Thread: eMail and Telemarketing For Small Businesses

Telemarketing

Some businesses find contacting customers by phone works well for them. Phone surveys are generally quite cost-effective. You can:

* gauge the customer's interest immediately
* ask questions to assess the customer's needs
* explain technical or complex messages more effectively
But, remember, a lot of people find marketing calls an unwelcome interruption - particularly in the evenings when you're most likely to get them at home. Consider carefully whether consumer telemarketing fits your business' image and whether you're willing to risk alienating customers.

Some phone survey guidelines:

* At the beginning of the conversation, your interviewer should confirm the name of the respondent if calling a home, or give the appropriate name to the switchboard operator if calling a business.
* Pauses should be avoided, as respondent interest can quickly drop.
* Make sure that a follow-up call is possible if additional information is required.
* Make sure that interviewers don't divulge details about the poll until the respondent is reached.

As mentioned phone interviews are cost-effective but speed is another big advantage. Some of the more experienced interviewers can get through up to 10 interviewers an hour, though speed in itself isn`t the ultimate criteria of success. Five to six per hour is more typical. Phone interviews also allow you to cover a wide geographical range relatively inexpensively. Phone costs can be reduced by taking advantage of cheaper rates during certain hours.

The main costs of phone interviews are the interviewer's fee, phone charges, preparation of the questionnaire, cost of researcher time, and the analysis and presentation of the results of the questioning.

Email marketing:

Advantages

Email is a very low cost form of direct marketing - a message can be sent to thousands of recipients for next to nothing. And of course you can target the exact person you need to reach. Measuring response rates is simple and recent figures show that they are higher than those for mailshots - probably because replying to emails is so straightforward.

Nowadays you can use electronic newsletters with built-in response mechanisms. If you don't have in-house expertise, there are specialist firms which can help develop newsletters and customise them to particular audiences.

Disadvantages

Email contacts go out of date faster than either addresses or telephone numbers, so you need to be particularly active in cleaning your database. And the increasing amount of spam - unsolicited email - means your marketing emails will need to stand out if they aren't to be deleted before being read. Increasingly sophisticated anti-spam software also means that many marketing emails get sent to the `junk` box, so never get read.

Remember that you must comply with certain legal requirements if you send marketing emails to potential or existing customers.

Your efforts for For Small Businesses is really informative and useful.

Thanks

Originally Posted by TeamPlayer

Disadvantages

Email contacts go out of date faster than either addresses or telephone numbers, so you need to be particularly active in cleaning your database. And the increasing amount of spam - unsolicited email - means your marketing emails will need to stand out if they aren't to be deleted before being read. Increasingly sophisticated anti-spam software also means that many marketing emails get sent to the `junk` box, so never get read.

Remember that you must comply with certain legal requirements if you send marketing emails to potential or existing customers.

You forgot to mention:
Your host will delete your account and your domain will be added to Blacklists
and as result no one will host your web site since after

;)

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