According to the data from Pew Research, 91% of adults in the United States had cell phones as of 2013. This means that by using ringless voicemail you can reach almost any segment of the market. While there are certain categories of people that are less likely to own a cell phone than others, such as residents of rural areas and seniors 65 and older, you can use ringless voicemail successfully with these segments of the market, too.
Ringless voicemail technology leaves a voice mail without calling an actual phone number. It is able to accomplish that by dialing a business landline of a wireless cellular provider and leaving a message using the landline. Next, the provider identifies the receiver of the message, moves the message to the receiver’s allocated spot on the server and sends a notification about the message. As a result, a customer has a voice mail in the voice mailbox but there was no call and no interruptions. Because there was no call, the customer also didn’t incur any charges.
Ringless voice mail offers a number of advantages compared to cold calling or leaving messages when someone doesn’t pick up a phone.
When a telemarketer makes a call, the call is always an interruption. A person is doing something. A phone rings. The person stops doing what he or she was doing and picks up the phone. When it turns out that it is a marketing call, the person is often annoyed. This annoyance was one of the major reasons for the creation of the Do Not Call List.
Certain systems deal with this issue by hanging up the phone if someone picks it up because if a person thinks that a call dropped, there’s no one to complain about. In case someone doesn’t pick up the phone, the system leaves a message. The obvious problem with such a system is that it is not very efficient. Some people answer their phones all the time, even in the middle of the night. They don’t let their calls go to voice mail, which makes it virtually impossible to leave them a message, not to mention that you’d have to make several calls to figure out who picks up the phone on the regular basis.
Ringless voicemail doesn’t have any of these disadvantages. Voice messages go straight to voice mail. Because of this, there are no interruptions. When a person checks the voice messages, he or she sees a message. People check their messages when it’s convenient for them, which is why ringless voicemail doesn’t feel annoying.
Ringless voicemail technology is relatively new. Not too many consumers are aware of it. When they see a message, they get curious about how they missed a call and wonder who called them. This is why ringless voicemail has unusually high rates of people who listen to it and people who respond.
Ringless voicemail is also not limited to a certain length. When a person who picks up the phone realizes that there’s a telemarketer on the other side of the line, he or she is likely to hang up the phone if there’s a low level of interest. This means that the caller can’t deliver a message in full. With ringless voicemail, you can use the rules of copywriting to create very effective scripts. You can create a funny or interesting plot. For example, you may hire a voice impressionist to mimic a celebrity popular with your customer base or your prospects. You can come up with marketing ideas such as a scratch and dent sale or last minute sale. Ringless voicemail also allows you to use copy that will grab attention, hold attention and present compelling offers.
The Do-Not-Call Implementation Act of 2003 allows consumers to add their phones to the Do Not Call Registry. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened the National Do Not Call Registry on June 27, 2003. According to a report by the Federal Trade Commission, as of September 2016, the registry had over 200 million phone numbers. Consumers can add both landlines and cellular phones to the registry. When it comes to the cellular phones, federal laws prohibit marketers from calling them using automated tools almost in all instances.
Some of the biggest reasons for the creation of the Do Not Call Registry were the number of complaints about cold calls and robocalls and the fact that customers had to pay for marketers calling them. One of the reasons for strict restrictions about cellphones was based on the fact that people have their cellphones with them at all times. The laws about landlines were not as strict because during daytime most people are at work and many of the telemarketing calls were left unanswered. With cellphones, the number of answered calls went up but so did the annoyance factor and the number of complaints, which led to the introduction of the current laws.
Ringless voicemail doesn’t have any of the disadvantages of cold calling. It doesn’t interrupt people from what they are doing. Because ringless voice mail goes directly to a voice mailbox, there are no charges to the consumers associated with ringless voicemail.
All of this means that ringless voicemail is currently legal. There are no laws that are regulating it or restricting it.
Even with the National Do Not Call Registry in place, many people are still getting unwanted calls. For this reason, several lawmakers introduced a bill in 2016 aimed at banning all robocalls. The term “all robocalls” includes ringless voicemail because it is delivered by an automated system. However, as of the writing of this article in September 2017, the bill has not yet come law and ringless voicemail is completely legal.
