Tag: phone spam

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,
Phone (picture)
Dialing for dollars doesn’t always work. But dialing to convey important information does.

Most of the time, robocalls are used all wrong

I once wrote, “If you are trying to sell me something, or if you want my vote, I want contact with a human being who can answer my questions.” Yet I get robocalls all the time from clueless “marketers” who don’t understand this simple truth, or can’t be bothered with it. Worse, a lot of these calls are hangups, and far too many show up in the middle of the night. Would it be so difficult to program a function that blocks each area code between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m, local time? It won’t help cell-phone travelers but it will help a lot of home-based entrepreneurs who don’t always remember to turn the bedroom ringer off at night.

I have one message for these cretins:

–> Stop spamming me. I don’t buy from spammers.

I’ve spent years preaching the gospel of client-centered marketing. Marketing should be driven by the customer. You want to be found when the prospect is searching for great content about what you do. You want to be ready when that client calls or emails. But you don’t want to be spamming the prospect with canned, inflexible messages. It doesn’t work in social media, it doesn’t work in e-mail, and it doesn’t work on the phone.

But that doesn’t mean the technology should be tossed out. There are times I actually welcome a robocall, and other times when I tolerate them:

These robocalls are welcome:

  • From a school where I have a child enrolled, or the one where my wife works, announcing a closing or delay
  • From my town or state government, warning of a road closing, water service issue, etc., or giving polling hours for an election
  • From my utility company, updating me on a storm-related outage
  • From one of my credit card-issuing banks, flagging potentially fraudulent activity and offering to connect me with a human being if there is an issue

And these I’ll grit my teeth and tolerate:

  • A healthcare provider confirming an appointment
  • A business that I regularly patronize, announcing a special time-limited offer and giving me a reason why it can’t wait for me to check my e-mail
  • A reminder that an online or in-person event I’ve signed up—and especially one that I’ve paid for—is about to start

Notice a pattern? What do all of these have in common? I’ll skip a couple of lines so you can take a guess before I tell you.

Figure it out yet?

 

 

Here it is:

These are organizations with whom I have an existing relationship, using the tool to convey crucial information. They are not interrupting my day—or worse, my sleep—to sell me something. They are not horning on on me and forcing a relationship where none exists. The ones I welcome are telling me something I need to know; the ones I tolerate at least tell something they need me to know on the basis of our past interaction.

And that should be your guideline in using any intrusive marketing (or informational) method.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Business-general, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, privacy, Shel's Personal Life, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

How many times will they try to beat us into submission before they see it doesn’t work?

It’s bad enough that I have to delete some 200 spams a day from my email inboxes…that I get at least 10 junk calls every week from robots, and another 5 or so from poorly trained humans…that I have to spend my precious time flushing spams out of the moderation queues on my WordPress sites.

It is absolutely unacceptable that today, not only did I get two bounce messages from Russia for emails I never sent, I actually got a robocall (about lowering my credit card rate) that showed up with my own name and number on caller ID!

I was among the first to sign up for the do-not-call list. I moderate my website comments, so no junk gets through. And I value my reputation to the point where if I could figure out how to track and report these scum who are trashing my good name pretending to be me, I would make things very ugly for them.

Attention spammers: if you think I will *ever* do business with someone who not only forces unwanted (and often-deceptive) intrusions on me, but actually forges my name to the attempt, you are sorely mistaken. To paraphrase Phil Ochs, “Stupid spammer, find another planet to be part of!” And in the meantime, at least get me OFF your list!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

It happened again—the first words out of the robocaller’s synthesizer box were “press 1 for your free directory listing.”

Guess what—if that’s the first thing I hear from you, it’s also the last—because my phone will be back in its cradle before your robot even finishes the sentence. CLICK!

It’s like telling me you want to marry me the moment we first meet—before we’re even introduced. And guess what. I’m already happily married and I’m not in the market. Even if I were, that’s not how I’d want to be approached.

Sure, I’m in business, and I love free listings—useful ones, anyway, like Literary Market Place (which typically brings me a very small stream of very large clients). But I’ve also wasted a lot of time over the years filling out free listings that have zero benefit, like the gazillion Who’s Who books I got listed in back in the 1980s and 1990s.

So…when your call ID shows up as something unrecognizable (RL2 Services Co? What the heck is that?), the first thing I want to know is “who are you, really?” The second thing I want to know is “what’s the catch/the actual cost?” Then “how much time is this going to take?” And of course, “who reads your directory, how many readers are there, and how targeted is this to what I sell?”

No robocall is going to answer those questions.

I will listen to the first few seconds of a robocall, because sometimes it’s the bank’s identity theft with a security alert on my credit card, a school district telling me classes are canceled for weather, or something like that. I don’t love them but I have learned that once in a while, they’re real. But try to sell me something, anything, with a robocall and I just think you’re stupid, disrespectful, and annoying.

And some of the live operators are no better. I’m very protective of my cell number and give it out on a need-to-know basis. I got a human being calling me who told me he was calling because of a survey he filled out. I responded, “I don’t give my cell number out on surveys. Who are you really?” His response: CLICK!

Does this company really think it’s going to get on my good side with this?

I’ve had others who can’t deviate from a script. Honey, if I’m going to do business with you, we’re going to have a two-way conversation. If you’re human and you talk at me as if you are a robot, I will treat you like one. My turn to CLICK!

I continue to be amazed at the clueless, deceitful, or just plain disconnected marketing “strategies” I encounter. Presumably, businesses do these things to attract new clients. But it would be more accurate to call them “client repelling strategies,” because they do the opposite of attract.

If you would be pushed away by bad marketing when it’s done to you, why do it to others who will feel the same way?

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