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Mon 21 Mar, 2005 07:44 am
Andy Rooney's tips for telemarketers
Three Little Words That Work !!
(1)The three little words are: "Hold On, Please..."
Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.
Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep" tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task.
These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.
(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?
This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone.
This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a "real" sales person to call back and get someone at home.
What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer !!!
(3) Junk Mail Help:
When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.
When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope.
Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage if and when they receive them back.
It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return
envelopes.
One of Andy Rooney's ideas.
Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back!
If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.
You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 37 cents.
The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it...Twice!
Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!
Some excellent ideas, Shewofnm....if everyone did it, they might just stop sending the stuff out.
I dont know whether you have "Fax Junk" in the U.S., but one idea would be to have a piece of black (A4) paper handy by the machine, and send it to them as a reply.....it takes ages to come through at their end, and uses up all of their ink.
HA!
we Do have fax junk here. I just dont own a fax machine.
I had one a few months ago, actually I have the machine, but because of the junk, I turned it off.
Sending them a black piece of paper would be wonderful!
An entire cartridge of ink in one page...
Im feeling wicked at the moment..... hehe
"Junk faxes" are actually illegal in the U.S. So is most spam, of course, but you can track a fax.
Those are good ideas and I intend to put them to use.
Back in the olden days when my budget was always stretched thin I would, every once in a while, put the wrong check in the wrong envelope.
The phone company would call and explain that they received my check for the electric company.
"OH NO!" I'd reply.
"Hahahahahaha" we'd both laugh.
They never got mad and they never charged me a late fee.
I don't imagine they'd be so nice about it anymore.
I just got a bunch of junk mail today..
some with the little return envelopes...
I was thinking of something, even though if caught, it could be mail fraud? maybe?
Take those little return envelopes and address labels.
Place YOUR address label over the return address, and then a blank one over the 'to' address and write in your own. Free postage for ya... just a it much work then i want to put into it. ha!
I am feeling particularly cranky today, I think i am going to send back some junk mail in those envelopes tonight. .. might be a liberating feeling.
Re: Lets conquer junk mail! By Andy Rooney..
shewolfnm wrote:When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope.
Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage if and when they receive them back.
It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return.
I love this idea! I never thought about this before, because I so quickly rip up this type of crap mail. In future, I'll try it out! :wink:
I've been doing this for years, I love getting crap through the postbox and dont worry if there isnt a prepaid envelope just put it in any envelope that somebody sends you and post it back WITHOUT a stamp, that way they have to pay, and if they refuse to pay you still win because then the post office are stuck with it, and why not? They deliver the crap.
Re: Lets conquer junk mail! By Andy Rooney..
shewolfnm wrote:(3) Junk Mail Help:
When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.
When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope.
Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage if and when they receive them back.
It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return
envelopes.
Shewolfnm,
I must thank you for passing along this wonderful idea! I've been having so much fun with it in the last couple of weeks. Why just today I had a 2 applications for credit cards. It was an absolute delight to pass on brochures for local pizza shops and political mail onto these lovely spammers!
Thanks again.... :wink: