Your On hold Music Is Important Because Seth Godin Say’s So!
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20+ years, then probably don’t know who Seth Godin is, but if you’re a marketer, business owner or entrepreneur, then you more than likely have read one of Seth’s best-selling books, attended one of his speaking engagements, or visited most popular blog in the world by a single author – his! Seth Godin is an insanely successful entrepreneur. He pioneered the idea of permission based marketing, and has launched and sold some pretty successful companies such as Yoyodyne, Squidoo and others. In fact, after launching Yoyodine in 1995, he then sold it to Yahoo for $30 milliondollars, and became Yahoo’s vice president of direct marketing, a position he held until 2000. So yes, this guy is well-respected and certainly knows a thing or two about marketing! When he says your on hold music is important, then you may just want to pay attention.
You see, today marketers no longer have the power to command the attention of anyone they choose, whenever they choose. This is why much like Seth, I’m a strong believer of inbound-marketing, which is why I’m not surprised at all to see his latest blog post “Your call is very important to us!” In this interesting read, Seth’s gives top tips for treating inbound callers right.
Here’s a few snippets from his latest post. “Have a bright red light flash on the CEO’s desk whenever anyone, anywhere, is on hold for more than 5 minutes.” Well a bit tongue and cheek, but he happens to be spot on. Study after study shows callers will abandon being on hold and hang-up in less than a minute. To exacerbate this lost call problem, studies also show that 34% of these callers will never call you back!
“ 80% of your inbound calls are about the same ten things”, and the best way to handle these calls is to eliminate them.” While I’m not sure you can eliminate them, I do believe you can aid in reducing wasted time or repeated phone calls with commonly asked inquiries such as your business hours, location, website, shipping and return policies, etc by answering these common questions for waiting callers with a well crafted, informative, and professional on hold messaging.
“Change your on hold music to Bill Cosby and Woody Allen records.” While it would cost quite a pretty penny to pay for the license rights for such a thing, and once again in my opinion, the meaning is much deeper than the words. While Godin may not necessarily mean to actually have Bill Cosby or Woody Allen as your hold music, his suggestion is to have something pleasant to put callers in a good mood while having to wait.
He also writes: “If you’re closed, tell us the hours you are open and the relevant websites. Make sure the information is accurate.” Ah-ha moment! We just wrote about this in a blog post titled “Why Outdated or Inaccurate Marketing Content Is Making Your Business Look Stupid. This was a real-world situation which caused us to make a purchase elsewhere, because a company had inaccurate marketing information (see http://bit.ly/13C2y7i).
On hold marketing works. It gets people to take action, to change their minds, and most of all, to do more of what they might have had an inkling to do in the first place – sometimes a lot more! As Seth writes; “even famous companies get the proper handling of inbound marketing opportunities wrong.” Stop ignoring this tremendous inbound marketing opportunity at your business. Contact The Original On hold Inc., and we can show proven strategies on how you can capitalize on inbound marketing opportunities to grow your company, reputation, customers, impact and profit.
