A new medium is emerging in Business communications and attracting a lot of attention because of its promising ROI: straight to Voicemail messages. The concept is in the name: dropping a pre-recorded audio Message straight to the voicemail of the prospect, without even making the phone ring. The name sometimes differs, it’s also called Ringless (Voicemail) messages or drops.

The main benefits of straight to voicemail

The benefits are numerous: first, this method is perceived as less intrusive than a direct voice call or a text. Then, it’s easy to set up a minimal implementation of the flow and already achieve great results. Next, when the medium proved successful for your business, you can build on top of it to increase conversion even further and integrate it with the rest of your communication flow.

The move towards straight to voicemail isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s a direct answer to the saturation of most prospects, who receive too many untargeted calls and text messages. The use cases are diverse and range from creative growth hackers who are looking for a quick and efficient traffic generation solution (to website or point of sales) to large businesses optimizing their outreach.

Indeed, with ringless voicemail messages brands have full control over the content and its structure; during a call, it’s easy to slip away from the script. Straight to voicemail is also quite often used in more complex communication flows, mixed with regular phone calls or text messages. Since it’s perceived as less intrusive, it’s a great way to reach back to a prospect who did not answer the first outreach without being too pushy.

Making ringless drops work for your business

Since the straight to voicemail services are usually available through APIs, they are easy to automate and integrate with other mediums for even better results. Here at CALLR, since we started offering the services 3 years ago, we’ve seen many customers getting creative with their flows and achieving impressive conversion rates and ROI.

So we reached out to them, sat down and had a talk about their setup, the best practices they recommend and the results they were able to achieve. We were thrilled to see the diversity in the industries embracing the practices and being successful with it: real estate, car resellers, classified ads and marketplaces, and many others.

We’re in for a deep dive, structured in three main sections:

1. First, we’ll look at the minimal implementation of a straight to voicemail strategy.
2. Then, we’ll cover the best practices your business can implement to increase conversion rates.
3. Finally, we’ll present the advanced integrations you can do to go even further.

The basic straight to voicemail flow

The interesting part about straight to voicemail is that since the medium is still relatively new and underused, your business doesn’t need a complex workflow to achieve great results. In fact, some of our customers are even purposely keeping their flow simple and slim, because it’s sufficient to convert and easier to implement and maintain.

Getting started is a matter of minutes, as there only three requirements:

1. A database of qualified prospect — if you are looking to enhance the communications of your business, you probably have one at hand already.

2. A telecommunication service provider which supports the straight to voicemail feature.

3. One/several high-quality audio recordings of your pitch. The message is obviously the most critical part of ringless drops, we’ll cover this in depth right after the next section.

Results overview and conversion rates

The basic flows are highly appreciated by growth hackers. If you are familiar with the tools and have a database ready to be contacted, we’re literally talking minutes of your time to get started. It’s a highly convenient way to try a pitch or validate an idea.

Despite the minimalistic approach developed with such flows, they tend to deliver better results than regular voice and SMS campaigns. In terms of conversions, our best customers are able to achieve a call back rate around 20% with qualified databases. Roughly half of these callbacks (10% of the database) become sales qualified lead.

Enhancing your ringless messaging strategy

Ringless drops most appreciated benefits lies in its ability to maintain a personal touch in the outreach strategy, despite the automation. This also why the content and delivery of your message are crucial. In terms of content, if you’ve been doing marketing for a while you probably don’t need a handbook, so the most recurrent best practices we’ve observed will be enough:

Don’t call empty-handed

The best way to excite your prospects’ curiosity is to bring to their attention something valuable for them. In a typical B2B scenario, framing the solution you provide as a way to help your partners save money or increase their sales is usually a good start. Overall, you need to water down your pitch to focus on the financial bottom line for your prospects — 2 minutes is shorter than the usual pitch so don’t be afraid to jump straight to the benefits.

Strive to maintain the personal touch 🤙

As said before, we think the personal feeling straight to voicemail is able to deliver is key to its success. With that in mind, doing everything your business can to preserve and maximize it is usually a winning strategy. Here are some recommendations:

• AVOID using Text to Speech at all cost — always use a recorded message.

• Have different messages adapted for the main personas your business is targeting. There is no need to go crazy; 3-4 different recordings are usually enough to get started.

• People tend to respond more positively to a female voice. Woman’s voices are perceived as more soothing and trustworthy because of their higher pitch, by both genders.

• Introduce yourself in the message. When people are calling you back after hearing it, they might want to talk to you, and not just any random salesman or agent in your company.

• Mind the frequency! While ringless drops are initially perceived as less intrusive, it’s better to be prudent about callbacks and the frequency of the messages. When someone gets the same message several times over a few weeks and is never able to actually talk to someone, it might feel like being harassed by an unstoppable machine.

Going further with ringless drops

With the basics covered, we can dive into the arcane. While the flows and tips we suggested before were quite flexible, the implementations covered in this part are more dependent on your existing business communications setup. We’ll focus on the possibilities, present some example flows, and leave it to you to figure out how to best implement this for your business.

Overall, implementing the solutions we detail below will translate into an even more personal feeling, allowing you to push conversion rates higher. The main downside lies in the additional setup times they require.

Pre-qualify the numbers your business collects

While collecting numbers of prospects, it’s sometimes hard to gauge their interest and current state. Since ringless drops are non-intrusive, they are a great medium for a first contact: the less relevant prospects won’t be too annoyed, and you will have a clear tell of interest from the most qualified ones.

It’s a bit like a phone version of the double opt-in used for mailing lists:

Just like with emails, using such a flow help you ensure your prospect database is qualified and engaged/engageable. In terms of implementation, it’s also very handy as the whole process can be fully automated.

Examples of phone double opt-in flows

The numbers you are collecting end up in a CRM or other prospect management software. From here, you can either integrate CALLR directly or use a tool to do for you, like Zapier. With the most basic implementation, you can simply drop a voicemail to your prospect a set time after you collect it, to initiate the activation.

• If you have more data on your users, you can go further such as using a different message depending on the context of the number collection. For instance, if you collected the number at a trade event or a workshop, referencing it in your first outreach is a great way to make an impression and develop the much needed personal touch.

• If your service is an app or an online service, you can even add conditions based on the current status of your prospects. For instance, trigger the ringless drop only if the prospect hasn’t tested the service X days after the first contact.

Give options to your prospects using IVR

ℹ️ Interactive Voice Response (IVR) allows your prospect to interact with you, usually through inputs via the keypad, ex Press 1 to be connected to a salesperson. IVR can be used both inbound — to route the calls your business is receiving, or outbound — to offer options to the prospect you’re reaching to.

Despite the targeting and pre-qualification of your databases, all the prospects you reach to might not be at the same stage in the sales cycle: giving them options is a great way to account for this. Two or three different options are usually enough, as anything over that amount induces an unnecessary additional complexity (choice) for your prospects.

Sample ringless drop + IVR flow

CLIC’AUTO, a French company specialized in managing marketing campaigns for third parties in the automotive industry: they offer a highly competitive ROI for foot-traffic generation campaigns to car dealerships. They use outbound IVR to offer three options to the prospect they reach out to:

1. Press 1 — be recontacted later: the listener is asked to press 1 if they’d like to be contacted by a salesperson. The salesperson then receives an email with the person’s contact information.

2. Press 2 — Direct connection: If the listener would like to, they can be connected to a salesperson during the call. You can enhance this feature even further, for instance matching it with your salespersons’ schedule and availabilities to make sure there are no empty promises.

3. Press 3 — Leave a voicemail. The listener is invited to leave a recorded message. This option is particularly useful to gather clients’ feedback.

Read the full case study for more details on their implementation.

Use the API to double down and find the best flow for your business

You can use any of the feature provided by our API to customize your flow even further such as calls, text messages, or call recordings.

Text messages are great to redirect prospects to a website

For instance, text messages can be a great way to redirect people to a website after you reach it to them. You can either offer them the option through an IVR system (Press 2 to get more information about this) or send the text message to a prospect who hasn’t reached back after a few days.

Qualification and personalization pushed to the limits

If your current business communications flows can support it, you can push the personalization of your outreach even further. For instance, you can attribute a specific salesperson to each of your prospects (phone number) once you have enough information about them. Then, using an inbound IVR system you can make sure that every time they call your business, they will be redirected to the same agent.

Harness the full potential of telcos

Phone calls, text messages and straight to voicemail all have their pros and cons. Here’s the good news: you can and should mix and match them together. Building your business communications on a flexible API is a way to future-proof your infrastructure. You don’t know your future needs yet, so keeping options on the table is a sound strategy.

At CALLR, we’ve been helping growth-hackers, startups and major brands optimize their outreach for more than 10 years. If this article delivered any value for your business, we’re confident our website and service offering will too.

The straight to voicemail feature is available for any non-geographic (=mobile) phone numbers. Drops are limited to 2 minutes maximum, and priced per unit. They are very cost-effective, and you can push the price further down with a high volume and recurrence.