Last Friday I received a recorded voice broadcast in my office voicemail box from Marketo co-founder and VP of Marketing Jon Miller. It was promoting their upcoming Marketing Nation Summit, and it got me thinking a bit about the role of voice broadcasting in marketing.
Voice broadcasting can get a bad rap as an intrusive technology. People often think of it as something that calls you at home and interrupts your family dinner, and I know marketers who don’t use it because of that. Yet those marketers have no qualms about sending out hundreds of thousands of emails a week, many to purchased lists from third parties, perhaps because emails are seen as a less intrusive and annoying communications vehicle.
But when I listened to the Marketo voice broadcast I wasn’t annoyed at all. I use Marketo’s software, I enjoy their blogs and eBooks, and many at my company were already planning on attending the Marketing Nation Summit anyway because it’s a great event. In other words, his voice broadcast was relevant to me, and as a Marketo customer, I appreciated receiving it.
As a marketer, however, I also appreciated its effectiveness at getting his message heard. As an experiment I did a quick search of my email inbox and found I had received seven emails from Marketo about the event in the last few months, even though I really don’t remember getting more than one or two. I get so many emails from vendors each day that it’s easy for me to ignore them or miss them altogether. But there was no way I was going to miss that voice broadcast because it was a voicemail message.
So, as a marketer, have you tried voice broadcasts before for event promotion, lead nurturing, or customer alerts and retention? If so, what have you used them for and did they work? If not, why not? Is it because you think voice broadcasting is too intrusive, or that you don’t have the right technology to do it?
Sending Out Voice Broadcasts Is as Easy as Email
The right cloud-based voice-based marketing automation system can make sending out a voice broadcast as easy as sending out an email blast using a marketing automation tool like Marketo. You don’t need any technical assistance from IT or any special knowledge to use it. You simply record your message (or type it in using text-to-speech functionality), upload the spreadsheet of phone numbers, and your off. You can then monitor campaign success online using real-time reports, similar to what you would do with an email campaign in Marketo.
And the similarities with email and marketing automation don’t end there:
- Just like with using email text fields, you can personalize your voice broadcasts using text-to-speech functionality to include each recipient’s name, company, city, or any other information you want in the message.
- People who receive your emails often reply to it if they have questions they want answered; you can then reply back and have a conversation via email. Voice broadcasting works the same way, but is even better because the conversation is more immediate. If someone has questions about your voice broadcast, they can be connected right away during the call to one of your agents for a live conversation; they don’t even have to hang up the phone and dial your number.
- Where emails enable you to include links to send people to your web site for more information, you can send people from your voice broadcast straight to an IVR (interactive voice response) that you can easily build to provide more details, answer questions, and interact with callers.
- Some HMTL emails display differently based on what device they are opened in (laptop vs. mobile, for example). Voice-based marketing automation systems also give you the ability to customize your voice broadcasts based on how they are accessed, so it will automatically play one message if a live person answers the phone and an alternative one if the call goes to voicemail.
To learn more about the benefits of using voice-based marketing automation to create voice broadcasts, you can download the white paper New Ways to Integrate Intelligent Voice Broadcasting into Your Marketing and Sales Strategy.
