-B. GroupCast Messaging in St. Louis, for example, is producing results in the financial services sector, like promoting credit card processing offers to small businesses, or advising insurance brokers and financial planners on new products. GroupCast sets up unique toll-free numbers on each campaign. Responses come into its call center backed up by automated voice response, which allows it to track results and do tests.
- Guided voice mail
- What's next?
Business marketers must get more disciplined about voice mail as part of the marketing mix. Voice mail should be right up there with direct mail, e-mail and telemarketing as a mainstream medium. B-to-B firms ought to be conducting split testing of offers and scripts, and looking at ways to improve response rates. Better yet, multitouch campaign sequencing needs to be tested to see where voice mail best fits.
If this is where 85% of our phone calls are going, we need to make the most of them.
RUTH P. STEVENS (ruth@ruthstevens.com) consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of “The DMA Lead Generation Handbook” and “Trade Show and Event Marketing.”
Quick Tips
- The message must run no longer than 30 seconds and not sound rushed
The listen-to rate declines dramatically for messages that run any longer, according to Barry Chelist, director of sales at GroupCast Messaging.
- Sincerity is audible
As NewLeads' John Hasbrouck cautions, “Think about [whether] you believe what you're saying. If you don't really believe it, don't say it.”
- Strive for natural-sounding speech
“Don't go for a radio commercial,” says Mike Kytell, founder and CEO of Boxpilot, the guided voice-mail service for B-to-B marketers. “You want to sound real, not canned.”
- Expect the same kind of response you'd get from an outbound telemarketing campaign
As Kytell puts it: “If you picked up the phone and called 100 people, how many would call you back?”
- When you deliberately opt for voice mail over reaching a live person…
The best time to leave a message is during the business day, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., when most people are in meetings or at lunch, according to Chelist. Evening or late night is risky, he adds, because so many people have their office numbers forwarded to home or mobile phones. — RPS
