Ringless voicemail drops, or voice drops, are the perfect way to make sure your recipients receive a message without being inconvenienced. Voice drops also minimize the chances of people hanging up without hearing your message first.
Voice drops can be the perfect complement to a well-designed marketing program. The key is knowing how to use ringless voicemail well.
Planning a strategy
Don’t just record one generic message and start throwing it out there. For your voice drop to be effective, it has to be planned out and in sync with your larger strategy.
Consider using voice drop technology as an inexpensive way to follow up on cooler leads to see if they might turn hot. Use them to alert customers that a new product is about to drop or tell people to look for a special offer you’re about to send.
The key is to personalize the messages. People can tell when they’ve gotten a generic message and they resent it, which is why we’re so quick to hang up on robocalls. But many businesses leave a recorded message when going to voicemail, so you have a chance to reach your recipient with a well-crafted message that sounds natural.
Crafting your message
Your first step is narrowing your call lists to match specific objectives. Once you have these objectives clearly laid out, follow these tips to make messages that get results:
Be specific and concise: Don’t be afraid to ask for exactly what you want, and don’t waste people’s time with a convoluted explanation of your brand history and values. Get down to business and say what you want to say in 30 seconds or less.
Give them a reason to choose you: While you don’t want to spend forever waxing eloquent about who you are, you do want to give people a reason to respond to your call to action. How are you offering value and how is it relevant to them?
Make contact info easy to remember: Give your contact information twice to ensure the recipient hears and remembers it without having to listen to the message again (which they’re unlikely to do).
Be natural: As you craft your message, remember that people can often tell when someone is reading from a script. Having a script will help you stay concise and specific, but you have to write a script that sounds personable.
Recording your message
We’ve all left a message on someone’s voicemail only to realize afterward that we missed an important point, worded a sentence completely backwards, or just sounded confusing. Most people can’t help being nervous at being recorded, and scripts help us deal with our nervousness. How can you make your scripts sound natural? Here’s what to do:
Use real speech language: In real life, no one says, “Please do not hesitate to call me.” We say something more like, “Don’t hesitate to give me a call.” Always use the same contractions you do in normal speech and use spoken — not written — language expressions.
Accent like a real person: When people read something for the first time, their eyes run ahead of their brains as they try to decipher the meaning behind the words. For most people, this causes them to sound odd, putting the accent on the wrong syllable or the wrong word. You can only avoid this by practice, practice, practice.
Decide the time to send your drops
You can send all your voicemails at once or just some over a few hours a few days a week. If you do too many at once, you could be overwhelmed with call backs, so plan carefully.
Choose your time of sending to coincide with times when recipients are likely to be checking their voicemail. People often do this over lunch break or when they’re getting bored mid-afternoon. The commute home is also a prime time for people taking public transportation.
Once you’ve designed, crafted, and sent your messages, be sure to track and tweak your campaigns as you get concrete numbers showing how effective they’ve been.
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