How To Create A Successful Telemarketing Campaign
Yes, it’s still possible to make outbound calling work. The stereotypical dinnertime hassles that you once knew are fading from prominence (thank goodness) in favor of a more targeted and intelligent approach.
Today, To Create A Successful Telemarketing Campaign can garner responses between 5 and 10 percent of the time. That happens to be higher than most other forms of “push” marketing, including direct mailing and e-mail marketing.
To make telemarketing effective, you need to recognize the three elements that make it work: targeting, messaging and engaging. As a marketer, it’s important to understand who you should speak with, why they’ll appreciate the contact from you, and how you’ll engage them in the process. When telemarketing is used as a component of a larger marketing strategy, it can be highly effective.cre
Create A Successful Telemarketing Campaign By Targeting Prospects
Marketers must first understand who they are calling. An old notion that if you Create A Successful Telemarketing Campaign anyone could be your prospect if they just heard the pitch, is a terrible disservice to anyone who might come in contact with your brand. It also happens to be a bad use of resources. Knowing your targets, on the other hand, stacks the deck in your favor.
Good targets might include prospects who have voluntarily contacted your company in the past, clients who have bought from you in the past, prospects who are known to spend on products or services that are complementary to yours. All of these scenarios give you a reasonable basis from which to approach the prospect. Lacking such a relationship or conversation starter, it’s also useful to develop personas.
Personas are becoming more important to marketers of all kinds recently. Whether it’s the ads on a particular website or anything on television from toilet paper to car insurance to men’s diet soft drinks, companies have actually begun talking about their target demographic right in the ad.
They go to great lengths to understand their best buyers, capture all the relevant details about their lives, preferences, attitudes, experiences, and anything that might inform their worldview. Then campaigns are built to speak directly to those people.
Take your time and do the research to construct detailed personas. What you learn about your prospects from this exercise doesn’t just help you locate them, but also mold your message to suit their needs.
Refining Your Messaging
The message in an outbound call is never about the product. It’s about the prospect. If you’re calling people you’ve already done business with, you’re likely to know something about them and how to address their needs. The same is true if you’ve done your homework building accurate personas. Your message has to strike a chord.
Rather than being alarmist, or asking obnoxious questions about whether the person who picks up the phone wants to protect his family (what is this, a call from the mob?!), your script will need to find ways to be practical, helpful, convenient, economical. Thank current and past clients for their business. Share information that they can use– not an immediate pitch. It’s all about the prospect.
When you do have something to pitch, use a third-party story. In other words, talk about someone else, who appreciated the improvements, the new offer, or the special deal.
Telling stories, which naturally include stories develop around the exact same kind of persona as the person you’re calling, is a powerful way to let prospects choose to include themselves in an offer, rather than push back against a pitch. Remember, people love to buy, but they hate to be sold!
Engaging Your Prospects (and Clients)
It should go without saying that a skilled telemarketing service can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your campaign. The other side of that coin is a solid team of inbound professionals who can handle questions and customer service. There are many other parts that will need to work, too, if you want to create real engagement (and sales) with your prospects.
First, understand your conversion goals. There are many types of prospect behaviors that are vital to your sales funnel, even if they aren’t an actual sale. By identifying these various goals, you find ways to manage their effectiveness at getting and keeping your prospects engaged. Among your possible conversion goals that start with an outbound call, and move your prospect through the funnel:
- take a survey or otherwise provide feedback
- update personal information or contact preferences
- opt for an email list for a promotional offer or information
- set an appointment for a further discussion with an account rep
- try the free part of a “freemium” service
- visit a special website to get a specific deal
- visit a physical location for an appointment, sale or other offers
- renew a subscription
- make an add-on purchase
- buy an updated or replacement version of a product
Second, map out the ways you intend to relate to prospects and clients over time. The surest way to lose interest is to only show interest when it seems you’re trying to sell something. Like we noted above, conversion goals aren’t necessarily sales, and as far as client relationships go, your long-term interactions definitely should not be all about sales.
Given how easy it is for clients to find and act upon competitor information, it’s your job to ensure they don’t want to or need to. Client interactions should consist of at least 80% service and no more than 20% sales. It may sound burdensome, but it’s a lot easier to keep clients by reaching out to them and meeting their changing needs than it is to be constantly prospecting for new ones.
Comments are closed.