Tips for creating an effective business voicemail greeting

I call today’s idea the friendly voicemail greeting hack.

I’m surprised at just how many business people’s voicemail greetings make you feel like you’re call is a total inconvenience to them. Just in the last week I had:

• One person tell me they didn’t like checking voicemails as it took too much of their time (so could I text them instead!). No I couldn’t … I was driving!
• Another that rattled on for 30-seconds, then gave me just 10 seconds to leave a message … that would then be converted to text!!
• And yet another who sounded like he was having the worst day of his life … Read in a very dower tone -> “Hi, it’s Pete here, please leave a message.” Arggghhhhhhhh!

So, here’s my 3-steps to creating a friendly voicemail greeting:

1. Take a listen to your existing greeting (I bet you haven’t done that for a while!). Then delete it … ready to record a fresh, new one.
2. Decide what you’re going to say, you might even like to script it, but keep it brief. Mine goes something like “Hi, it’s Tim Reid here from The Small Business Big Marketing Show. I’m probs putting the finishing touches on another episode to help grow that beautiful business of yours. So leave a message and we’ll talk real soon.”
3. Find a quiet place (your car is good), take three deep breaths, put a smile on your dial, and hit record.

Pro-Tip: Have all of your customer-facing staff do this. Maybe give them a loose format to stick to, then give them permission to add their own personality to their message.

That’s my 3-steps to creating a friendly voicemail greeting.

To help you bring this low-cost marketing idea to life, here’s some funny voicemail greeting scripts.

And as always, you’ll find more marketing inspiration in my popular marketing text The Boomerang Effect.

So, what have you got to lose?

WHYGTL