Three Steps to Love Your Voicemail Greeting

Your voice is a musical instrument that can influence your listeners’ emotions. So ask yourself, do you like the sound of your voicemail greeting? Most people don’t!

Yet that voice is what all your listeners are hearing!

Often, that voice isn’t restricted to your voicemail greeting—it’s the same voice people hear when they meet, interview, or chat with you!

Now imagine loving the sound of your voice. What if your voice became your secret weapon to get anything you want in life?

It can be! Let’s start now by fixing your recorded voicemail greeting. Try these tips and see what kind of positive messages people leave you!

1. Stop apologizing for your name.

Most of the time when people say, “Hi this is [your name here],” they go down in volume and pitch on the last syllable.

Why does that matter? Musically speaking, going softer in volume and lower in pitch subconsciously instructs listeners to feel sad. When speaking, this same combination communicates that you’re sad or insecure.

Here’s how to sound upbeat and confident on your greeting. Maintain your volume and pitch when you say the end of your name. For example, “Hi, this is Roger Love, I can’t get to the phone right now.”

2. No More Mr. (or Ms!) Monotone

When all your notes are the same pitch, it is called “monotone.” Think of that boring professor in movies who drones on and on and during lecture while the main character makes every possible attempt to pay attention, as an example.

A monotone voice tells the world that you don’t have enough personality to be entertaining, charismatic, funny, or surprising.

When you speak in the same note over and over again, listeners think they know what you’re going to sound like next. When they know what you’re going to sound like next, they think they know what you’re going to say next. At that point, they switch gears, drift into their own thoughts, and keep your voice playing in the background while they distract themselves with more interesting things.

Don’t become Mister (or Misses!) Monotone and lose your listener in the process.

Instead, use verbal strategy number three:

3. Stair Step Melody

For this strategy to work, you need to imagine the pitch scale like a stairwell. If it helps, you can picture each key of the piano stacked progressively upwards so that all the keys form a neat staircase.

There are three directions you can move on this metaphorical staircase:

Up the stairs: meaning, you increase your pitch from word to word.

On the same level: meaning, you touch the same stair’s note multiple times in a row as you speak. (Caution! If you stay on the same stair level for too long, you can become Mr. Monotone. See tip number two for explanation as to why I don’t recommend you to do that.)

Or down the stairs: where your pitch goes down in tone as your sentence continues.

Melodies that go from low to high (up the stairs) are called, quite logically, “ascending melodies.” These melodies make people feel happier.

When the melodies go from high to low (down the stairs), again quite logically, are called “descending melodies.” These make people feel sad.

If you’re looking to excite the listener who is about to leave you a voicemail, I recommend going up the melody staircase. Keep in mind that if you’re speaking multiple sentences in your voicemail, you can go up the melody staircase in the first part of a sentence, then again on the ending portion of another sentence. That means you don’t have to go from super low pitch at the first word of your entire message and end at your absolute highest note as you finish the message.

What are you waiting for? 

Start re-recording your voicemail greeting right now.

Who knows, your future callers might like your new greeting so much that they’ll call just to leave a message.