EXPERT OUTSOURCED TELEMARKETING

The concept of Inbound Marketing is to improve customer experience and build trust by offering potential customers information they value.

The formulae goes something like this; ATTRACT + SHARE INFORMATION OF VALUE + GAIN TRUST = CONVERSION.

That’s fine there is nothing wrong with that. Except.

In order to share information of value to these customers, you first need the customer to opt-in to one of the vast communication channels saturating the market today.

The problem is obtaining opt-ins on these communication channels, as signup abandonment is huge.

Recently one of our clients (pbxvcontrol.com), went down the Inbound Marketing path and spent a fortune. 3-months down the track, just a handful of opt-ins and not 1 sale from “inbound marketing”. Yet in just 1 day from our Telemarketing, we obtained 100 times, yes 100 times more emails, and his first sale.

One of the world’s largest digital agencies wanted to grow their client base and contacted us to generate appointments with new top end clients.

We recommended a “give to get” two staged approach would work best. The first stage is a brief call to introduce their agency with an offer to send an added value instructional “how to” email. Something not available online. Second stage is a follow up call to answer any questions and at this time an offer to set an appointment.

However, our client decided they still wanted appointments set on first call attempt.

So we devised a new strategy. We devised a multi objective strategy. Objective 1 Appointment, if that fails Objective 2 offer email. Then followup on that email in attempt to achieve objective 1 again.

After a pilot of 2-months we achieved 760 appointments. Our client was very happy with this result. At this point we suggested running another campaign with our initial strategy. And after 2-months we more than doubled the results to 1,867 appointments which is now their permanent strategy with us.

*These strategies can be adopted for any industry.

Canon and Xerox contacted us to perform Appointment Setting campaigns operating in different states. Canon required a standard Appointment campaign having us presenting there brand as enticement to gain appointment to a set of qualifying criteria.

The main obstacle within this industry is that companies with this equipment have service agreements whereby they are locked into.

Xerox wanted to aggressively gain market share and a campaign was designed with their permission to extract the maximum possible number of appointments and decimate competition.

Xerox allowed us to offer a Black and White Laser printer upfront for any business that agreed to an appointment. At the end of their presentation at their appointment, they offered to payout current contracts and have customers enter into a new agreement with them.

Although Canon was happy with their results, Xerox result was 20 times more appointments than Canon.

*Besides an irresistible offer for clients, there are two other main factors that influence results. 1) The more we qualify, the higher the quality however less the volume of appointments, 2) The type and quality of the database being used can determine success as well.

News Corporation engaged us to complete a massive database updating campaign.

There main issues were accuracy and wanted a 100% local team – not offshore. Given telemarketing has only your voice; clear articulation was paramount as items such as email addresses were easy enough to get wrong, let alone with a foreign accent.

We recommended, while we were on the phone updating customer details, that it was great opportunity to generate some leads for their digital subscription services. They were delighted with the idea and at the end of the campaign we achieved 99.7% database accuracy and 52.3% increase new digital subscriptions.

This case study is not about one specific organisation, as we are often asked to start off with a short campaign duration to test the waters then expand the duration afterwards if successful.

Telemarketing is extremely effective, however it does take a lot of calls; more specifically call-backs.

It is very rare to reach your decision maker on the first call. So you need to allow for multiple calls over days and sometimes weeks.

Your key decision maker could be not available for 100 reasons. So you need to allow for this.

Even if you do reach your decision maker, you may need to allow enough time for them to think about your offer. Every situation is different.

In any lead generation activity, there is a pyramid that reflects the reality of marketing.

At the very top of pyramid, you have people who are 1) interested and 2) ready to act.

As you move down the pyramid there will be people at various stage of interest and readiness to act.

The vast majority are going to be people that you have not been able to reach. So you need to allow enough time.

The other issue with short term campaigns is running the risk of calling back too soon due the condensed time frame. This can potentially burn opportunities forever by annoying prospects from calling too often.

In fact, we have worked on campaigns where leads from our initial call have converted years later.

So to run a short campaign to establish the effectiveness of telemarketing is not a great strategy. Certainly not if you are trying to establish whether or not to use Telemarketing long term or not.