When was the last time someone stared at a banner ad for a whole minute? What about listened to a YouTube ad for a minute without pressing ‘Skip’?
Now, what if we told you there was a way not only to capture your potential customers’ attention for that full sixty seconds, but for them to appreciate you doing it?
There is. It’s called advertising-on-hold.
Why Advertising-on-Hold?
Advertising-on-hold is simply advertising that plays to consumers while they’re on hold to your business. Like elevator music, only much more commercially impactful.
The fact is an average of 70% of business callers are put on hold, according to AT&T. Most businesses invest a lot in the customer experience once the phone is answered. Training, salaries, analytics software, call tracking software – the lot. What sort of investments are you making for the other 70%, whose ‘first touch’ with your brand isn’t the person on the other end of the phone?
In 2014, a study of 1000 UK consumers found that only 23% are happy with the call handling standards on their business calls. This figure drops again amongst 55 to 64 year olds, to a staggering 12%. Given that that over 50s account for 76% of the UK’s wealth, and nearly half of all consumer spending, these are the wrong people to get on the wrong side of.
Improving the on-hold customer experience is an obvious move, and one that your competitors likely aren’t doing. On-hold advertising has huge potential – not just in terms of improving your brand perception, but in concrete, financial terms.
You might ordinarily think of being on-hold as ‘dead time’ – an annoyance to be borne, more than anything – but that isn’t the case. An influential study by Maximarketing found that 16% of consumers have actually brought a product on the basis of an advertising-on-hold offer.
That on-hold window is incredibly valuable – in two ways. It’s a chance to educate your customers, to give them critical background information about your company, products or services. It’s also a chance to build your brand image, delivering a professional, friendly service that sets you apart.
Take advantage of that 77% of consumers who aren’t happy with call handling standards, and give them a service they remember.
More than half of respondents in the UK consumer study stated that they feel more valued if they hear professional on-hold audio when they’re waiting. Nearly 40% asserted that they’d be willing to wait longer, if they could listen while they waited.
Here’s how to make advertising-on-hold work for you.
Advertising-on-Hold Best Practices
- Be useful and informative
- Choose your voice wisely
- Music is important
Advertising-on-hold works best when you provide meaningful, useful, relevant information that the customer wants to hear. Focus on the benefit to the customer – maybe telling them about your new product range, or informing them of new offers that might pique their interest.
Even long sales calls rarely afford you the opportunity to say everything that might be relevant. In fact, much of the time a good sales call will be spent actively listening, rather than going with the immediate sell. Advertising-on-hold helps you maximise the effectiveness of your sales team, by increasing your exposure to the customer in a non-pushy way. Just be sure to focus on the customer – not you – and you can’t go far wrong.
How we perceive what we hear is more than just the words used. It’s important to give some thought to the voice delivering your message, if you want your advertising-on-hold to be as effective as possible.
You should be careful to match the voiceover you choose to your audience. Male and female voices are perceived differently, as are voices of different ages. It’s not good enough to simply go with any voice – you need a voice that aligns with the image you’re trying to project.
The music you include in your advertising-on-hold is almost as important as the message itself. Speed, volume and pitch all have an impact on how people perceive your message, and your brand.
Many businesses choose popular tracks, but this can be something to avoid. One Direction is fine, if you like One Direction – but who wants to take the risk? In other words, people have pre-existing emotional responses to popular music, and that’s something that’s out of your control.
For that reason, it’s generally far better to choose a bespoke track as you have less chance of causing an emotional response that limits your potential to make a sale.
As this article has hopefully proved, you’re missing a big opportunity if you don’t invest in advertising-on-hold. There are fewer and fewer opportunities to secure a captive audience nowadays, and advertising-on-hold is one of them. It’s proven to work, transforming the customer experience and offering a big conversion opportunity. Not bad, before your customer has even spoken to anyone…
To read more about advertising-on-hold check out Network Telecom.
I would have never thought on-hold advertising would do that well, but you can’t argue with the numbers. I’d be curious to know specifically what they bought, though – was it entirely new products, or more things like upgrades to a service they already subscribe to?
Either way, it’s definitely something we should be taking advantage of!
To target your audience you should target your business category people.