Think about this.
That contact you’re reaching with a voice message may already be getting hundreds of such messages. This means that your success is tied to how you play your cards.
Running an effective voice broadcasting or robocall campaign involves implementing best practices to improve your campaign’s success rate. This guide shows you how to get the best out of your robocall campaigns, along with highlighting the best practices our product specialists recommend.
How do you optimize your robocall campaigns on CallHub?
Let’s start by understanding how to set up an effective Robocall campaign on CallHub, with the help of best practices and tips.
1. Record your message
Live answer
Live answer is the message played when your call is answered. There are 2 ways you can add this message to your campaign.
- Play audio: You can upload a recorded message. CallHub lets you listen to it after, to make sure it sounds as you want it to. Recording audio of your own is recommended when you’re running campaigns that involve persuading your audience into taking action. For instance, voter persuasion, GOTV, etc.
- Text to speech: Type out your message and CallHub will convert it to audio. This is ideal for short voice messages like payment reminders, security alerts, etc.
Best practices:
- For simple use cases such as sending reminders, use the text-to-speech feature and personalize your message. The ‘Personalize’ feature lets you customize your message using dynamic fields like first name, email, etc.
When you need to connect with your contacts on a human level, we recommend using recorded audio.
- We recommend keeping your message:
- A maximum of 30-seconds long and to-the-point when you’re running informational campaigns.
- A maximum of 45-seconds long and engaging when you’re running persuasive campaigns. For example, start by setting the scene while accommodating the context so they know who this call is from.
Transfer
The ‘Transfer’ feature in CallHub gives your robocall campaign interactive capability.
Once you hit ‘Add Transfer’, you can add the audio message you want to play after the transfer digit is pressed and define the transfer digit. For example, if you are connecting them to a representative, your message will sound something like this:
Thank you for joining us. Please hold while we connect you to our representative.
You can use Transfer in multiple ways:
- Engage interested leads with further conversations by getting them in touch with a live representative.
- Get them to leave feedback.
- Conduct polls, collect RSVPs, and more with 0-9 as the transfer options.
For every transfer, you can get emails that will have the contact’s details, audio recording and the transcription(if opted for).
Answering machine detection
CallHub can detect answering machines automatically and lets you choose the subsequent action.
Once you enable the Answering Machine Detection feature, there are 2 actions you can perform:
- Add a voice message to play after the machine is detected.
- Hangup immediately if the machine is detected.
Best practice: Your voice message here needs to direct your contact to getting in touch with you. For instance, you could ask them to leave a message or tell them you will call back in two hours.
Do Not Call
This feature lets you honor your contacts’ wish to be removed from your list.
CallHub lets you play a message that your contacts will hear when they press the digit associated with expressing the interest to be removed from the list.
For instance, say your contact presses ‘9’.
They can hear a message that goes something like this: “Thank you for letting us know. We are removing your number from our list.”
Now, at the backend, any number that presses this digit gets moved to your Do Not Call list and they won’t be a part of your future campaigns. Note that it is a legal and ethical requirement to honor your contacts’ decision to be removed from the list.
2. Add your contacts
You can add one or multiple contact list containing the contacts you want to reach out with your campaign.
Best practice: Get your contact list analyzed to verify the validity of the numbers. CallHub’s Contact List Analysis add-on can help you weed out the invalid contacts or edit them.
3. Set up the CallerID and retries
General Settings
Choose the CallerID for your campaign.
CallerID: This is the number that appears on your contacts’ screens when you call them. You can rent new numbers from CallHub or use any existing ones once CallHub validates them.
Best practices:
- CallHub helps you get a Dynamic CallerID which helps establish a local presence by automatically changing your CallerID to match your contacts’ location. This helps you get a higher attention and increases the engagement rates by up to 20%. Studies show that people are 4 times more likely to pick up calls from local numbers.
- Get a ‘Caller Verified’ badge: As per SHAKEN/STIR, a new technology framework designed to reduce fraudulent robocalls, you can get your number validated and attested. This will enable a trust indicator on your phone number and your contacts will see a ‘Verified’ badge on your screens when you call them. This helps improve your answer rate and brand reputation by instilling trust in your audience.
Submit a request here to authenticate your phone number.
Note: Dynamic CallerID is a free add-on available on CallHub’s Store, which is accessible from your dashboard.
Dialer Settings
Set up the retries and the frequency.
Max retries: This number defines the maximum number of retries you want per every unanswered contact. CallHub lets you choose up to 10 retries.
Frequency: This defines the number of calls you want to make per minute. This helps you control the number of contacts you want to reach in one Voice Broadcasting Campaign.
Time between retries: This is the time delay in seconds before you retry a contact.
Best practices:
- Our qualitative research suggests keeping the number of retries between 1-3 depending on your use case.
- Choose your frequency depending on
- The number of volunteers (available to take calls if you have a given a choice to transfer calls on a key press)
- Campaign duration
- Use case, etc.
- The recommended time delay between the retries is 24 hours.
4. Schedule the call
This is where you decide the duration of your campaign along with defining the hours and days. You can set a start date, time and an end date, time.
However, at this stage too, you have the option of choosing timezone based calling. Your calls will get placed as per the campaign timezone, which can be any timezone you choose, or the contact’s timezone(based on their area code).
Best practices:
- Use our Analytics Dashboard to analyze your campaigns and predict the best time slot to run your campaigns. For instance, the days and hours when you have the highest
- Answer rate
- Machine detections
- Unreachable contacts, etc.
- Using your contacts’ timezone and scheduling the campaigns within reasonable hours will help you stay compliant.
There you go. Hit ‘Finish’ and you’ve scheduled your campaign.
Now, let’s see how you can optimize your campaign further and better strategize your future campaigns.
Use the Analytics Dashboard
A detailed reporting dashboard can help you analyze the performance of your voice campaigns.
CallHub gives you call reports and daily performance reports in real time. The insights show you
- How many contacts your voice message reached
- How they responded
- How your agents are performing after the transfer
- Your campaign’s performance on different days of the week.
Analyzing these insights helps you understand when people are prone to answer your calls, when the cost of transferring calls is high, etc. helping you plan your campaigns more effectively.
Connect with your CRM
CallHub lets you connect your CRM account with your CallHub account and share data across platforms in real time. The bi-directional data sync allows you to import contacts, survey data, tags, and more into CallHub and the campaign data back to your CRM. You can also segment and target your audience based on their location, level of engagement, interests, and more.
Take a look at the integrations.
Where can you use robocalls?
Now that you’ve understood how to use CallHub’s Voice Broadcast Dialer, let’s see the use cases this dialer is best suited for.
| Follow-ups: This can be a follow-up call after you’ve provided a service or they have attended your event, made a purchase, etc. For instance, customer service follow-ups, post sales follow-ups, etc. |
| Surveys: Create a series of multiple-choice questions and let your contacts respond using their dialpad. For example, customer satisfaction surveys, market research surveys, assessing voter sentiment, etc. |
| Feedback collection: By enabling your contacts to leave a voice message in response to yours, you can gather detailed feedback and insights into your audience’s concerns, needs and interests. |
| Reminders: Along with sending reminders related to payments, membership renewals, upcoming events and rallies, and more, you can give them the option to get in touch with you to get their concerns addressed by talking to a representative. |
| Lead qualification: Give your leads the ability to get in touch with you and nurture them down the funnel. For example, your message can be: “Hi, {first_name}. Welcome to {organization_name}. Please press ‘1’ to talk to our representative. Press ‘2’ if you’d like us to call you back later.” |
| GOTV: With a GOTV robocall, you can reach all your contacts in the shortest time possible and encourage them to get to the polls and vote for you. |
| Endorsements: What better way to let your voters than playing a message that shows you have an endorsement from a highly influential figure! |
| Announce promotions: Use a robocall campaign to announce your seasonal sales, offers, and more. |
For deeper insights on how Voice Broadcast Dialer can help you, reach out to us.
Now, let’s see a few general best practices around running a robocall campaign.
Stay compliant with federal regulations
There are laws that define certain regulations around robocalling. For instance, getting consent, being time-sensitive, etc. Sometimes, these laws differ from state to state, and country to country. Make sure you stay up to date and abide by them. This helps you maintain your organization’s reputation and prevents you from being penalized.
Check out this guide to see what you need to do to stay compliant.
Plan your campaign well
A definite plan on how to go about your campaign will improve your success rate. Plan the specifics like
- When would you send your voice broadcast?
- How frequently would you send them?
- What’s your messaging?
- What metrics are you tracking and what’s the expected result?, etc.
Key takeaways
Used in the right way, robocalls or voice broadcasts can be a very effective tool. They not only reach your contacts with your message in the shortest time possible, but also capture their responses and engage them in multiple ways.
Do you have more questions? Our experts would love to help out.
Featured image: Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels
