Interesting Telemarketing Technique

It’s not that I am immune to telemarketing calls – only I don’t receive them that often. I tend to hide my main phone number so that it is only accessible by a select few. However, this evening I received a call from an area code I did not recognize. I tried to grab it, but on the second ring I answered and nobody was there. Not a big deal about me not recognizing the number, I switched my phone number a few months ago because of a spammer I deleted from one of my services – he wasn’t too happy and was harassing me via phone, and he even succeeded in getting my website removed from my hosting account due to sending a DOS attack against that website. So – with this new phone number I get a few calls for the previous owner of the number.

Back to my point. Before I call any mysterious phone number back – I always do a reverse phone number check on 411.com to see if I can find out exactly who is calling me. I checked it out, and the number was a land line phone in Florida. I just so happened to be doing business with someone in Florida this evening – so I called the number back. I was surprised by what I heard: it was a voice recording stating -

“Thank you for returning this call. . .blah blah blah . . . all the great things about our hotel chain and brand name. . . come stay at our hotel. . . wait for an operator to assist you. . .”

I know that I did not submit this phone number for anything that had to do with travel, vacation, hotel stays, etc. So – either this call was the result of

1. Someone filling out information somewhere recently using the wrong phone number
2. A company that is using outdated information from something the previous owner of this phone number submitted
3. A different type of cold calling attempt in order to get business

I can understand numbers 1 and 2. However, I would think this is a very non-targeted way to advertise your business. On the other hand, it probably saves a ton of money on telemarketers’ hourly rates: as the telemarketers would only be talking to the truly interested or the severely irate. The casual, hard to convert, customer probably wouldn’t sit and listen to a sales pitch they had been tricked into hearing, then wait to be transferred to an operator to get sold to again.

Maybe this method has been around for a while, only I’ve never experienced it before. I’m all about learning new marketing techniques: maybe there is a hidden marketing method that can be learned here that will apply to a non-telemarketing method.