Possible On Hold Techniques
If you are involved in marketing a business, you are always searching for ways to reach your customers. Some are large scale, such as paying for the naming rights to a football stadium or basketball court, some are small scale like putting up a billboard or a newspaper ad. Whatever the case, you are always looking for ways to get in front of your potential customers' eyes and ears in order to make your products and services known and understood. When you are thinking through a no stone left unturned marketing strategy, there is one area which you may not think of but is full of possibilities: on hold messaging.
So just what are the advantages and disadvantages of on hold marketing? Well, the disadvantages are simple: your customer must already have found your business to be on hold, and it is only an audio medium. But these limitations can more properly be seen as the parameters, the structure, that make this form of marketing such a powerful tool. You use other methods to bring them in. The advantages spring from already having them on the line.
When you call a business and are put on hold, there are generally three things that can happen. First, you can sit there bored out of your mind as there is nothing on the other end of the line but silence. For a business, this time can even be dangerous as the customer may hang up or, if they stay on the line, may be less inclined to do business with the company that just seemingly didn't value their time. Second, you may be treated to some music. You might get some elevator jazz, some top forty, or maybe some classic rock. Although music that is chosen specifically to speak to a business's clientele can develop the brand identity and keep the caller from losing interest, it still does not optimize what can be delivered in that time. Therefore, from the business marketers point of view, you can see that either of these two options are at best time wasted and at worst time that has either bored or upset your customer, and in the moments directly before they are to interact with a representative of your company too!
So let's look at the third option, which is , of course, messages on hold. Instead of boring or upsetting your customer in those crucial minutes before they speak to you, you can provide them with a custom message tailored to their and your needs. You could use it to inform the caller of products or services they may not know about or better educate them on the things they do know about but might not know everything about. Or you could communicate seasonal sales or specials. Whatever your purpose, on hold messaging is another medium of marketing that allows for your creative team to interact with the customer. In this case, the circumstances of the communication are controlled in such a way that the communication is happening directly before they speak to a representative of your company. If properly utilized, it is impossible not to see how effective of a tool this form of marketing can be.
