A typical attitude among new voice broadcasters or businesses thinking about using voice broadcasting is that a great majority of their responses will turn out to be good leads. In most cases this is far from true. Yet despite the fact that a minority of responses turn out to be good leads, voice broadcasting can be employed profitably in many instances, given a thoughtful approach and good business metrics.

If a broadcaster is delivering a message to live-answered phones only, and accepting press one live transfers to sales staff, we've seen many successful campaigns that obtain only a 15%-25% "long call rate". (Here a long call is defined as a call where both parties are on the phone together for a minimum of 1 1/2 minutes.) And this is not to imply that all of the "long calls" turn out to be classified as good leads by the broadcaster. Far from it. Some broadcasters have told us that often only 1/2 or even less of the long calls are good leads.

This is why it is so important that a business consider their business metrics carefully as they embark on a voice broadcast campaign. For example, if their effective cost for a "long call" is $25, and 1/2 of them are good leads, and they can ultimately close 1/4 of the good leads, then the cost of a sale for them is $200. If the profit for a single sale is not substantially more than $200, their own business metrics may make it impossible to employ voice broadcasting profitably.

These numbers will vary widely among industries, and are affected by both the message as well as the target audience. For example, the hypothetical firm "Wonderful Web Widgets", wanting to sell website services to small business, would be ill advised to send a broadcast to an "all businesses" list, because such a list would include large businesses (which they're not targetting), as well as many small businesses that have not found a need to have websites.

Why send a message to beauty parlors and accountants if these industries aren't normally interested in websites? This just increases the cost of the lower number of good leads that are obtained.

Another thing to consider is the mode of the broadcast campaign. The example above was about a live delivered message. What about answer machine / voicemail campaigns?

For most industries, the response rate for the live delivery - live transfer campaign is between 0.6% and 1.0%. Meaning that for every 100 calls delivered to a live answered line, there is less than 1 transfer.

For a campaign that leaves messages on answer machine / voicemail, the numbers will be significantly lower, because the prospect will have to have enough interest to write the callback number down, and then call it back, taking much more effort than simply "pressing 1" during a live message. These numbers are impossible for us to track, since the calls back to the broadcaster don't utilize our broadcast system, but broadcasters who use this method have indicated to us that the call back ratio is probably 1/4 to 1/3 of the live transfer rate for a similar message.

For a businessperson considering voice broadcasting as a lead generation system, the message is important, the calling list is important, and the basic business metrics are probably the most important factor to consider when planning a campaign.