Tuesday, March 16, 2021

3 Parts of Telemaketing

 

3 Primary Ways to Use Telemarketing
to Grow Your Business

Ask yourself or any business owner to name a few of there best marketing channels for bring in more business and they’ll reel off an array of answers. You’ll probably hear social media, email marketing, direct mail and other digital strategies. It is wonderful to have so many ways to market as well as confusing. Today’s businesses have a entire plethora of marketing alternatives to utilize for outreach, growth and retention.

All those many choices can cause you to forget about one of the more conventional channels sitting right in front of your face on your desk. Your phone!

TELEMARKETING
Telemarketing is one of the most overlooked marketing tools. The traditional idea of picking up the phone to drum up business is out of fashion. The fact is, though, that when done correctly, telemarketing can indeed help you to grow your business.

The 3 Arrows In Your Quiver

Telemarketing is one arrow in your marketing quiver. If you have a unified marketing plan with all your channels aimed at the same place from different directions you come out a winner. Within this vast array you have lots of channels to work with. You’ll want to use as many as you can in combination and in the most effective way possible. Don't use more then you can work 100% effectively but only those that you can execute at a high level of expertise and saturation.

That is why companies like Larson & Associates are here.
We can help take you the next level

In the case of telemarketing, that doesn’t mean old-fashioned cold calling like we did 20 years ago.

It means taking an intelligent approach to growing your business using the phone. Here are the three significant parts we take to grow your company with telemarketing:
1.    Telemarketing to existing customers
2.    Telemarketing to lost customers
3.    Telemarketing for lead generation

Telemarketing to Existing Customers

Growing your business doesn’t always mean attracting new customers. Don't get me wrong, new customers are nice but achieving top drawer customer retention to keep what you already have, easier, less expensive and can often be a better way to achieving your yearly sales goals. Keeping your present customers on board can make more of a difference to your bottom line than you might think.


Telemarketing can aid your customer retention in a variety of ways. Customer care or research calls are good examples. In these instances you are showing your customers that you care, creating a more positive view of you and your company. That makes it less likely that they, the customer will abandon you and start using a competitor.

Researching out to your existing customers can also help you find new opportunities. Asking questions, getting feedback on your products or services can help you fix problems before they become problems. By taking the time to talk about the different and changing needs of the industry, you can find future paths for your business to expand with them.

It is also possible to do some cross-selling or up-selling while telemarketing to existing customers. If someone already buys from you, they’re more then likely to be interested in other products or services you have. They have first-hand experience of your quality of your work and the products and services they are now using so why not more ? Ask! And, existing customers via telemarketing are more likely to answer the phone.

Telemarketing to Lost Customers

A second way to use telemarketing is when you are trying to grow your business via telemarketing that involves customers you’ve lost. It happens to all of us. The one who got away or we did not take a more careful watch over. 

Telemarketing is the easiest and fastest way to restart that energy between the two of you. By that, we mean customers who bought from you before but haven’t done so for a while. That might be as they haven’t felt a need to purchase or could be because they’ve moved over to a competitor. Or it could just mean you messed up and no one had the for-site to call up to make things right.
 

It may surprise you how successful reaching out to lost customers really is. Just making the call can be enough to help to jog their memories as to how useful your products or services were. What’s more, it shows them how much you care and value their business. Calling and speaking to past customers can rebuild that severed relationship allowing you to again be the brand of choice.

Even if you fail to win them back as a  customer, speaking to them can give you invaluable insight as to what happened. If you’re able to learn why they left you, you can make it less likely for you to lose customers for the same reason in the future. That will aid your customer retention numbers and thus help keep your business growing faster.

Telemarketing for Lead Generation

Lead generation is what most people think of when they think about telemarketing. Cold calling, dialing for dollars. Getting a targeted niche specific list of prospects is an effective way to warm those prospects up and get them to the next level of the sales cycle. When we are making calls it is not necessarily to make a sale but rather to set an appointment or pass a lead on to sales staff to send out information about your companies services. Selling isn't necessarily what you want to think about when talking to a prospect for the first time.

Telemarketing for lead generation isn’t as popular as it once was. We here at Larson & Associates happen to love sitting here drinking coffee and making phone calls all day, one call after another for our chosen clients. Some one on your staff or us here at Larson's should be making those calls. As my sales mentor Hank Trisler use to say, if you were dropped off in Minot ND (which had a high temperature last Tuesday of -5) as a sales person you would have only two choices to makes sales fast. Start walking the streets and knocking on doors or sitting at your desk in your warm comfortable office making telemarketing calls. I think you could make more touches and more sales faster with a phone call to people who you already know use a service or product like you have.

3 Legged Stool Marketing Method

We do it but we do not normally think about telemarketing as the only tool you should be using but thought of as only a part of a broader strategy using different channels and tools to get you a faster, higher rate of return on your calling time and dollar. The Larson Method ties in lead generation calls with other marketing channels. Think about calling prospects who you’ve reached out to with an email but have yet to get a response. Or got that direct mail post card and were "meaning" to call you.

The Larson 3 Legged Stool Method utilizes Direct Mail-Email-Teleprospcting. When put together it forms a 3 pronged attack that hits people, your valued prospects in 3 different ways making a powerful 1-2-3 punch.

Need the knock out left hook? If that is not quite enough I get my Social Media Expert Fred McMurray of My Three Daughters (not sons) fame to work out all your social median needs and you have the can not miss of lead generation and ample supply of leads for a company of any size and kind from a 1-man army to Fortune 500. http://www.larsonassociates.ws/associations  We can put a plan together that fits you and you alone.  We get down in the trenches with you to help you find your niche so you can not just sell to receptive people and companies but to own that niche so you are the one everyone wants to buy from. 

Larson & Associates


We Make Good Businesses Great and Great Businesses Even Better

Larson & Associates
3475 Steeplechase Way    Suite 101
Grayslake IL 60030
847-991-1294

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Direct Mail Works

 

Put Direct Mail Back In Your Marketing Mix!

You know I am a great advocate of multi-channel marketing. It allows you take advantage of the 5 senses of sighthearingsmelltaste, and touch. 

Outside of a good old face to face sales appointment, and that is not going to happen right now with covid, it is only through your message and your words that you can captivate the heart and mind of your prospects and customers. 

Show them you care. Tell them you care. You need to start the showing this special care in the words you use, not just expressing the feelings but also explaining how you understand the problems they are having is a great way to start. More so in a Covid world. Then if you are doing niche selling like we at Larson & Associates advocate you most likely really do understand their problems and pain points, maybe even more then they do themselves, all the good and bad of the market because of your fuller broad-based understanding.

Direct mail does not have to be dull!

Direct mail at first glance might appear to lack the glitz and glamour of digital marketing. No bells. No whistles. But with all the new innovations maybe not! Print technology like spot digital varnish or digital foil have burst onto the the scene in the last year. Are you taking advantage of those new exciting innovations along with variable data capabilities which came into use a few decades ago with the promise of fast, highly personalized campaigns? Smell you ask? Yes you can get scented pieces of mail. Really, The perfume companies have know this for a long time. Is it time for you to start stinking? Sound? Oh yes with little chips you can talk through the mail. If you have the voice for it sing out loud and strong!

As direct mail technologies have evolved, and as email in-boxes have filled with needless spam looking offers, many marketers are finding that a targeted direct mail added into the marketing mix can cut through the clutter and deliver many of the those same advantages that companies have been enjoying from online marketing. In addition, with many offices closed during the pandemic, physical mail is often reaching people when they are home as well as phone calls and this mail into their almost empty mail box might be providing a pleasant diversion from the daily routine of life.

Many of these prospects are welcoming mail as a point of contact with the world outside their homes. The good thing about mail is that you can touch it, you can feel it, you can smell it and you can see it. If you want to taste it I don't want to hear about it, lol. That alone makes a difference, particularly now, when we can't even really touch or see each other.  Although direct mail volumes are down significantly that is a good thing for you. As marketers headed off to Zoom-land from last March onward amid the contraction of the economy and marketing budges kept shrinking it opened up more space for those who kept doing what worked. As I call them, the basics of Direct mail, Email and Telemarketing using zooming in-place of face-to-face sales calls.  As we move into the start of 2021 and the new year, we are starting to see an increase in direct mail use requests putting aside the slowness because it works! And it holds up one leg of the marketing stool in a way the others can not!

 

Can We Help You?

Take a look or re-look at direct mail. You might be surprised but what mail is capable of doing for you.

What we have found is that when people unsubscribe from an email list, many times it's not because they don't want to have a relationship with you and your brand. Sometimes they're are just overwhelmed by the number of emails so unless yours is really good and keeps striking a special note you will not make the short list forever.

So is it time to go wide open multi-channel?

Should your company be using a strategically timed mulit-channel. multi-touch campaigns involving emails, follow-ups phone calls and postcard mailings?

You think we should talk?  The return on investment numbers say. . .  Yes.

Larson & Associates


We Make Good Businesses Great and Great Businesses Even Better

Larson & Associates
3475 Steeplechase Way    Suite 101
Grayslake IL 60030
847-991-1294