Well it’s been four weeks since the whole of Europe’s business sector had to get all its Data Protection ducks in a row, facing the prospect of a hefty fine or serious litigation. There has been a lot of panic sweeping through the IT departments of larger companies where the pressure from Marketing, Legal and the board must have been intense (and may still be for those who’ve left it late), for the sole traders or small companies it may lie with just one person to get this right. It’s understandable that there are so many organisations late to the party, there was 2 years to prepare for the legal start date of GDPR, but very limited insight given by the EU legislators as to what in practise it would mean. Couple that with the fear of losing blind, mass-marketing as a legitimate lead generation tool and I believe many businesses were spooked in to waiting to see what others did and if the clarity eventually would come.
There were those however who saw this potential banana skin as an opportunity to become a more streamlined, effective operation. They didn’t bury their heads in the sand and leave it until the 25th May to send a poorly scripted “opt in email” (bound to result in mass deletions) leaving their sales departments hamstrung. These canny entrepreneurial characters took a different approach – cleanse, qualify and secure. What does that mean? Well it’s all about starting at the end and working backwards, if the goal is to secure real paying customers for life then you will have to ensure you’re selling to the right people.
Having a specific buyer persona is what marketing experts tend to look at first when putting a strategy in place and so anyone looking to make the most of their database must fill it with prospective people that look like their ideal clients. To get that level of qualification at first you must be able to contact them or encourage them to contact you, have you ever been asked to submit an email address to get access to free in a bar or restaurant? This is a very easy way to get the right people on board with offers or competitions and you can learn a lot from their activity (like what web pages they visit from clicking links) and use that to qualify them as good leads or hold off on contacting them until they’ve shown the right IOIs (indicators of interest).
Consumers prefer to be in control of their contact level with a business or brand so therefore empowering them to decide “when they hear from you” and then keeping to that builds a great deal of trust. Those businesses who’ve updated their privacy policy and put in place the sufficient control processes have earned the right to use this as a differentiator, if I was looking around a vertical market say financial advisors where there’s not an overt difference between options, hearing one being confident about their level of compliance – enough to shout about it as soon as my call was connected – would make me more likely to choose this company over others who weren’t mentioning this, even if they had in fact been early adopters. But how then can an organisation ensure that message gets out to everyone who calls in? Well they could send an edict out telling those who answer the phone they must inform callers via pre-scripted statement but then that’s reliant on everyone following that 100% of the time with the same gusto and passion.
Bearing in mind the caller may have been waiting to get through in the first place and had to suffer awful hold music or worse just ringing, it may lose value due to perceived time spent waiting to get through. Or what the smart cookies have done is have a professionally voiced auto attendant greeting which is short and to the point that plays whilst a caller is waiting for a colleague to become available. So instead of that time being wasted at a cost to the caller experience something so important that it could seal a potential deal (like GDPR compliance) is heard by everyone and because of the quality of the production, it doesn’t sound like a rushed job done by the receptionist with background noise and a potentially awkward accent.
This then becomes an evolving part of their business, as new products come online, or seasonal and industry events come up marketeers can utilise this space and that when callers are on hold or transferred to introduce customers to this news. It is akin to having an extra member of staff without the salary or NI contributions and this one hardly ever gets sick…Audpro resellers now provide this service as standard across all on-site or cloud-based platforms, so whether you’re a director or IT manager looking to transform the front-end of your business or a provider of phone systems in any shape or size not currently on our white-labelled programme, we want to make sure you get the most value from your comms solution and trusted telecoms partner.
Get in touch to learn why we are quickly becoming the “Channel’s Choice” for professional telephone audio.
Guest Blog by Steve Neil, Channel Partner Manager at Audio Productions
For nearly fifteen years Audio Productions have been at the forefront of audio marketing techniques. Our team have been at the cutting edge of this area of marketing opportunity, working closely with a wide variety of clients and technologies. Over that time the company has developed a series of cost effective marketing opportunities, creating high impact individually tailored marketing solutions which deliver great value for the client every time.
