The “Secret” of Voice Broadcasting Unveiled
September 29, 2008
Voice Broadcasting (delivering a huge number of automated phone calls and delivering a pre-recorded message to them) is a really strong and cheap way to get your message to large numbers of customers.
In spite of its great power, before you spend one thin dime on a phone blast, you surely ought to learn this secret. Without this “secret”, you could easily just blow your cash. OK, you ask, what could this awful secret be? It’s really elementary - Virtually all people don’t like receiving telemarketing calls.
Alright, alright I know that’s not exactly a secret. If you’re looking at using an automatic broadcasting system and you do not take into account this “secret” carefully, it can really hurt your campaign. Here’s why…
The biggest by far majority (90% or more) of folks who get an automated call simply hang up. The next largest group (a few percent) of folks press “2″ (to be removed from the call list). The smallest group, around 1-2%, press “1″ (to be transferred to a live representative, or to listen to more recorded information, or to leave a message).
You may be thinking…”OK, but I’m only paying for the live transferred calls, so what’s the problem?” Here’s the problem.
Just because someone presses “1″, it does’t follow automatically that they’re interested in your message. Some of them only want to request removal from the call list. Those responses are worth nothing to you. But you still pay for them. So you should carefully consider how to maximize the positively interested, qualified responses.
Now, whether you’re advertising merchant accounts to business prospects, or even selling raffle tickets for your charity event, you’ll hear some folks say “take my number off and don’t call again” (or worse)…No surprise there right? And I promise, even if you’re asking for contributions for sick children, even if you’re calling a list of past donors, you will STILL receive some negative calls!
The unavoidable fact is this - out of 1000 folks, there are perhaps 2 or 3 who get so irritated when they receive a telemarketing call, they will press “1″ to complain. To show the result of response rate on the amount of worthless calls received, consider two speculative broadcast campaigns.
Campaign #1 - pitching merchant accounts to businesses - response rate is below average, at 0.6%. Campaign #2 - asking for contributions for sick children - using a donor list - response rate is above average, at 1.5%.
Now, assume that 3 out of 1000 (0.3%) of the numbers called are the kind who will “press 1 for no good reason”… If you work through the numbers, the business campaign gets 50% negative calls, but even the charity campaign gets 20%!
The reality is, if you are connecting your calls to live answered phones, and taking live transfers, you {will never,simply cannot} dodge negative calls, regardless of what your pitch is about. And the primary way to reduce them is to construct a message with a higher response rate.
We’ve shown how getting negative calls is a fact of life in this business, and how increasing the response rate will decrease the number of bogus calls.