Written by Now that everyone’s online, everything’s digital, and most of us text or email rather than call even our friends, why bother with telemarketing? If you’ve had the same question, or figure that telemarketing is too “old school” to bother with when digital marketing is right there, well, we’ve got a few reasons you might reconsider.
Connections count
How many sales emails do you get in a day? Do you even know, or do you delete them before you’ve even had a chance to really notice?
A phone call (one that’s done well, let’s be clear) can build a connection that an email never could. It can give you a chance to get your message into the ears of the right person at the right company. Sure, you’ll get a lot of hangups and rejections, but you’ll still have more opportunities to connect than through cold email outreach
If you’re now thinking “well, why would people do email instead of telemarketing, if calling is so much better?” it’s a good question. The benefit of emails is you can send many hundreds in the same time it takes to make just a few calls – so, when it’s a numbers game, why not use this to your advantage and try both?
Variety’s golden
Variety is the spice of life, right? Well, variety’s also a pretty big deal when trying to get people’s attention. Over the years, the number of touchpoints it takes to turn a cold contact into a client has risen and risen – now it’s estimated between 7 and 13 touches are needed before someone buys from you (industries vary considerably, as you’d expect).
Well, do you really want to badger someone with 13 emails just to try and get them to sign up or purchase? Of course not, that many of the same type of contact will be more detrimental than positive. But you can’t also just hope that your ad retargeting will reach them enough times, either. Maybe you also need to engage with them on social media, and send something in the post (oh, wait, that’s not digital either, is it?!)
Telemarketing adds another touchpoint, simple as that. The more variety in your outreach, the less likely you are to irritate and put off your potential buyer. Compare 13 emails to 4 or 5 emails, a couple of calls, a few remarketing ads, a discount code postcard, and a relevant tweet – much more engaging, right?
Databases matter
Ok, so let’s say you’ve given up on anything but digital marketing and digital outreach. What happens when you want to send an email out, but your database is tiny? Or you have a list you bought online somewhere? Or your database hasn’t been updated in years?
What happens is that you get very few emails into the inboxes of your target audience – either because you don’t have enough email addresses, or the people you’re sending to have long since moved on. At the worst-case scenario end of this, you could have your marketing email sending privileges revoked for sending too much spam, all because your database isn’t clean.
What’s the solution? Well, it’s often phoning round to the companies you want to contact to cleanse and update your database. That’s right, even in a digital-only strategy, there’s room for (and a need for) telemarketing.
Time’s precious
Let’s say you’ve got a good response to your cold email. You’ve managed to get a bunch of prospects to agree to meet with you. Great news. Score one for digital.
How many of those prospects show up? Sometimes it’s most or all of them, and sometimes it’s barely any (another one where industry has a strong role to play). How much time did you or your sales team waste preparing for those meetings? What else didn’t go in the diary because you thought you were booked?
Telemarketing isn’t just about getting meetings or making sales. It’s also about making the best use of your time. If you have a meeting planned in, telemarketing can be used to quickly check that the person is still coming, that they’re still interested, and that they won’t suddenly ghost you.
And sure, you could send emails with the same purpose, but one of the huge benefits of using the phone is that it’s much harder to brush someone off when you’re actually speaking to them, compared to deleting an email (or the traditional brush off “I never received it/it got lost in spam” responses).
So, ultimately, telemarketing can be used to supplement and improve your digital efforts – you can get more from both when they work together. In conclusion – digital being great doesn’t mean telemarketing is dead!
