Improving the Efficiency of Email with Voice Broadcasting
As we all know in business it’s more expensive for us to find new customers than it is for us to keep the existing ones. In today’s fickle and competitive customer market this continues to become increasingly important. E-mail is a common and often used communication method for most companies today. I don’t knock e-mail because I think it works, but not as effectively as it used to. Because of all the e-mail newsletters, junk mail and spam these days, you’re lucky if your message gets through to 1% of your e- mail list. Most customers are reluctant to even give you their e-mail address these days or to at least give you their primary e-mail address. Here’s a list of what I consider the pros and cons of e- mail marketing. Keep in mind e-mail marketing is suited to and will work better in some verticals that others.
Pros
- It’s generally inexpensive to send.
- It gets delivered fast
- It goes directly to the individuals you are trying to target.
Cons
- Developing content can be time-consuming and expensive
- E-mail message design must move from the marketing department to the IT department and back again while developing the HTML format and look and feel of the message. This can be very time consuming as well.
- Managing the email camaign statistics and making sense of it, is very time consuming
- Your e-mail message may get caught in the customers spam filters.
- Did someone actually read your message and digest what it said or did they just glance at it and then let it get buried at the bottom of their inbox somewhere, thinking to themselves “I’ll get to this one day”.
- The e-mail recipient you are sending to may have changed their e-mail address, moved to another company or may have even blacklisted your domain.
- Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, I’m just saying that it’s not as effective and efficient as it could be. Let me suggest ways to improve results from your e-mail campaigns and improve customer communication in general.
Many companies have their customers phone numbers, if not you may want to consider collecting their phone numbers along with their e-mail addresses. It would be nice if we could give each and every one of our customers a personalized phone call and have a nice conversation with them about your products and services. Unfortunately this isn’t always practical, but fortunately you can get very close to this. Imagine your customer getting a follow-up phone call after they purchased your product or service or perhaps a phone call to a customer you haven’t heard from in awhile suggesting a special offer, a reminder of your services, a birthday greeting or some other message that makes them feel special or provides value to them.
Voice broadcasting sends a prerecorded voice message to hundreds or thousands of telephone numbers or telephone numbers with extensions. Your voice blast could play your prerecorded message when someone answers the phone, or it can leave a voicemail message for that individual. Best of all it has many features to make your message more interactive. Press a certain key on your phone and your customer can be transferred to a live operator. Not enough operators? No problems we can easily set your voice blast to pace its outgoing calls. You can also personalize the call with text to speech and have each call mention that person’s name, account balance, or any other information unique to that individual. A survey can also be done by asking the customer to press a specific key for a specific answer. The customer can also specify that he wants to be removed from the list.
Voice broadcasting is a quick easy and effective method for communicating with your customer base. Many companies have made voice broadcasting a part of their communication strategy with great success.
You may have concerns about the reactions you’ll get from your customer base and this is a valid concern. Please let me help you to structure your message to your clients in such a way that they will perceive value from your call as opposed to it being an annoyance. We’ve had great results in working with our clients to test voice broadcasting as an addition to their communication strategies. If it’s done right it can be a great success.
www.messageimpact.com