How Telemarketing Benefits To Your Marketing Strategy
Telemarketing is one of the forms of direct marketing best known by the public, and most often used in commercial techniques. The process consists of communicating from companies with a potential client by telephone to convert a record in a database into a client.
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What Is Telemarketing?
Telemarketing or telephone marketing is a customer acquisition strategy, conducted by the marketing department by phone. Currently, and thanks to the development of VoIP technologies, it is one of the most profitable methods of attracting new customers, due to the low cost of its implementation.
However, for it to successfully meet the objectives set, it is necessary for those responsible to implement an appropriate strategy. In addition, they must know each step of its methodology. Without these two elements, these types of initiatives will never be effective.
Usually, a telephone marketing campaign is carried out in support of a series of previous actions, where the customer has shown some interest in the product or service that the company offers through other communication channels, such as email or social media.
It is also very useful for making the first contact with the customer, since unlike messages via email or SMS, in telemarketing a personal conversation is established between the customer and the company.
Market research companies often conduct surveys to classify these potential customers, thus selling the databases to companies that can take advantage of them, thus gaining customer acceptance
Pros And Cons Of Telemarketing
Pros Of Telemarketing
Telemarketing is old enough, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s outdated. Find out why making calls to customers is good:
- It is not as expensive as a door-to-door strategy.
- It helps you reach a huge number of prospects.
- Being a conversation, it becomes very personal. It will be friendlier to certain audiences than email, for example.
- There is no waiting to know if a lead is interested or not since the response is instantaneous.
- If they are follow-up calls (that is, we have already had another type of contact with the customer), they will create a good impression.
- When a prospect really wants to hear the information, it will allow you to say more information about your product than in a television commercial, for example.
Telemarketing is adjustable, that is, more calls can be made or fewer calls per day, depending on the needs of the company.
Cons Of Telemarketing
Like any coin, Telemarketing has two faces. These are the least pleasant aspects of this technique:
- Many perceive it as something very intrusive, annoying, and even aggressive.
- It requires an exhaustive control of the telephone agents since there is a great margin of error in the use of the script. In addition, it is difficult to know if they follow good practices and if they always give adequate service.
- The chances of offering the right product at the right time are slim.
- In many countries, customers can sign up for a registry that prevents them from receiving telemarketing calls. This means that there will be a lot of potential customers that you won’t be able to contact.
- A single bad call that annoys the prospect can damage your company’s reputation in their eyes (and it may cause them to walk away with the competition!).
- While you have more time than in a television commercial, it is not always enough.
- A bad database can spell outright failure.
The Difference Between Cold Calling And Hot Calling
The two main types of Telemarketing are cold calls and hot calls. Depending on which of them you use, you will have more or fewer chances of success.
Cold calls are those made to a new customer, one who does not know us or who has not requested the product we want to sell with us. Therefore, it will be much more difficult to personalize the experience we offer to this potential customer.
Many view these types of calls as impersonal and opportunistic. If your business is cold calling, you might as well consider changing your current sales and marketing efforts to more successfully serve the market.
Hot calls are those made to our current clients or potential clients who have requested information (or, a “cold” client who showed interest and a second call is made to follow up or sell a product or service). These are the kind of calls where we can deliver a well-planned strategy.
You can see, hot calling is a better practice, As
- You will respect the privacy of the client.
- You are not trying to sell a product that a person does not want to buy.
But even so, hot calling doesn’t mean you’ll be an effortless success. On the contrary, it is very important that your sales pitch is appropriate
Similarly, you have to be very careful with your choice of words and phrases, as there are some that will scare and drive your customers away.