Note: As you read these, please keep in mind that this is not professional marketing advice, merely experience based suggestions. People go to school for this stuff, i.e., to deep-dive into marketing, we didn’t.

1. Keep it LEGAL:  Most CallFire customers use us to contact their own customers, businesses, or resell value-add voice services.  All of which is perfectly legal.  However, if you purchase opt-in leads and use them to generate sales - be sure to research and adhere to your local, state, federal, and international dialing laws & regulations.   You may not be eligible to use CallFire if you do not adhere to these dialing laws.  Anyone can check out www.DoNotCall.gov for information on using telephony broadcast within the United States.
2. Keep the Message Short: Keep the message between 20-30 seconds. Most customers have little patience for automated audio and will hang up pretty quickly if they don’t hear something they like.
3. Clear Call to Action: This is especially true for press-1 style campaigns. There should be a call to action early in the message, this can be in the form of a question, or a directive. It also helps if relevant, recent news items are referenced for it brings a certain degree of freshness to the message.
4. Be Emotional: By this we don’t mean theatrics, but at the same time don’t come across sounding like Stephen Hawking (no offence intended). You have a very short window to grab the customer’s ear, do it with emotion, do it with style. If you’re not confident of your voice, you could always try a professional voice talent. Keep in mind however, if reaching out to existing customers with whom you already have a relationship, your voice might get more transfers than even a CNN anchor.

For a more thorough evaluation, check out a previous post titled “Top Five Methods to Make Successful Political Voice Broadcasting“

It will pop up the standard text box that allows you to enter numbers manually as well as the famous file prompt that you’re used to seeing in your add numbers page.

Just one of the ways, we’re trying to simplify your Callfire experience,and help in navigating your work day a bit easier. As always please do drop us a line to let us know what you think of this or other features.

Quote of the Day

Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify

                                                –Henry David Thoreau

Currently, the Callfire system will inform you if any numbers you upload to your campaigns have processing errors.

You will get a bold alert as shown above, clicking on messages will take you to your inbox:

Clicking on the unread messages will let you know the message details and will also remove the alert notification from the top of the page. This way, truly urgent events are automatically escalated for your review.

Quote of the day:

Alert: A message or other indication that identifies a problem or an impending problem.

                                                                                                    —IBM’s DB2 Manual

If there are any duplicates in your list, they will be marked as such and not dialed. You can still see them by clicking on the campaign details page.

Quote of the Day

Never confuse movement with action

                                             –Ernest Hemingway

Our Website runs independent of our dialing infrastructure which is spread across two data centers in the continental United states and is hosted on dozens of servers. Our UI, though our only public face, is but one small piece of it.

Note, for those with higher account thresholds, the same logic applies to your account limit. For those who would like a higher threshold, please do drop us a line.

Bobby’s latest biz is Http://www.YELLOWPAGES.travel - and it enables you to search ALL the top travel sites at the same time in order for you to save time. They stand to bring together all popular travel sites on the web to determine who really has the lowest price.

Cool idea and I thought it deserved a shout out!

When and how does DNC scrubbing occur?

The answer is only by request. As pointed out by our help page, every time you create a campaign or add numbers to a campaign, you will be given the option to scrub against the the DNC phonebook. Keep in mind that the DNC is a phonebook is a snapshot at any given time. This means a scrub against the DNC at 9:00 AM will not yield the same results as a scrub at 12:00 PM the same day. This may lead you to another question:

I am running multiple campaigns, how can I keep my DNC scrubbing up-to-date?

The answer is again: only by request. Simply select the campaign you want to scrub as shown below:

From the drop down menu on top select “Scrub Campaign” and click go:

The campaign will be scrubbed against all the numbers dialed up until that point.

As the message suggests, please verify the phone numbers before proceeding. One way to do this is to go your call details for that campaign and check for any with the status ’scrubbed’.

I must hasten to point out that this list is your own and in no way or form cross referenced with the Federal DNC. Our clients are responsible for their conformance with federal and local dialing laws. You can read more about dialing laws here.

CallFire’s Virtual Call Center allows organizations provide a better quality of life and increase productivity of their members. Think about it, your support, sales, or volunteer staff only need to have access to the Internet and a phone, and you can have all the features and controls that a brick-and-mortar call center would have. Here’s the kicker, it costs you no more than $2.10 per hour per agent. That’s it! No up front fees, no monthly minimums. I’ve had customers who’ve told me that makes a great case for keeping their support desks on US shores.

Try it out!

Quote of the day:

Mr. Watson - Come here - I want to see you.

                                                   — Alexander Graham Bell