The notion of asking the right questions is so common to good business advice that it’s practically become a cliché. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it, though: after all, figuring out which questions are the right questions can be its own project. In business, if you want to unlock the secret to questioning correctly, look at your customers, and think from their perspective.
10 Sales Expert Tips for Selling with On Hold Messaging
Whether you plan for it or not, your On Hold Messaging is always On Hold Marketing, because it sends a message about who you are as a company. What do customers think when they hear silence, or cheesy muzak? Whatever they think, they think that about you. So take control of the image you are already sending, and use your messaging to sell something.
3 Science-Backed Secrets to the Best On Hold Music
Music is the original placeholder of the On Hold world: even the clunkiest old phone systems have some kind of music built-in. By itself it’s just that – a placeholder. It doesn’t accomplish much, but it means your callers aren’t sitting in silence. That might give you the idea that the messages laid over the music are more important – but here you’d be mistaken, because the messages don’t work so great by themselves either.
You need the whole package to succeed, and here’s why:
3 Ways On Hold Messaging Makes You More Money
Originally posted on: www.clearonhold.com/blog/2020/9/10/3-ways-on-hold-messaging-makes-you-more-money
Companies that provide On Hold Messaging frequently remind businesses how necessary good on hold messaging is for success. Truly effective On Hold Marketing, though, doesn’t treat your on hold messages as a mere necessity. To market, you look for opportunities, and if you think about it, you’ll find that placing callers on hold provides a lot of opportunities.
1. You’re Making People Wait
Every single business in existence has inconvenienced a customer – they don’t have a choice, really. Every customer you have is competing with other customers for your time, energy, and attention, especially when you’re trying to serve more than one at a time.
Your business shouldn’t ask whether you can avoid customer inconvenience – you should be asking how you can turn inconvenience to your advantage. It’s not unusual for a business to employ a model that inconveniences customers; have you ever seen one of those U-Pick fruit farms? They have successfully convinced people to pay them to harvest their crops for them – and their customers happily obliged.
You’re probably not a fruit farm, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make inconvenience work for you. What are those fruit farms actually doing? They took a necessary part of their supply chain – harvesting – and turned it into a marketable reward: they gave people something they didn’t know they wanted.
What do you have that your customers don’t know they want yet? It could be as simple as giving them some entertainment on hold with good while-you-wait jokes. It could be reminding them of a service you offer that customers could benefit from but never ask about. Get creative.
2. You’ve Got a Captive Audience
Well, sort of – after all, you only have part of their attention. “What’s the point, then?” you might say. Consider that you’re guaranteed some of their attention. It’s amazing what kind of difference that makes in sales.
To give you an example, let’s think about cold calling for a minute. In a cold call scenario, the sales person making the call has to give 100% of his or her effort to grab the attention of their intended audience – and that results in about a 1-3 % success rate. Researchers have found, though, that when a cold call comes with a referral – that is, when the salesperson has something that guarantees even a little bit of attention – that success rate jumps to 40 %.
Talk about an increase! Amazing what even a little attention from a potential customer can do when you’re making sales – and make no mistake, what you are doing with your on hold messaging should be selling.
3. Your Caller Already Wants to Talk to You
So get them to listen to what you have to say. This follows from the last two points, actually. Your caller reached out to you because they have a specific need or desire in mind, and you are expected to fulfill that. Placing them on hold makes them wait for that specific need or desire, which forces them to pay attention to you – because they want to talk to your business.
This presents you with a great opportunity to address their need in part – answering questions, for example, or mentioning products they are likely to be looking for. More importantly, this time offers you a chance to cross-sell and upsell products and services.
”Looking to buy a lot of pipe for a construction job? Did you know we deliver? Ask about pricing!”
“Taking your cat to the vet? Do you have a regular check-up schedule? We have a plan that help you pay for that…”
“In a hurry? Be sure to sign up for our text-your-order service today and save yourself time!”
What do they all have in common? All of those messages use something your customer already wants from you and turns it into a sales opportunity – whether it’s a product, a service, or merely the fact that calling was the easiest and most convenient option.
The trick to making all this work, of course, resides in the quality of the ad copy – since you’ve got the marketing savvy, make sure your writing matches it. The best way to do that is to hire a specialist, preferably one who understands writing, marketing, and on hold messaging. Always go for the full package – it saves you time and money, so you spend less and make more.
Clearonhold
119 N Sage St Suite 201
Toccoa, GA 30577
www.clearonhold.com
5 Successful Marketing Strategies Built Around On Hold Messaging
On hold messaging can do so much more for you when it’s part of a broader marketing strategy – in fact, it provides you with a foundation that you can use to build your marketing. If you run a small business, you usually don’t have a huge marketing team, and you can’t hire consultants – so use your on hold messaging as the place to start!
Your 9-Step Process to the Best On Hold Messaging
So you’ve just been told you’re in charge of handling your company’s on-hold messaging…
…but you’ve never really been trained in writing ad copy.
“That’s okay”, you say, “I can write, and if you can write, you can write… right?”
Well . . . if your goal is just to get a job done and check it off the box, then sure . . . you can just write up some cheesy stuff that sounds like every other on-hold message you’ve ever heard, get it produced, and let it ride! You callers will continue to hate being on hold, they won’t learn a thing about your company, and they’ll probably be more irritated when they get to the phone . . . but at least you will have it off your list, right?
3 Tools You NEED to Increase Your Sales & Automate Your Marketing
It seems like no one actually talks about telephones anymore, but we’ve come a long way from Alexander Graham Bell shouting “Ahoy!” into a copper-and-resin tube. We don’t talk about them because telephones are as ubiquitous as indoor plumbing. It’d surprise you if a business didn’t have it, and you assume every place does.
4 Steps to Hone Your Brand with Sharp On Hold Messaging
Think for a minute about where you do most of your consuming. When you have a cup of coffee in your hands, is it Starbucks, Dunkin, or a local shop? You’re getting new boots and a jacket to go to the jobsite – what name springs to mind, Dickies, Carhart, or something else? Coke or Pepsi? Be honest with yourself, you drink one or the other – unless you drink RC, in which case you probably aren’t drinking the other two. Every brand you choose in this little experiment has succeeded in becoming your brand. You, as the consumer, identify with the brand, even though what got you there was the product. That fact played a major role in almost destroying Coca-cola, by the way.
5 Great On Hold Message Subjects for Veterinarians
On paper, running a business sounds so easy. People want a product or service, so you provide it! You run a business, so you know that reality doesn’t make it quite so simple. There’s no such thing as a service or product that “sells itself”: your customers need you to tell them why they need your service, even if it’s something as obvious as healthcare.
4 Common On Hold Messaging Clichés that Waste Your Callers’ Time
Believe us when we say writing copy presents challenges – sometimes it feels impossible; copywriters frequently find themselves tempted to reach into our bag of old clichés and placeholder phrases and cobble a passable message together. Resist that temptation! Lazy advertisingclear makes for fewer sales because it relies too much on your customers to motivate themselves. Your On Hold Messaging should motivate them! Here’s some tips on turning those complete wastes of time into messaging that actually benefits your business!
3 Things You Can Do with On Hold Messaging to Get the Best Customers
In a lot of ways, Building Supplies sell themselves – a fundamental need drives sales. You either get the lumber, or the house doesn’t get built; get the pipes, or no toilets and sinks. Marketing for these products can be deceptively easy, because in most cases the very fact that someone is walking through your door means they’re going to walk out with at least a basic product. At the same time, very few building suppliers deal solely in pipes and 2x4’s, and since it can be anywhere between 5 and 25 times less expensive to sell to a returning customer than a new one, cross-selling all that other stuff you carry can be the key to your success.
The 5 Rules of Creating the Most Effective On Hold Messaging
1. Speak Directly to Your Audience
When you write an on hold message, you’re speaking with just one person—the customer you have on hold. Don’t waste your time talking over his head to an imaginary crowd! Address him directly—phrases like “you already know”, “your needs”, “you, our customer” all make sure the caller feels (even subconsciously) like the message was written just for him.
4 Reasons You’re Hurting Your Business by Not Changing Your On Hold Messaging
Even if you haven’t been in business long, you know there’s more to success than just making and selling products – who you are to your customers matters—that is, your brand matters. It matters most of all because no one brings in revenue to your business like repeat callers and repeat customers, and they are exposed to your brand more than anyone.
7 Secrets the Best Veterinary Hospital Managers Know About Communicating with On Hold Messaging
2 Ways Clearonhold.com Can Help You Communicate About the COVID-19
As we all now realize, the COVID-19 Pandemic either has affected or will affect how your customers are communicating with you.
That means, when people need to contact you, they’re a lot more likely to call before they come!
When they call, many of our customers are using Clearonhold.com to help communicate the changes.
2 Ways Clearonhold.com can help
#1 If you aren’t already using clearonhold Professional Auto Attendant Greetings – Start Using them.
If your phone system allows, Professional auto attendant greetings are a great way to get the word out about your most important changes to EVERY SINGLE CALLER quickly, clearly, concisely and professionally. They work both after hours, and if you like, during the day. Your customers know there are changes, and you may be able to answer their question in the first 15 seconds of the call, and before your phone ever rings! This will go a long way to helping your business to stand out as a reliable, professional stable resource during this time of chaos.
#2 Use your On Hold Messages to communicate
Getting your on hold messages updated is super easy with clearonhold’s online production builder. It can take as little as 10 minutes to get the entire thing put together and on your system. Plus, with our extremely fast turn around speed, you can rest assured that the new updated messaging will be on your system very quickly so you can get your communications out as fast as possible.
These are very unstable times. It could be weeks, or it could be months. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get back to normal, sooner, rather than later.
Let us help you stand out as a stable business with a level head during this crisis. If you are communicating clearly, accurately and professionally during this time of crisis, your customers will trust you many years after the troubles of COVID-19 are in the distant past.
Call today and ask for Johnny, Jimmy or Stephen today, and let us help you continue to stand out as a stable, professional resource for your customers during this time of chaos.
Can I Make a Suggestion?
You know many of your customers better than they do.
We make a lot of calls, and spend a lot of time on hold – so we know a lot of people still use their On Hold Marketing defensively, playing generic messages about basic services. Your customers already know why they called, and while advertising those generic services and products isn’t bad, it doesn’t earn you any money you weren’t already making, and you want to make more.
When you tune in to the radio (or log in to an online streaming service), you already have a sense of what you want to listen to, and you won’t forget your favorite song if Spotify went away tomorrow. You access those services to get what you want, but you stick around because they suggest other things you might not have otherwise listened to. It’s why you don’t hear Jay-Z on the Classic Rock station, and why YouTube has a list of “Up Next” videos on the sidebar – the power of suggestion.
In most cases, you won’t hear anything you’ve never heard before, just something you weren’t thinking about. Internet companies do the same thing: they track your search history so they can remind you of what they think you like, and get you to spend money on that stuff again.
You know your customers much better than Google or Amazon knows you. Use that knowledge with your On Hold Marketing, and put the power of suggestion to work for you.
Hold On to Your Customers!
The motivation to avoid silence on hold is pretty plain and straightforward – silence makes hold times seem unbearably long, it makes callers feel forgotten, and it hurts the professional image of your business. Using your on hold messages as a way to avoid silence is definitely a step forward – but how many businesses are using it as a customer service tool and a way to boost sales?
