A common attitude among new pre-recorded telemarketers or concerns thinking about working with voicemail broadcasting is that the biggest portion of their responses will prove to be worthwhile leads.  Most of the time this is far from true.  Nonetheless, despite the fact that a minority of transferred calls prove to be quality leads, automated telemarketing can be utilized fruitfully in many instances, given a sensible plan of attack and well-grounded business measurements.

If a broadcaster is dialing a message to live-answered phones exclusively, and picking up press one live transfers to sales staff, we’ve seen many prosperous programs that obtain only a 15%-25% “long call rate”. (Here a long call is characterized as a call where both parties are on the call at the same time for at least 1 1/2 minutes.)  And this is not to suggest that all of the “long calls” turn out to be judged good leads by the broadcaster. Far from it. Some broadcasters have revealed that many times only 1/2 or even less of the long calls are worthwhile leads.

This is the reason it is so important that an organization think about their business systems deliberately as they launch a autodialer broadcasting program. For example, if their effective cost for a “long call” is $25, and 1/2 of them are qualified leads, and they can at the end of the process make a deal with 1/4 of the qualified leads, then the cost of a deal for them is $200. If the profit for one deal is not substantially higher than $200, their own business metrics may make it impossible to work with voicemail broadcasting cost effectively.

These numbers will vary widely among different types of businesses, and are affected by both the pitch as well as the target dialing list. For example, the hypothetical business “Wonderful Web Widgets”, which wants to sell website services to small business, would be making a mistake to deliver a broadcast to an “all businesses” list, because such a list would include large concerns (which they’re not targetting), in addition to a lot of small businesses that have not found a need to obtain a website.

Why dial a recording to beauty parlors and accountants if these industries aren’t usually concerned with websites?  This only raises the cost of the lower amount of quality leads that are received.

Another thing to consider is the mode of the broadcast program. The example above was about a live delivered message. How about answer machine / voicemail campaigns?

For most businesses, the response rate for the live delivery – live transfer program is between 0.6% and 1.0%. Which means that for every 100 calls delivered to a live answered number, there is less than 1 transferred call.

For a program that leaves scripts on answer machines, the numbers will be much reduced, since the prospect will have to have sufficient interest to record the callback number, and finally dial it back, consuming much more effort than merely “pressing 1″ while listening to a live pitch. These results are unrealistic for us to record, due to the fact that the calls back to the broadcaster don’t involve our phone system, but broadcasters who use this technique have told us that the call back ratio is probably 1/4 to 1/3 of the live transfer quantity for a similar message.

For a businessperson considering using voicemail broadcasting as a lead producing method, the script is important, the calling list is critical, and the basic business systems are often the most important factor to consider when planning a lead generation broadcast.

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