And these 11,808 phone calls happened in less then an hour?

HOW IN THE WORLD DID I PULL THIS OFF ?

• I am Superman (I can wish and wear the Underoos) 
• Or I hired a call center with hundreds of people

Or I used a "Phone Call Autoresponder" - its not the best definition but its the easiest to grasp.

This is a REALLY COOL service, probably the coolest thing I have played with in a while - VoiceShot

(This is NOT an affiliate link - I make nothing if you use this service, minus that you can come back here and leave a comment to thank me!)

And its really simple too as these guys got their user interface right (which is nice for a change!) 

• You upload a list of your customer's phone numbers (I will cover HOW to acquire phone numbers and expand the value of your list in a future post)
• You record your message, either by dialing into their service or by recording a WAV file on your computer / mic (I choose the WAV as I was able to edit it in Audicity - great FREE audio editor).  I actually choose to upload two messages - one for a "real person answering the phone" and one for answering machines.
• You schedule the "voice blast" - just like you would an autoresponder broadcast and POOF the calls are blasted out.

 So why do I think this is SO COOL? 

1. Email deliverability SUCKS - actually SUCKS is too nice of a word but this is a family blog
2. Email deliverability SUCKS (sorry I guess I said that already)
3. You are demonstrating to your customers / leads that you are a real person / real company - not some faceless / voiceless website in cyberspace.  And as you will see below below respond and they take action.
4. You are reinforcing your marketing message / brand by "reaching out" to your customers / leads in a new medium / way.
5. And oh yeah - email deliverabilty SUCKS!!!

 My statistics from my FIRST campaign on VoiceShot - I am a stats junkie:

• I used a really tiny section / sample of my customer list (11,808 records / phone numbers)
• 38.6% (4,563 calls) were answered by 'live people' - which is kind of funny, as the system waits for someone to say "hello" and then it plays the recorded call message - I can't even imagine how many people today were trying to 'talk back' and ask questions
• 39.4% (4,651 calls) went straight to voice mail (again I used a different recorded message for these)
• 21.9% (2,594 calls) were 'unsuccessful' - which basically means it was a non working number, someone entered their number incorrectly (by accident) or they entered a crap number to get past my lead capture form.
• Cost: $1,105.68 = .12 cents a call and you only pay for the successul calls (live answer or voicemail) which is cool.

Results / ROI (all that really matters)
If you are NOT tracking every marketing campaign then you are wasting money!
So how did this campaign perform for me?

• My inbound call center RANG OFF THE HOOK - volume was 10X + a normal weekday afternoon
• I received a TON of email replies - some were - why are you calling me?  who are you?  normal B.S. that you have to have customer service address.  Most were legit questions about the service that was being marketed.
• I reinforced my company brand to EVERY single delivered call.  They now know that we are "real" and a serious company that is worth doing business with / spending money with.
• And at the end of the day the only thing that really matters - my merchant account was ON FIRE - it is not my style to throw out dollar amounts but I will say we did 4X our normal hourly transaction volume this afternoon (the calls hit about 4 hours ago so this is ALL real-time data).
• And without bragging about numbers, I easily saw a MULTIPLE TIMES RETURN on my investment within the SAME day . . .

Summary
This was a NON IM (Internet Marketing) niche!  Yep, believe it or not there are OTHER niches that are profitable out there . . .

As you can tell by this post, I am really jazzed about the immediate response to the voice broadcast and my offer.  It was a great experience and I would happily recommend VoiceShot (they even have a real account manager who called me back with answers to my questions).

So what can you do with this information?  TAKE ACTION - if you don't have phone numbers from your customers / leads - you need to START ASKING for them!  (I will blog about "real" lead generation in the near future)

And remember how I said that email sucks!  That is why you need to subscribe to my RSS Feed right now

I look forward to your comments.

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