Missed Call Marketing: How it Attracts Customers

Do you know how missed call marketing can boost your company’s success? Learn more in our comprehensive guide.

Photo by Taylor Grote on Unsplash

What is Missed Call Marketing?

In our digital world, email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing are often more popular forms of marketing compared to older methods, such as telephone marketing. Nonetheless, incorporating missed call marketing into your wider campaign can still generate lots of benefits.

In missed call marketing services, a “missed call” occurs when an interested customer places a call to a number advertised on an offline and online marketing promotion. By doing so, the company that has received the missed call will automatically send either a text message or a call back with more information, thus activating the brand.

But where does the idea of missed calls come from? It’s actually a fairly old concept that was first introduced when placing phone calls would cost a lot more money than it does now. Fast forward to when mobile phones became a staple in most households, missed calls started being used by people to either alert friends and family members that they were safe, or to convey a message such as “I am thinking about you”.

Today, missed calls have evolved and turned into a very effective marketing strategy with a lot of unexplored potentials. Missed call marketing works by enabling interested customers to reach out to a specific company at no cost. This free opportunity incentivizes people to connect with brands, whereas brands can promote their products or services in a fast and effective way.

 

Understanding How Missed Call Marketing Campaigns Work

So, how does a missed call marketing campaign work in practice? It’s surprisingly simple, and you don’t necessarily need a call recording feature (though we still do recommend implementing one for all your other sales and marketing operations).

All you have to do is create a marketing campaign to promote one of your products or services, and add a toll-free number to it. Make sure that the number is visible and, if possible, easy to remember, as this will make your missed call marketing campaign more effective.

In your campaign, invite your audience to place a missed call to that number (and state, once again, that this won’t cost them any money) to receive more information on the product or service that you are promoting. Once the person calls the number that you provided, the call gets automatically disconnected.

In a matter of seconds or minutes at most, the caller receives either a text message on their phone, a pre-recorded voice message, or a callback from one of your customer service or sales representatives.

Technically speaking, you will need to connect with a cloud-based missed call service provider, choose a 10-digit number as your missed call number, and enable that virtual number to handle a potentially huge amount of missed calls at the same time.

Once the interested prospect has placed the call, your system dashboard will collect their details in real-time, which also helps with lead generation. If you connect your system to your email address, you will receive real-time notifications about any missed calls that you get. Think about this as a sort of call transferring service that will link your phone to your email systems.

 

How Businesses Can Benefit from Missed Call Marketing

There are many advantages to using missed call marketing, whether you are a small, medium, or large company. Let’s discover some of the main ones below.

1.    It is Affordable

Let’s face it: one of the biggest pain points of businesses of all shapes and sizes remains how to be more productive, more competitive, and more profitable without breaking the bank. This is why you should consider implementing a missed call marketing strategy.

Missed calls are a very affordable way to promote your brand’s products or services, and they enable both you and your prospective customers to save money. In the case of your customers, a missed call costs them absolutely nothing, which means that a much wider range of people can access your promotions. In your case, a missed call campaign will probably only cost you a few cents, but it may return a massive ROI.

2.    It Helps Collect Real-Time Data

If you are big on gathering real-time data—whether it be around lead time manufacturing, product lifecycle management, seasonal sales, or anything else—then you will love missed call marketing. Missed calls, in fact, enable you to collect lots of information on your customers in real-time.

As soon as a customer places a missed call, your cloud systems save their details on your CRM. This helps you gather and store a lot of potentially profitable information at virtually no cost.

And because customers no longer have to fill in complex, time-consuming forms with their personal information, they will also be a lot more eager to use your missed call marketing campaign for their own benefit.

  

Image sourced from CIO Insight

3.    It Supports Your Lead Generation Strategy

We mentioned this earlier, but it’s worth discussing this in a bit more detail: with missed call marketing, your lead generation strategy can dramatically improve. Think about it: instead of blindly sending email campaigns to people who might have no interest in your brand, you let your prospective customers take charge and tell you that they want to know more about what you offer.

And because you now know that person X is actively interested in your brand and wants to receive more information on it, you will realize how much easier and quicker it is to convert them into a paying customer.

So, you can bid farewell to all those frustrating and sometimes expensive lead generation methods that you’ve been using so far, such as buying mailing lists and spending a lot of time and money on an email marketing campaign that doesn’t seem to be working.

With a solid missed call marketing strategy in place, you can both increase the number of your leads and enhance their quality, which ultimately enables you to generate organic traffic and much better leads for your sales team.

4.    It Simplifies Customer Feedback

Do you know what really helps with customer retention? Getting regular, detailed customer feedback. Knowing exactly what your customers think works and doesn’t work with your business can take your decision-making strategies to the next level and ensure that your customers are always left happy, satisfied, and eager to return for more.

And guess what? This is something else that a missed call campaign can help you with. You can pretty much revolutionize things like phone surveys and pools, and e-voting with missed calls.

To achieve all this with your next missed call marketing campaign, you need to think outside the box a little. Don’t just focus on promoting a product or service, but use the campaign as an opportunity to run a poll, conduct a customer survey, and ask callers to indicate a preference.  

Doing so might require you to enable different missed call numbers—one for each of the different options that your poll or survey provides—but, as we mentioned previously, the cost to you will remain minimal.

Image sourced from LocaliQ

5.    It Optimizes Time and Effort

Engaging your customers is an art that, more often than not, requires a lot of practice, effort, and trial-and-error. But what if you could speed it up and make it even more effective? This is precisely what you get to do with a missed call marketing campaign.

Whether you are a time-aware small company, an entrepreneur spinning many plates, or even a larger corporation looking for smarter time management strategies, missed call marketing is the way to go to help you optimize your resources.

Because the communication between you and your interested leads is almost always handled in a rapid, automated fashion, your busy sales and marketing teams will find themselves with a lot more time on their hands to devote to tasks and activities that add real value to the business.

And because missed calls are so versatile, you could even use them as part of your customer service offering and CX action management system. For example, let’s imagine that one of your customers needs support with something, they can alert you by simply placing a missed call.

That call will be immediately logged into your systems and passed on to the next available support team member. At this point, your customer can simply sit back and relax while you work hard behind the scenes to get their query dealt with and their problem solved.

6.    It is Very Flexible

While the vast majority of people these days opt for placing calls using a mobile device, it’s important to note that fixed telephone lines still exist and that lots of people continue to use them. This means that your missed call campaign will be able to target a currently neglected customer segment, leaving nobody behind.

Enabling people to place a missed call from a landline might be particularly advantageous if your brand’s target audience is more senior, lives in a remote area, or is less tech-savvy.

Image sourced from Verdict.co.uk

7.    It Allows You to Expand Your Audience

With missed call marketing, you can greatly extend the scope of even the smallest and cheapest marketing campaign. Consider, for example, that there are currently over six billion smartphone subscriptions around the world.

This figure is only projected to increase by several hundred million in the next few years. This can only mean one thing: the potential reach of a missed call marketing campaign is massive.

Therefore, creating missed call marketing campaigns regularly can be a surefire way to connect with more people than ever before.

Attract More Customers Than Ever With Missed Call Marketing

While all too often overlooked, missed call marketing is actually a fantastic tool to promote your company’s products or services in a fast, effective, and cost-efficient way.

In this article, we revealed how businesses that leverage this form of marketing can expect to hugely expand their potential lead, obtain better-quality leads, convert more customers, and raise their profits. 

Naturally, it’s vital to run both automated and manual testing cases before you move ahead with your first missed call marketing campaign, as you always want to offer a smooth, pleasant, and seamless experience to every single one of your callers.

What are you waiting for? Try creating your first missed call campaign today!

 

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

 

 

Bio:

Tanhaz Kamaly – Partnership Executive, UK, Dialpad UK

Tanhaz Kamaly is a Partnership Executive at Dialpad, a modern cloud-hosted business communications platform that turns conversations into the best opportunities, both for businesses and clients with features like the IVR software by Dialpad. He is well-versed and passionate about helping companies work in constantly evolving contexts, anywhere, anytime. Tanhaz has also written for other domains such as Track-POD and Cybersecurity Insiders.

 

Check out his LinkedIn profile.