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68 Professional Voicemail Greetings Examples for Small Business

voicemail greetings

A phone number is still a useful tool for business since it’s a direct and effortless way to talk with customers and attract potential customers. Nowadays, a professional phone number service for business also dramatically boosts your sales because business-friendly features are covered, including voicemail greetings.

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What is a Voicemail Greeting?

For any business, what should be cared most is the first impression left to customers when starting a business, which is more obvious when a business runs on the phone, but it’s such a pity that customer calls fail to be well received every time. The problem is, such embarrassing incidents can be avoided. Having a professional voicemail greeting seems to be the best choice.

A voicemail greeting is a recorded message set up for the callers that have been missed when business owners or customer service staff are not available to pick up the phone. It can be applied to any situation related to business on the phone, like dealing with new customers calling for the business, automatically replying to customers during after-work hours, or making a holiday greeting sample to customers.

How does a Voicemail Greeting Work?

If important calls are missed that may bring new business, voicemail greetings can let potential customers on the other side know their calls have successfully arrived and been notified to corresponding people, which may give them a relatively good first impression telling them how reliable and professional a business or a business owner is and it’s still possible to even seize the opportunity to successfully make a deal with them.

When calling a company that interests them but doesn’t answer the call right away, what customers don’t want to hear most is a long, confusing, and hard-to-understand voicemail. Therefore, for all companies, the ideal business voicemail greetings should be precise and short, which should include the basic information of the business, the reason why the staff is not available, and when they can expect the call to be returned within a few words (usually between 8 and 30 seconds so callers won’t hang up the phone halfway through).

Why is Getting a Professional Voicemail Greeting So Important for Business?

Leave a Good First Impression

As is all known, much of today’s communication takes place over e-mail instead of the phone, so many professionals just ignore the importance of phone communication. However, when someone just calls you in order to get the information, you can’t let him/her wait for a long time in vain and hang up after a while without knowing anything, which does leave a rather bad first impression to callers. Therefore, when you receive a business call and are not free to answer right away, a clearly stated voicemail greeting is essential to leave a positive impression on clients and your colleagues alike.

Improve Business Efficiency

Voicemail greetings can greatly improve work efficiency when you are in a meeting, participating in activities, or doing other things that occupy your time to answer phone calls. By listening to your voicemail greetings, callers may get some basic information they want immediately instead of waiting for your return call. Moreover, voicemail greetings provide you with total relief to deal with meetings, new product introductions, and similar situations without any worry about missed calls. You’re completely able to focus on what you’re doing as long as a voicemail greeting is used.

Boost Business

For all the customers, what they expect from a company is nothing more than professional services or products, as well as a good service attitude. While they find your company a possible cooperative partner or just want to know more about you, they always try to contact you as soon as possible. Among all channels to get you, making a call is the easiest and quickest. However, it is human nature to miss a call once in a while, especially when you get frequent after-hours business phone calls. How to alleviate this embarrassing situation, and try your best to seize the potential business? All you need to do is make a proper and professional voicemail greeting (which should provide all the essential information such as your name, the name of your company, and an estimate of how long it will be before you return their call). In this way, your professionalism can be felt, and an important deal may be achieved because of that.

What Is a Good Professional Voicemail Greeting?

Well, you must have known about the definition and functions of “Voicemail Greeting”. A voicemail greeting is a recording that informs your clients, colleagues, and your business partners that you are unavailable now. Having a good and professional voicemail greeting can be vital in your business communication strategy because both your professionalism and politeness can be reflected when customers encounter your greetings. If you want to catch valuable business opportunities, the first thing you need to do is to make a good professional voicemail greeting. And here comes another question: what makes a GOOD professional voicemail greeting? We’ve listed some tips below that may help you create your own one.

Try to be polite and welcoming.

Imagine yourself being a client who is interested in a product made by some company. You are so attracted and absorbed in this product that you pick up your phone and make a call to the company at once. However, what depressed you is that you just hear a long string of beep, and then you hang up. How do you feel? Really annoying, right? But if you call the company and then hear a gentle and polite voicemail greeting starting with “Hello, you’ve reached…” or “thanks for calling…”, how you feel will be totally different. An amiable voicemail greeting can endow callers with a gracious first impression of your company, which may boost your business at the very beginning. That is why a professional voicemail greeting should be polite and welcoming.

Try to use a clear voice to record at a moderate pace in a quiet place.

Sometimes your professionalism can be shown not only from the words you say and the messages you convey but also from something more elemental, like the voice of your record. Clients would not like to hear an inarticulate, noisy voicemail greeting. Instead, what they prefer is a clear voice speaking at a normal speed (don’t be too fast or too slow) in a relatively quiet background. So, if you have any problem meeting the first two conditions (speaking voice and speed), you’d better find another person who has the ability to do that to record for you.

Try to be short but informative.

A good professional voicemail greeting should not be too long or trivial, because not everyone has the patience to hear you talk about things that are of no great importance. Commonly, if you encounter a speech on the phone (maybe around 2 minutes), it’s very likely that you hang up at the 30 seconds, for it is too long and inconsequential. So, a good, caller-like-to-hear voicemail greeting should include all the basic elements below within 30 seconds:

Actually adding “thank you” at the end of the greeting can also display your politeness. It is undoubted that clients/colleagues/business partners will be more inclined to polite and connotative companies. As a result, showing your gratitude at the end is definitely an essential component in a professional voicemail greeting. Do not underestimate the power of gratitude words!

Avoid being too unnatural and blunt.

Whether this element can be applied to your greeting or not depends on your condition. For those job hunters, medical workers, and senior executives in big companies, please skip this tip because it is incompatible with their conditions. However, for others, this may endow personal voicemail greetings with a more funny sense and even attract some key customers.

When you think of voicemail messages, this kind of impression may come to your mind at once: beep, boringness, and bleakness. How can you stand out from the siege and make a different and personalized greeting? Try to be more creative and easygoing.

Let’s see an example below:

“Thank you for calling [your name] at [name of your company]. I’m on vacation this week. If you are [name of your celebrity crush, e.g., Barack Obama], call my emergency line. Just kidding. Please leave your name, number, and message, and I’ll call you back later.”

Show your expectations by stating callers will be called back.

This is the last but not the least tip, and a useful tip that can greatly improve client response rate. You put your expectation in your greeting by stating that your clients will be called back, and in this way, your clients will feel they are valued, so in return, they will also value you and your company.

How to Generate Professional Voicemail Greetings?

After learning the helpful tips above, you must feel excited and want to make yourself a professional voicemail greeting straight away. Actually, creating one for your own is not too complicated. All you need to do is to write a greeting script by using the above-mentioned tips and record your greeting in any of the following ways, and then a personalized voicemail greeting will be successfully generated.

Record Your Own Greeting by Yourself

This is the easiest and most convenient way to generate your own greeting. The very first step is to find a mobile phone that is provided with a voicemail greeting service. And then you just need to simply speak into your phone while the voicemail greeting service is enabled. Try to find a quiet place, use a clear voice and speak at a normal speed.

Hire a Professional Announcer to Record

Not everyone has a good voice. For those who have a hoarse voice or those who just do not want to show their voice to others, hiring a professional announcer to record your voicemail is a good choice. Or, if you really value the first impression you give to your clients much, you do need to find a professional.

If you don’t have a good voice but want to save a little, we recommend you try text-to-speech technology. In one tip above we point out that a good professional voicemail greeting should not be robotic and unnatural. This is true, and also important. A lot of people have a misunderstanding towards this technology, thinking that virtual announcers can only make a rigid and robotic sound. Actually, it’s totally wrong. Instead, these announcers can utter your text in a rather natural, fluent, and standard way, sometimes even better than you. Here we offer you a few ways to use this tech:

Use Google Translate to Generate a soundtrack.

Firstly, open the web, put your text in the source language box. Then, prepare a phone and be ready to record. Next, click the “play button” to allow Google to read for you, and at the same time start to record on your phone.

https://translate.google.cn/

Use Ulikecam to Generate your record.

First, you need to download the app/software. And then open it. Find “subtitle”. Click on it and then you’ll see “read subtitle”. Choose one virtual announcer you like and let him/her record your voicemail greeting. Finally, save the audio and send it to your phone.

https://lv.ulikecam.com/

A Comparison

Below, there is a comparison sheet that gives the pros and cons of the three ways above. We hope you can find the most suitable way for yourself to record your voicemail greetings.

 Record by yourselfHire a professionalUse a virtual announcer
Self-condition××
Price××
Sincerity

Voicemail Greeting Examples (Scripts)

Standard Business Voicemail Greeting Samples

Professional Voicemail Greeting for Business

Holiday Greeting Samples for Business

Voicemail Greetings for Business After Hours

Voicemail Scripts for Restaurants

Medical Office Voicemail Greeting Examples

Voicemail Greeting Samples for Dental Office

Sales Call Voicemail Script

Real Estate Voicemail Greeting Script

Hair Salon Voicemail Scripts

Bonus: Some Creative Voicemail Greeting Samples for Business

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