In your business, you use your phone in many scenarios to communicate with partners, customers, and prospects. But whether you're using softphones or regular desktop phones, it usually works like this: you decide to call someone, look up a number, dial it, and, hopefully, a conversation takes place. That's the way it works, right? Well, not necessarily, if you use phone campaign software.  

Because if you use your VoIP phone application to run any kind of classic phone campaign, this standard process is not very efficient, is it? It's wasting lots of time. Time spent looking up phone numbers, manually dialing, time wasted misdialing, more time spent waiting for people to pick up the phone, or people never picking up the phone. Before you know it, your team spends 40 minutes out of every hour not doing what you want them to do: talking to people.  

So, what to do about it? You may have heard about phone campaign software for automation before and asked yourself whether that could work for your business too. The answer to that question is mainly about scale.  

One thing is for sure: A classic phone campaign can be one of the most effective ways to reach the people you want to present your products or services to – whether you're selling something, scheduling appointments, looking to generate leads, qualifying prospects, or conducting surveys.

But suppose you're regularly reaching out to a larger audience and want to track your results systematically and measure your campaign's success. In that case, you will most definitely benefit from a campaign automation tool that allows you to work more effectively and cost-efficiently. Doing it manually is just not an option.  

A campaign automation tool will allow you to set up automated workflows, which specific actions or events can trigger. For example, if a customer places an order on the website, the system will automatically send them a receipt with a tracking number for their purchase. 

Or perhaps it's a survey asking your customers whether they would like to receive future promotions from your company via email. You can also use a campaign automation tool to automatically send out emails based on events that occur in other applications. For example, let's say a customer places an order on the website, then the system will automatically send them a receipt with a tracking number for their purchase.  

Campaign automation tools are handy when you have multiple people working in different departments and time zones who need to be able to coordinate their efforts and communicate with each other easily. It can also automate customer surveys, a great way to learn more about your customers. You can use these surveys to ask about their preferences and satisfaction with your products or services.  

As you can see, there are various uses for automation tools, but the best ones share a common feature: they are easy to use and integrate with other applications. But how do you go about choosing a suitable tool? Let's look at what a professional outbound phone campaign tool can help you do:    

Automate your phone campaign  

Are you still manually sending emails to your contacts? Do you need to prepare reports for management or colleagues? Would you like contacts added to your social media channels or your CRM? Are you collecting leads on your website and need to add them to your calling campaign? A good tool will automatically do all these things for you and allow you to organize your campaign's execution systematically. Needless to say, you'll want to ensure that the tool you choose will work seamlessly with your existing technology infrastructure, does not present too steep a learning curve for your team, and has a fair and transparent pricing structure.   

The best way to find the right tool is to closely examine what your team needs and then talk with vendors about how their products might help. You may want a customer engagement platform, CRM, or an integrated marketing automation suite that includes Lead nurturing, lead scoring and qualification, sales prospecting and management, social media marketing, and customer service tools. If you have little budget, check out free tools like Facebook and Twitter. They can help get started, but it's worth investing in a paid tool for the best results. 

The good news is that there are a wide variety of tools to help you manage your lead generation and sales funnel. Whether you're looking for a phone campaign, marketing automation platform, or CRM, plenty of options are available.  

When evaluating phone campaign automation software options, you should consider the following:   

• Does it offer features that meet your needs?  
• How easy is it to set up?  

• What infrastructure do you need to support it? 

Bring transparency and accountability to your campaign 

To gauge your campaigns' performance, you need some essential answers: What is my ROI? Which team members are doing a particularly good job? Which leads perform the best? An effective tool will give you reports and statistics that provide vital insights into your campaign.

The software will automatically track the work hours of your team members to allow you to manage their time better. And when it comes to training and quality control, the better tools enable you to monitor and listen to ongoing conversations, record them automatically, and even convert them to searchable text.  

A tool that provides a reporting system means you can gain information to improve your campaign's performance. You can see who's doing what, how much time they spend on various tasks, and how many leads they generate. You can even track the progress of individual salespeople to see which ones are performing well and which ones need more training or support from other team members.   

As a result, you can make better decisions about where to focus your efforts, who to hire, and what training is needed. You'll also be able to identify more efficiently which strategies have been most effective and provide more accurate estimates for future budgets.  

You can also use sales analytics to improve the customer experience and make it easier for your team members to do their jobs. For example, you can identify which products are selling most successfully and which aren't. 

Increase the number of leads you reach 

The right tool will help you systematically process the leads and contacts you want to call – in a structured fashion that you don't have to think about much once you've set up the campaign. If the regulations in your jurisdiction allow it, there are even more significant benefits.   

Many tools automate your dialing, which is a huge productivity booster. But, the more advanced tools also employ machine learning technology that filters out answering machines and optimizes contact reachability with predictive dialing. Compared to manual dialing, that will allow you to reach triple the amount of people you get on the phone in a given period.   

For more extensive campaigns, built-in collaboration functionality enables you to share lead lists among multiple callers and teams or even lets you outsource work to external call centers. At the same time, you keep complete control over the campaign in real-time. Overall, you can achieve significantly higher levels of team productivity thanks to features like email automation, report customization, or the integration of external systems.  

The same is true for lead management, by complementing a phone campaign software with a CRM, you can start to track and organize leads into different groups based on their value or likelihood of conversion. This helps you prioritize your sales efforts and ensure no leads are left behind. You can also use automation tools to send out emails and reminders at specific times or when certain events occur—so that when someone fills out an online form, they get an immediate response from your company with a call to action for further communication.   

This is a compelling way to help you keep in touch with your customers, build trust and rapport, and stay top-of-mind. It will make it easier for you to convert leads into paying customers down the road.  

Do you want to explore the idea of using phone campaign software? 

Dialfire is a flexible, high-performance, cloud-based solution that's easy to implement and intuitive to use. Using only a web browser, you're free to manage your call campaigns from anywhere, while Dialfire's open APIs, integrations, and no-obligation pay-per-use pricing model keep you in control at all times. 

A final note from VoIP.ms: We have recently interconnected with Dialfire after learning about all their functionalities and are happy to offer our clients professional phone campaign software right from the cloud in combination with our users' VoIP.ms SIP Trunk and DID service. Check out our wiki for more information on setup or take a look at the following links:  https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Dialfire