Spam Killer: How to Reduce Nuisance Calls from Marketing Campaigns

privacy, marketing, call tracking, api, webconnect, working from home, 

If you’re in marketing and your job is to make the phone ring with qualified leads for your sales team, you want their time spent talking to legitimate prospects, not answering spam calls. For marketers, especially in the US, spam calls are a daily battle. Here at iovox, we have several “spam killing” strategies, including a new solution called iovox WebConnect, that not only gives marketers perfect attribution as to the interests of the callers but also eliminates spam calls entirely.

In 2019, in the United States alone, there were more than 63 billion spam calls. You know this all too familiar scenario…your phone rings with a local number from your hometown that you think may be legitimate, so you answer, and soon realize it’s a robocall telling you your social security number has been compromised, or some other fiction that has just wasted 30-45 seconds of your valuable time. Multiply that by 63 billion and you get a colossal amount of lost productivity and not to mention massive irritation! And that’s just in the United States.

In fact, according to Consumer Reports, 70% of people have given up answering incoming calls all together unless it is crystal clear that the source is trusted.

Flash forward to how this impacts the marketer who has the responsibility to generate qualified phone leads for his or her sales team. What happens when the spammers turn their sights on the marketing numbers used in your campaigns?

Sales and call center managers obsess about efficiency, so you can imagine the tension that arises when “the marketing team” destroys their call center KPIs by tying up valuable agent time dealing with spam calls.

Fortunately for the marketer, we have a solution to this dilemma.

At iovox, we’ve been in the call tracking business since 2007, so we’ve seen it all when it comes to the “spam wars”. Like water finding a crack, spammers seem to always be looking for an angle to exploit. While we don’t want to share all our secrets (spammers read blogs too! :), we will pass along a few tools for marketers who need to make the phone ring for their companies, but only from people interested in your company’s products or services.

Tool 1 – iovox Call Blocking and Spam Filters

Spammers like to be efficient with their systems and time, so when presented with an iovox interactive voice response system (IVR), sometimes they give up right away. For repetitive nuisance callers that persist through the IVR, call origins can be scanned, and when common patterns are detected, spam filters from the iovox platform smother these unwanted calls and block them from accessing the system. The iovox Call Blocking and Spam Filters have phenomenal flexibility, and the abilities to block number ranges, certain countries or just a single number. To be sure you’re not blocking callers with good intentions you can always create a permissions list of approved numbers that you will accept on your platform.

Tool 2 – Automated Velocity Blocking via the iovox API

For customers using the iovox VOICE API, high velocity calling patterns typically used by the robo dialing spammers are easily detected, and rules can be established to block calls from a particular origin that meet certain frequency requirements. Those requirements are established by the iovox customer and are easily adjusted based on learnings gained through implementation.

Tool 3 – Self Quarantine

No this isn’t referring to COVID-19, but the idea is similar. This quarantine method is used by companies to reserve a pool of numbers that are cycled in and out of marketing campaigns where phone call conversion is the goal. Once a marketing campaign is complete and the number has done its job, it goes back to the locker room to chill and rest until it’s needed again. This quarantine cycle keeps the numbers from catching the eyes of the spammers and enables the marketer to identify “noisy numbers”. Any number that is receiving spam traffic can be kicked off the team, leaving behind the strongest and most reliable numbers for the next marketing campaign.

Tool 4 – iovox WebConnect

This last tool does not involve the use of phone numbers as part of a marketing campaign, but still results in a call and delivers 100% attribution. The new iovox WebConnect service enables visitors to a website to initiate a call from their web browsers (mobile or otherwise) with a simple click or tap of a button.

Once the call button is selected, the iovox WebConnect service routes calls to the preferred location, which can be a call center, an office, or an individual working from home.

Not only does the WebConnect solution not require the use of a phone number, it also includes the attribution analytics that marketers are super interested in such as the product area the person was viewing just before initiating the call. This information from the customer journey is invaluable and unlike some other methods of call tracking attribution on high volume websites, the iovox WebConnect service is 100% accurate.

All that’s required to implement iovox WebConnect, is an iovox account and the implementation of a simple JavaScript snippet that looks like this:

The snippet:

<div id="call_button"></div>
<script>
 let options = {
  "selector":"#call_button",
  "linkId":"call_me",
  "credentials":{
   "apiKey":"23f5943159bab396a229a8f1bb3332d8b02ae6b3",
   "actionKey":"78a9ce08b759a8bd0ec1d6e1403cbc4b55d53292"
  }
 };
 let dialer = new IovoxDialer(options);
 dialer.createButton();
</script>

Regardless of the size of your business, we can all agree, fighting phone call spam is important. For the marketer whose job it is to increase the volume of calls, tools from iovox can help ensure that the increase in calls are from interested customers, and never spammers.

Questions? If you’d like to know more about how iovox can help you block spam and improve the quality of your phone based leads, give us a call toll-free from within the US at +1 888 369 9519 or send us an email at hello@iovox.com.

From outside the US please reach us at one of these numbers:

Las Vegas, USA +1 702 425 7505
London, UK +44 (0)20 7099 1070
Sydney, Australia +61 (0)2 8520 3530
Paris, France +33 (0)1 84 88 46 40