Guest Blog: Billy Williams on Why Automated Dialing Should be a Marketing Tool All Businesses Use

Dr. Billy Williams mentors clients, especially insurance agents, across the country. He has been a fierce advocate of using CallFire's Voice Broadcast, Cloud Call Center, and Hosted IVR campaigns for lead prospecting and customer outreach and retention. The following post is a guest blog with some of the tips he has shared with business professionals.

Why Automated Dialing Should be a Marketing Tool All Businesses Use

By Billy R. Williams, Ph.D., President – Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring Effective marketing is pretty simple:

1. Put your message in front of as many people as possible
2. Build lists of prospects that are interested in you, your product, and/or your expertise
3. Reach out to the lists regularly with timely, effective, problem-solving information
4. Reach out to as many people as possible on days that are important to them
5. Use affordable automation to help you stay consistent with your keep-in-touch campaigns

My partner agencies and the majority of our member agents use a company called CallFire for automated marketing, so I will use their functionality to explain how to target each of the 5 marketing areas I mentioned above.

1. Put your message in front of as many people as possible

• We use the Cloud Call Center to prospect DNC-scrubbed lists of prospects. You can have 1 or 100’s of telemarketers ready to speak live with a prospect.
• We use voice broadcasting to communicate important, non-solicitation, focused messages and announcements to current customers and opt-in prospects
• We also use “Press-1” campaigns to help us accomplish number two on our marketing list:

2. Build lists of prospects that are interested in you, your product, and/or your expertise

• Direct a press-1 campaign to a live person or to a CallFire IVR (message tree, automated survey, or hotline) that can be used to gather or give important information
• Every time someone responds positively to your telemarketer, or presses 1 on your voice broadcast campaign, that is one more person that you just added to your opt-in lists of potential customers

3. Reach out to the lists regularly with timely, effective, problem-solving information

• CallFire gives you the ability to easily schedule follow-up campaigns from calls that were not answered, requested a callback, needed bi-lingual help, etc.

4. Reach out to as many people as possible on days that are important to them

• We create weekly phonebooks in CallFire (Yes, 52 phone books) and each week we run a birthday audit from our database and add the phone numbers into the correct phone book. Then we quickly send out a Voice Broadcast birthday message. We do the same thing for recurring events like upcoming policy reviews, graduations, wedding anniversaries, etc.

5. Use affordable automation to help you stay consistent with your keep-in-touch campaigns

• The more a person hears your consistent message, the more credible you become. By using a low-cost solution like an automated dialer program, you are able to keep a consistent keep-in-touch program operating. You will not benefit long-term from a flash-in-the-pan marketing campaign. Here are my two rules of thumb when it comes to keep-in-touch programs:

1. Don’t send out information that has no real value to the prospect
2. The first time they hear you or your message is an introduction; the second time they can say they know of you; the third time they start to become familiar with you, but it takes four or more times for the prospect to feel like they are developing a relationship with you.

Follow the tips that I have just provided to you when setting up your automated dialer campaigns and you will see an awesome ROI.

Billy Williams, Ph.D., is president of Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring and Williams Family Agency Inc. The group currently has 23 member agencies and produces $360 Million in production annually. He is an expert at helping insurance agents and agencies double or triple their current production using no-cost conversations and processes, low-cost, efficient, marketing and advertising platforms, and technology.