The Tools Every Marketer Needs To Increase Response Rates

By: Jane Peters

The tools every marketer needs to increase response rates

In the current environment it’s essential to have the right tools to support calculated marketing activity such as response monitoring, call recording , CRM and email marketing programs.

The customer you have on your database will have either bought from you before, enquired about your products or even just requested to be put on your mailing list. This database is your key to unlocking potential sales as in the current climate; cold sales will be twice as hard to come by as before. If you have the tools to support your marketing efforts, this will go a long way to ensure your business retains a profit during the recession. Read on to find out how a marketing toolkit can help you utilise those contacts and reach out to those buyers looking for what you want to sell.

CRM – Prepare for Battle

When thinking about marketing to an existing, possibly quite old database, it’s vital to clean it thoroughly before conducting any activity. To cleanse the database, set aside two or three days and contact everyone (if the data is of a large quantity you may wish to employ a contact centre or telemarketing expert to take on this task for you). When gathering information to update the database always prepare a list of the elements you wish to hold on the database:

Full name and address

‘Contact number’ landline and mobile if possible

Email address

Details of their last purchase or if not with you then what and where did they buy

When are they looking to purchase: 3, 6, 9, 12 months time

Once you have this information, you are ready to make contact with a warm audience. They know who you are and have either purchased from you or once thought about purchasing from you so you are in a good position to market to them.

Once the data cleanse is completed, make sure the information is kept up to date with a regular contact session carried out once every six weeks at a minimum. A CRM database will allow you to effectively target certain sectors of your database for an increased response. For example, if you are a travel agent, you could prepare a campaign to target previous customers who bought a package deal to the Canaries in the summer holidays last year. If you time it right, you could catch them just as they are thinking about making another booking. Send them an email or flyer with details of the special deals you have for the canaries this year. Follow-up with a telephone call and you will instantly up your response rates.

Response Monitoring: Track your success

When conducting a marketing campaign, track the response by allocating each channel a unique telephone number. If you are a national company, use an 08 prefix, if your service offering is local, use a geographic number. Every call that comes in responding to the marketing will be captured on a report that can be accessed online. For example, in a weekly management meeting you may be asked to provide an update of the recent marketing activity. If you have used a trackable telephone number you can print off a full report on how many calls came in against each channel.

This system of using trackable numbers can help marketers choose which form of marketing to spend their budget on. If your campaign highlighted that the website and an email marketing newsletter brought in the most calls then the budget could be focussed upon that. In tough times the budget may be tight so being able to see the response midway through a campaign will give you the ability to market tactically. If you didn’t have response monitoring to find this information out, 50% of the marketing budget would have been wasted.

Other benefits of using instantaneous reporting gives users a much quicker appreciation of whether their media is generating response, particularly important when trialling new methods and channels. As one media agency told us:

‘One issue with using new channels is that they’re often unproven, so you need to be able to recognise problems and adjust the campaign quickly if it’s not working.’

Being flexible with media planning creates a number of benefits :

Lower media costs: keeping media schedules more fluid allows users to access last minute deals and therefore stretch their media budget further.

Reduced advertising sizes: users are finding that they can reduce their advertising sizes while maintaining their response levels. This means they can have more adverts across more areas which increases the potential reach of a campaign.

Improved creative: if a particular piece of creative shows reduced performance, the adverts can be changed quickly to improve performance.

Call Recording – The Next Step

In addition to tracking telephone responses, call recording is a great way to improve conversion rates. After finding out what marketing is successful it’s time to improve the conversion from lead to sale. How do you know what experience your customers are getting when they call you? Are they being left on hold? If the product they are calling about has sold out are they told about similar items still available? How many sales have been lost due to in-experienced call handling?

The internet has changed the way enquiries should be handled. When someone calls to enquire now, they have most probably researched the item online before calling and will be ready to do business. Are your sales team ready for this customer? Does the way you do business reflect the changing climate of price comparison? How do you handle the price lead consumer?

If you could monitor this activity by recording the content of your incoming sales enquiries, the task of improving conversions would be simpler. The program by recording the incoming call on the telephone number you have allocated to marketing activity. Once the call has completed you can listen to it through your computer via an online secure login. If you go through the calls from that day, you can discover where the problems lie (as well as highlight the good calls) and train your sales team to improve their conversion rates.

In summary, by having tools at your disposal, the modern marketer can bring efficiency and clarity to every marketing campaign. It will take away the finger in the air approach and improve not only cost efficiency, but increase sales. In today’s market you need every tool at your disposal to make sure the return on investment is consistently good.

http://www.mediahawk.co.uk

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/marketing/article_4386.shtml