Telemarketing and been successfully undertaken since the 1950’s and these days incorporates appointment generation, market research, lead qualification, seminar promotion, database cleansing and enhancing. In recent year’s telemarketing has come under scrutiny as being an ineffective method of marketing and a bad reputation has been formed as a result of Fraudulent telemarketing companies, outsourced oversees telemarketing and the sheer volume of telemarketing calls made on a daily bases.

So after nearly 60 years of life has telemarketing kicked the bucket? With email marketing becoming an ever more popular method of marketing, many companies are asking themselves “which should I use?” The only way to clearly decide is to look at the pros and cons of both direct marketing methods.

Pros of Email Marketing;

Probably the biggest advantage of email marketing is the ability to clearly distribute information to a large number of prospects in one hit. Providing prospects with aesthetically pleasing text will give you a better opportunity of attracting their attention and interest.

The cost of email marketing is very low with the average cost of purchasing multiple use email data being approximately 35p per record and the cost of sending email shots from a dedicated email server coming in as little as 0.1p per email sent.

Email broadcast are instant arriving with the prospects within minutes or even seconds, and they give the prospects the opportunity to read the message at a time most convenient for them.

Email marketing has the ‘green’ factor as there it is paper free.

E-marketing is easy to track and analyse bounce rates, click-throughs, un-subscribes etc, allowing you to correlate marketing to sales.

Cons of Email Marketing;

Vast quantities of emails are sent to prospects every day for various different products and services. With most data suppliers selling the same/similar email lists, prospects are being inundated with emails and so anti-spam filters are becoming increasingly more implemented to deter unwanted emails.

Due to the simplicity and cheapness of email marketing, many companies are sending unsolicited bulk email (spam) and as a result new spam filtering software is being produced. Should your email be conceived as spam, these email filters will block your IP address for any customer using their spam filter, and hence legitimate emails will struggle to get through.

Emails can be easily ignored by prospects by simply hitting the delete button.

With bought in email addresses there is no guarantee that you have the correct person responsible for purchasing the product/service you are offering.

By sending an email you lose the ability to create rapport with the prospect. As people tend to buy from people they like, this lack of rapport could be the difference between the prospect spending with you and with your competitors who contacted them by phone.

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Pros of Telemarketing

The results of Telemarketing are highly measurable. Conversion rates of call to appointment and appointments to sale can be analysed to measure a direct R.O.I. for the telemarketing campaign.

Telemarketing allows you to get through to the correct contact you desire and also collate additional valuable information such as current spend, current supplier and contract renewal date. Also should any of your data be incorrect telemarketing allows you to manual cleanse the data.

With a well constructed script you can put across the correct information in way that the prospect understands.

By using psychological telemarketing techniques, rapport with prospects will be developed increasing the likelihood of the prospect wanting to spend with you.

Telemarketing can be outsourced to a professional company, meaning that sales people can optimise their time by being out on the road selling instead of making the calls them self.

Geographical limitations are removed as selling can be done over the phone.

Unlike email marketing, telemarketing acquires an immediate answer from the prospect allowing you to polarise the prospects into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ pots and to stop marketing to the ‘bad’ pot.

Cons of Telemarketing

Due to a high volume of companies using telemarketing, prospect are becoming increasingly adverse to telemarketing. One example of this is the increased number of people signing up to the telephone preference service.

If you do not source an up to date and well targeted data list, the results of the telemarketing campaign will be poor making it a very expensive exercise to complete.

Outsourcing to a professional company gives you less control as you do not directly employ the telemarketers.

Telemarketing can be time consuming if running it in-house. Also without appropriate training and good quality scripts results will be low.

So what’s the solution?

Realistically, utilising both methods of marketing is the best solution. Creating a cycle of telemarketing – email broadcast – telemarketing will significantly increase results.

Telemarketing improves as you are able to send further information to prospects between conversations, strengthening brand awareness and catching prospects at a more suitable time.

Email marketing improves as you are only emailing data that you know to be correct and prospects that will be familiar to your company name thus being more likely to actually read your email. The telephone follow up call will re-enforce the message delivered in the email.

Click here for more information about Responsiva’s telemarketing services

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