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Voice mail and e-mail can be
powerful recruiting and marketing tools—but only if you treat
them like their first cousin, direct marketing.
Until
a few years ago, the term “direct marketing” referred mainly
to direct mail and telemarketing. Now that voice mail and
e-mail are in common use, you can add them to the list of
direct marketing techniques.
Direct marketing is based
on the assumption that your message needs to reach so many
people, it can’t be personally delivered (or least, not
delivered with any real quality of interactivity). The number
of prospects is simply too great, and therefore too expensive
to “hand deliver” to each person.
However, in
recruiting, there’s another—and possibly more relevant—basis
for direct marketing: the belief (real or imagined) that none
of your prospects can be reached directly by telephone. I’ve
been told by several recruiters that so many prospective
candidates and employers filter their phone calls that it’s
virtually impossible to get through to people to make a
real-time presentation. If this is true, then outbound voice
mail and e-mail may be the only viable way to reach new
prospects.
A One-Way Ticket
If you leave a voice mail message or
send an e-mail blast, you’re
sending a one-way message that’s incapable of answering
questions, handling concerns, or probing for referrals. So,
the result can only be binary, either on or off. Your
prospects either call you back (or e-mail you), or they don’t.
That means if you broadcast your message by voice mail
or e-mail, you have to accept the limitations of the medium,
and trade quality for quantity. Since you’re playing a numbers
game with a low rate of return (two percent with voice mail,
far less with e-mail), you have to offset the inherent
inefficiency of the technique by increasing the number of
prospects. Which means that unless you have lots of
prospects—or your message is truly important—don’t leave a voice mail
message or send an e-mail.
Here are some tips when
launching a voice mail or e-mail campaign:
1. Beef up
your list. To offset the inefficiencies of the medium, you’ll
need a large number of names, numbers or e-mail addresses in
order to get a reasonable return.
2. Craft your
message to get a response. Your “sale” will take the form of a
callback, an e-mail reply, a resume attachment or a visit to
your Web site.
3. Repetition is key. Even if you get a
disappointing response, keep sending your message. Over time,
you’ll build brand awareness and increase your chances of
getting a response or making a sale.
4. Be prepared for
success. Your only real opportunity to “sell” is when you get
a call back, so have a script (or a strong presentation) ready
for when people start responding. You may not get a second
chance.
5. Don’t fatigue your list. Repetition
is good; suffocation is bad. If you deliver the same message
too often, people will get annoyed, and your response rate
will decline.
6. Always test your message. If you have a list of
1,000 e-mail prospects, send your message to the first 250. If
the response is good, send the rest. If the response is bad,
rework your message or make corrections and send it to the
next 250 prospects. Same thing with your voice mails: test
your message with 10 people. If they all hang up on you,
they’re telling you what they think of your message.
7. Clean your list. Direct marketers call this “list
hygiene.” De-dupe and correct your list as often as you can,
and make sure to honor all requests from those who want to be
removed.
8. Be vigilant with your removes. It’s a
common mistake to add new names you removed a couple of months
ago. A simple clerical error on your part may offend a privacy
fanatic.
As a safeguard, keep a DO NOT SEND list, and
cross reference it before you start a new campaign. Even
though voice mail and e-mail are non-interactive, they can
still get terrific results—if you follow the
rules
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