TweetOne of the very best ways to boost the response rate to either an email or a voicemail program is to use them together and we have consistently seen response improvements of 25-40% when the two message types are combined.
Voicemail provides the emotion and the human connection. Take your time to craft a short, punchy, relevant message and deliver it with feeling and conviction and a natural style.
Email provides the logic and the detail. With its ‘click the link’ reply capability, it’s still the easiest and least intrusive reply mechanism going.
The voicemail-email combination offers one of the best marketing synergies going. Not only does each have it’s own set of unique strengths, they are both admirably suited to offset the weakness of the other.
Voicemail is not a great place to list information like dates, places or numbers and while it can produce solid results in generating responses, not many contacts choose to respond to a voicemail with a phone call, although the ones that do are usually among the best possible prospects for your offer. But, voicemail can pack enough marketing punch to drive your message home in spite of a hugely cluttered environment.
That clutter is deadly to email and made even worse because the email inbox is probably the most cluttered segment of the whole environment. Filters and deliverability are also a big problem for email. It’s hard to know for sure if your message ever truly reached its intended audience.
So which comes first, the email or the voicemail?
First, let me say I definitely prefer a multi-hit approach for both email and voicemail. Because email is super fast and the cheaper of the two, send your email first, just in case you can quickly pick up some low hanging fruit. If you get a really good response, send it again.
We used to recommend sending a voicemail either before or after your email but now, with the deep discounting available on your second and subsequent voicemail campaign waves, it’s best to send voicemails both before and after an email. Here’s why:
You send a voicemail ahead of your email to help overcome the clutter issue. A voicemail that talks about your offer and highlights the arrival of more follow up detail makes your email stand out. Your contacts know before clicking on your message; who you are, what you’re writing about and what they have to gain by reading your message. If you think you’re losing responses because your emails aren’t getting read in the first place, a voicemail- up front- is one way to address the problem.
A voicemail follow up can boost responses when your contacts have read and are interested in what you have to say, but for some reason decided to follow up on this later. You know what happens then. In spite of the best intentions your message and your offer are out of sight, out of mind and out of luck. That follow up message, again bringing the emotion and human impact of a fully engaged voice to bear, might just be the push they need to grab your interesting email and take action.
The voicemail + email combination has a long history of success for many different marketing applications – demo offers, download opportunities and event invitations among them and is still the most productive way for sales cold callers to maximize their prospecting and lead follow up efforts.