So, you’ve got a list. You’ve got a sales goal to meet. You’ve got some new product offerings you’re ready to get customers excited about. You’ve decided to do that with a message campaign.

Now what?

Don’t dive into cold-calling without asking yourself a few questions first. Thinking through them will help you to better plan your campaign, sales approach, and post-campaign analysis, which will help your future campaigns have even more success.

So, without further ado, here they are:

1. How Complete Is My List?

Does it have first and last names for individual contacts? Company names and business addresses for every contact? What about phone extensions and email addresses? How is your list formatted?

The more information you have for each contact, the better, because that information can guide how you talk to them in a live call and, on a larger scale, how you determine your product’s ideal audience.

For example, the SmartContact dialer can utilize the contact’s address information to automatically show the caller a map of the contact’s area and local weather conditions to facilitate small talk. This may seem trivial, but the sense of familiarity with the area makes a very human impression. And at the end of the day, your contact would much rather listen to a human than the faceless voice of a corporate entity.

If you have enough information about your contacts to categorize them by business size, industry, geographic region, etc., you can use your responder data from the campaign to determine what kinds of businesses you can get the best return by targeting. You can also use that information as a starting point for figuring out how to best frame your marketing to appeal to that audience’s unique pain points and desires.

2. What Is My Brand’s Voice?

In general, what kind of personality does your brand project through its advertising and social media? Is it highly professional, or more casual and conversational? Is it sassy or sarcastic? Is it cheerful?

Whatever it is, your messages should be written in the brand voice to keep all marketing efforts consistent and recognizable.

If you don’t have one already, consider creating a company-wide style guide for all marketing efforts to follow. This should address standards for, among other things:

  • General tone
  • Grammatical structure (if different companies spell, hyphenate, or capitalize an industry term differently, your company should pick one spelling and stick with it)
  • How the logo and company name should or should not be displayed
  • Specific brand color schemes (complete with specific hex codes for your design team to use)
  • Topics or issues that should or should not be addressed by the brand

3. What Is My Relationship With The Contacts?

Are the people on the list former customers? Are they personal connections of yours that you are trying to turn into customers? Or are they people you have never met or heard of who may be entirely unfamiliar with you and your company?

These relationships can affect the tone you’ll want to take in your messages. Remember to always keep things within the brand voice, but know that you can (and should) be a bit more personable with connections you’ve met before than with brand new prospects.

If your list contains a combination of new and old prospects, consider splitting the list into two campaigns so you can give each group the best message for their situation. Why?

Well, have you ever signed up for a convention, then had a scheduling conflict that prevented you from attending? If so, you probably still got “follow-ups” from reps saying how nice it was to meet you, didn’t you? Anybody who has had this experience (myself included) knows that there’s nothing more off-putting for a prospect than receiving a seemingly personal message that doesn’t actually apply to you at all.

On a related note, if you are displaying at a convention and that convention offers you a list of all the people who signed up for the event, don’t assume that you saw everyone on that list. Have a separate sign-up sheet at your booth for interested people to opt-in on. That way, you end up with a list of interested leads who you did meet, as well as a list of potentially interested leads that you may not have met.

Sorting through these lists might be a bit more work, but targeting them with specialized message campaigns could give you a much better ROI than lumping them all together. Plus, you avoid the embarrassment of claiming to have met prospects who weren’t at the event.

4. What Do I Want My Contacts To Do?

What goal are you trying to achieve by contacting these prospects? Are you trying to boost interest in a product or offering – trying to get them to ask about it when they call back? Are you inviting them to an event? Do they need to RSVP?

Whatever action you want your prospects to take, make sure that it’s clear in your message. Instruct them how to contact you back, by phone or by email (make sure they know your contact information!). Mention the specific name of the product, service, or event they should be inquiring about when they respond.

If you need them to fill out an RSVP form, be sure to give them the URL. Make sure the URL for the landing page is simple and straightforward enough for them to understand in a voice message (your web team can do this fairly easily). If the URL is vitally important, accompany your voice messages with a follow-up email containing a link and instructions.

Don’t let your intentions get lost in the verbiage or ad copy. Be deliberate with the brief time you have as the center of their attention.

5. How Can I Entice People Most Effectively?

This is where the real artistry comes in: figuring out what information to give prospects and when. Keep things general to start out with, then choose 3 or 4 unique points of interest about your offering to highlight in following messages.

Think about what makes your offering unique and what parts about it might be appealing to different kinds of clients. Separate those things into their own highlight messages. That way, if a prospect isn’t interested in one message, the next one they get might catch their attention by addressing a pain point specific to their industry.

We recommend the following structure for an 8-message campaign:

  1. The Introduction: Announce who you are, why you’re calling and, most importantly, why the prospect should call you back.
  2. The Lead-In: Reinforce the 1st message and provide another reason to return the call.
  3. The Recoil: Politely suggest that maybe you have reached the wrong person. Ask if they can call you back to give you the information for the correct contact.
  4. The Comedian: Consider making a light joke while reinforcing a reason why the prospect should return the call.
  5. The Hook: Review and give detail to a specific element of your product or service that might work to intrigue a prospect.
  6. The Line: Highlight yet another specific element that may be of interest.
  7. The Sinker: Highlight yet another specific element and mention the elements listed in previous messages to remind the prospect of all your offerings.
  8. The Closer: Review all or most of the elements of interest. Let them know that this is the last time you will be contacting them and that you strongly believe that a meeting would be worth their while.

Of course, some messages can be removed or rearranged to accommodate a shorter campaign, but it’s worth noting that most prospects require at least 8 points of contact before they’re willing to buy.

If that seems like a lot of messages to keep straight, consider using SmartContact to record each message and deliver them to your prospects in the correct order at the correct intervals – all while you focus on your non-calling work.

Now that you’ve answered these questions, you’re well on your way to planning and executing a great message campaign. Perhaps these questions raised further questions about how your campaign should move forward or how your sales team could be functioning better as a whole. Feel free to discuss your additional questions and results in the comments; we’d love to hear what you think!