Lots of modern innovations have made the business world more efficient and productive. One such invention is ringless voicemail technology.
This tool, which is also referred to as a voicemail drop, allows you to send a recorded audio message to someone directly to their voicemail inbox. Most people in sales and marketing use this to promote their products and services.
You can even send one message to several clients, like a blast, which gives you time to focus on following up on those who reply to your voice note. You can use ringless voicemail by itself or supplement your advertising campaigns.
How Does It Work?
The innovation is quite a boon for businesses, no matter what industry you’re in. Before you go and try out this technology, you should first understand the steps involved in the process.
1. Record Your Pitch
There are companies like Drop Cowboy that have made the process straightforward for clients. First, you need to record a message that matches your objective for that particular campaign. You have the option to do it yourself or let your sales team take care of the task.
Some tips on how to make an effective sales pitch:
- Do Your Research – Knowing the demographic that you’re sending your ringless voicemail to can help you create a script that addresses their needs and interests perfectly. Answer possible questions that they may have about your product before they even ask them.
- Highlight Product Strengths – List the good points of your merchandise and how it can help potential buyers. The information you gleaned from your research will be valuable in matching the strength of your product with the needs of your consumers.
- Focus on the Customer – One of the cardinal rules in sales is to let clients know how their lives will be made more convenient and less stressful by what you’re selling. While it can be tempting to drone on and on about the strengths of your product, always remember that buyers don’t really care how awesome it is unless it helps them one way or another.
- Share Testimonials – Social proofing is also an effective strategy to use when creating your sales pitch. You can gather reviews from customers who’ve used your product and had great results. For prospects who were referred by a friend, you can use the experience of their peers to get them to try your merchandise.
2. Make a List
For general messages, like informing customers about your store hours, you can send the ringless voicemail to your entire call list. However, you should also create targeted lists to make it more convenient for you to deliver your sales pitch to a particular demographic.
You can group your existing clients by age, location, and job title. This way, it’s easier to build better customer relationships by personalizing your sales proposals to them according to their needs and interests. You can even group them by birthday so that you can send them an exclusive promo, discount, or freebie on their birth month.
In crafting a targeted list, you should know the persona of a prospective customer. To do this, you must go through your existing customers and determine their demographics. The information you glean from this research helps identify which age group, professions, and even organizations are most likely to respond to your sales pitch.
After this step, you can gather leads or potential customers. One excellent way to amass the contact information of prospects is through your website.
Create a concise form that collects only relevant details from your site visitors, like name, email address, and contact number. Asking for more than these three questions will need a logical explanation on your end, which is sensible because it’s never safe to give out personal information on the Internet without discretion.
3. Time the Drop
A convenient feature of ringless voicemail software is that they allow you to schedule when your message will be delivered to customers’ inboxes and how many you want to send for the week. You have the choice to distribute your sales pitch to all your contacts in bulk or limit it to two hours each day.
Another option is to have the program send voicemails every minute. However, you also have to consider the number of callbacks that your staff can handle. The best strategy for this process is to start small and work your way up to a manageable level.
You need to know when are the best times to call your customers. According to HubSpot, you should reach out to prospects in the middle of the week between Tuesday and Thursday. Research backing up this claim believes that people are busy planning their upcoming week on Mondays while, on Friday afternoons, they’re already thinking about what to do on the weekend.
Moreover, the best time to contact the numbers on your call list is between four and five in the afternoon. This is because most workers have finished their tasks for the day, which implies that they can accommodate and process your message. The next best time is during lunchtime since it serves as a midday break between morning obligations and afternoon to-dos.
You should also connect with customers who expressed their interest after opening your voicemail message within an hour. The rate of response increased within that timeline but dropped among those who received communication after two hours.
4. Monitor Their Status
After you’ve sent out your voicemail messages, you can track each one and determine if they have been opened or not. This is a crucial part of the process because you want to ensure that your sales pitch has been delivered to its intended recipient.
For ones that haven’t been listened to, you can resend it after a day or two. However, be cautious when doing this because the customer may have deliberately skipped your message and sending it again may damage their perception of your brand.
Is It Legal?
Ringless voicemail has gotten a negative association with spamming and debt collection, but this is because a few people don’t understand the regulations imposed by the government on voicemails.
In the US, voicemails fall under the legal umbrella of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This mandate serves to keep companies from annoying their customers with promotional messages.
Here are the general rules from the TCPA and FCC or Federal Communications Commission:
- Call Hours – Solicitors are only allowed to phone homeowners between eight in the morning to nine in the evening.
- DNC List – Companies must create a Do-Not-Call or DNC list that contains the contact details of customers who explicitly requested not to be called again. Businesses must also honor the national DNC registry.
- Transparency – Salespeople must maintain forthrightness and provide their name as well as the company they’re working with for each call. They should also give the contact details that recipients can use in case they want to communicate with the caller.
- Emergency Lines – Solicitors are prohibited from using automated telephone tools or prerecorded messages to emergency lines, such as 911, hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities.
- Recipient Cost – Customers must not be charged for the call or voicemail that they received or opened.
- Unsolicited Faxes – Sending faxes without the consent of the recipient are also not allowed.
What’s in it for Me?
There are lots of benefits to using ringless voicemail technology for your company, such as:
1. Avoid Interrupting Prospects
Cold calling is an infamous sales tactic that entails contacting potential customers and delivering a sales pitch when they answer. The practice has gained notoriety because of its disruptive tendencies.
Ideally, phone calls should only be used in urgent situations and emergencies. However, because your sales pitch isn’t life-threatening, it’s better to send it directly to their voicemail inbox rather than risk interrupting their workflow.
Your prospects may be in the middle of an important meeting or doing a task that requires their full concentration. The disturbance caused by your cold call will only make them more unwilling to listen to what you have to say, let alone purchase what you’re trying to sell.
2. Give Customers Time to Decide
Another advantage of ringless voicemail is that you allow customers to process your message. You’re giving them back the control over their buying decision. With this, you can be sure that they’re interested in your products and services once they respond to your sales pitch.
One drawback of cold calls is that some representatives harass the customers to get a sale out of them. You don’t need to force prospects to purchase your merchandise at every contact point.
The underlying objective for each call and message you send to prospects is to establish a relationship with them. Your ultimate goal should be to gain their trust and make them see the value of your products and services. Once you’ve accomplished this task, the sales will come effortlessly.
The reason why ringless voicemails have a higher open and listening rate is probably since this method doesn’t interrupt prospects from their busy workday and even gives them time to ponder on their decision. This ensures that they take the leap to try your product out of their own volition, which makes them better-quality customers than those who only bought an item because they felt compelled to do so.
3. Deliver the Best Sales Pitch Every Time
With cold calls, you shouldn’t be strict about sticking to the script because you’re talking to a live person. The flow of the discussion won’t always follow the outline that you have prepared. This factor makes it challenging to deliver the best sales pitch to the recipient.
Fortunately, with cold calling, you have the chance to create a script that includes all the information that you want your customers to know about. Moreover, you can keep on recording the audio until you find the one that has the right tone and flow. This ensures that you send a well-thought sales pitch to prospects every time.
4. Contact People at a Larger Scale
Ringless voicemail software has a blast function that allows you to send one message to multiple recipients simultaneously. This feature is valuable in today’s business world where you’re no longer just catering to local customers but, because of the Internet, potential clients in nearby cities and towns can discover your products and services.
At the early stages of your company, your contact list may consist of just a few numbers. However, your leads will also grow as your business expands to broader horizons, primarily if you’ve provided exemplary service to your customers. Word-of-mouth advertising is a powerful tool that can boost the promotion of your brand, like wildfire.
Prepare to scale your processes by investing in ringless voicemail software to make sure that existing clients and prospects can stay updated on regular promos and discounts.
5. Help Your Team Maximize Their Work Hours
Because ringless voicemail technology delivers the sales pitch directly to multiple recipients at a large scale, your team now has the time to focus on tasks that require higher-level thinking. They won’t have to go through the tedious job of dialing prospects and repeating the same script over and over again.
Instead, they can pour out their energy into responding to interested customers and answering their inquiries about your products. Not only will this result in better sales, but you’ll also have happier employees who contribute a lot to your company’s reputation and growth.
Conclusion
Ringless voicemail technology is a valuable tool for businesses in any industry. You just need to record your sales pitch, send it to your targeted list of recipients at the right time, and check their status after a day or two.
This practice is legal, with prohibitions that protect consumers from spam and fraud. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the Federal Communications Commission has regulations in place to monitor sales calls and voicemail messages being sent to American citizens.
The key advantages of investing in ringless voicemail software are that you don’t have to interrupt your prospects while they’re doing their jobs. Moreover, you also give them time to decide on whether to grab the promo that you’re offering or not.
