Telemarketing's Elevated Role in the Economic Downturn

Although more expensive than other sources, publishers still rely on telemarketing to give them quick results and more insight into what their readers and potential subscribers want.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Thursday, September 10, 2009

[Click here to view accompanying chart that details the services offered by 22 vendors.]

As direct mail continues to become a smaller part of the source mix, especially for b-to-b publishers, telemarketing has found a new position as one of the primary sources of new business and requals. And despite fear that BPA’s Telemarketing Recording Rule would affect budgets and response rates, publishers are actually seeing some benefits.
AD spoke with three b-to-b audience developers to see how telemarketing as a source has fared for their companies during the past year, what they look for when choosing new vendors to work with and how being required to record calls is working to their advantage.

TELEMARKETING: NEW PRIMARY SOURCE?

Eight years ago, Birmingham, Alabama-based Grand View Media Group, which publishes both consumer and b-to-b titles (but doesn’t use telemarketing for their consumer titles), used to heavily rely on direct mail to acquire new business and requals, but the recession has changed things.

“Direct mail is cost prohibitive for a campaign of this nature,” Delicia Poole, director of circulation and fulfillment, told AD. “Telemarketing is [now] our primary source for new request circulation. For renewals and requals, it is also our primary source. Of course, we start out with some of the more cost efficient methods first, such as cover tips, email, and so on. But after those are exhausted, we roll right into telemarketing to get the vast majority of our requals.”

Poole, however, says things could change in the future. “As more and more digital sources get into the mix, we expect to rely less on telemarketing, but for now it’s our primary source,” she says.

For Haymarket Media, telemarketing’s role has pretty much stayed consistent over the years, according to group circulation manager Sherry Oommen. “I’ve been working here for years, and haven’t seen much change,” she says. “We use telemarketing for both new business and requal, as well as for our events. The number of leads we’ve been acquiring has stayed pretty consistent as well.”

Given the current state of the economy and how it has impacted businesses across the country, telemarketing has come to play a more significant role, according to James Cowart, audience development director, Penton Media. “The challenge for us is to find the quickest way to get a response, so if we can reach readers via telephone, it’s in our best interest to continue to do that because, in one to three months, that person may not be there any longer,” he says. “Time is money. If you can get 3,000 leads in three days via telephone, that would be better than taking three months with a tip-on.”

Although telemarketing performs the best within the source mix, Cowart says response rates have dropped a bit. “We’re now pushing into online marketing and social networking to see where we can find more responses,” he says.

TESTING AND TACTICS

A lot of preparation goes into creating a successful telemarketing campaign from keeping the data clean and up-to-date and writing the script to figuring out the right opportunities to upsell and/or cross sell.

For the circulation team at Grand View Media, the design of the script makes all the difference. “We like to design our scripts with the thought in mind that we are calling people to help them do business smarter and more efficiently by providing them with our magazines and e-newsletters as ‘must reads’ for their industry,” Poole says. “When you approach the call in this manner and not as if you’re trying to sell someone something, it tends to work out better for everyone involved.”

And once potential and current subscribers are talked into ordering the title they were targeted for, Poole might take then advantage of the time on the phone. “We do use telemarketing to upsell and cross sell, but only if we’ve exhausted our more cost effective methods,” she says. “We find that it works out quite well. We get instant feedback on which industries and job functions are interested in the products we’re cross selling, which ones are not, and why.”

Oommen says her team also pays close attention to their scripts, which helps to determine if they’re targeting the right people and whether they truly qualify for the magazine. “As we monitor the calls, we’re listening to why people say ‘no’,” she says. “It helps us to better decide how we’re going to respond. This is very important because we’re now creating rebuttals where we didn’t before. If they give us a quick answer that may disqualify them from being eligible for our magazine, we may re-ask the question in a way that may possibly qualify them.”

BPA’S TELERECORDING RULE: A NEW ADVANTAGE

When AD published its telemarketing feature last year (CM, Oct. 2008, pg. 14), it was too early for publishers to comment on whether BPA’s Telemarketing Recording Rule affected response rates, but it seemed, at the time, that the effect would be minimal.

Not only did the rule turn out to be less painful than publishers expected, it actually had a positive spin. “I’m pleased with the rule,” Oommen says. “It holds vendors more accountable. Before, you would have no idea what was taking place on the calls—you would have to take the agency’s word for it. But overall, everything went smoothly. Vendors complied pretty fast with a few exceptions here and there.”

Cowart says the rule has become especially useful for Penton both in terms of cost and performance. “In the past, when you wanted a vendor to record the calls, it was cost-prohibitive,” he says. “But now that all vendors have to record, everybody now has a clean slate as far as price.”

Cowart explains that vendors are more willing to do dual- and multi-form calls—in other words, pitch a potential subscriber multiple titles with vertical content—because it saves them money since all calls have to be recorded. But this new practice has a set of its own issues. “The challenge is that, at most companies, everything is siloed,” he says. “Each title may have a different qual form than the other, the demographics don’t match up, and so on. So once the info goes to the fulfillment center, the codes may be different and everything gets out of whack.”

Penton had to go through about three or four calling cycles, Cowart says, before all of the kinks were worked out, but once everything went smoothly, the cost savings were beneficial. “It’s all about finding that fine line between how much is too much of a duplication of people in multiple titles,” he says. “An acceptable amount is 20-30 percent. Anything above that and you should be wondering why those two titles aren’t operating as one. But in the acceptable range, it makes perfect sense to make a dual or multi-call effort. Why call them twice?”

CHOOSING THE RIGHT VENDOR

Publishers may have different criteria they use when choosing a telemarketing vendor, but most will agree that having multiple vendors working for their companies is a wise choice.
“We have one main vendor who gets the bulk of our telemarketing work, but we also like to make sure that we don’t have all of our eggs in one basket,” Poole says. “I like to make sure that, should our main vendor get in a bind or we get in a bind, we have established a relationship with multiple vendors we can contact and get calling started pretty quickly.”

Haymarket Media also uses multiple vendors—about three with most new business calls going to one in particular. “We do have back-up vendors, in case our main vendor doesn’t have time to run a particular campaign,” Oommen says.

But overall, publishers want their vendors to be cost-efficient, flexible, experienced and confident in their ability to do their job. Oommen suggests looking for vendors that specialize in the type of magazines that are published at your company, such as controlled versus paid, as well the number of agents available at the call centers. Testing, she says, is a great way to see how a vendor handles your company’s campaigns.

“We split a file and give half to one vendor and half to the other,” she says. “Some companies are just better at handling b-to-b titles or paid titles. And listening to the calls makes a big difference. I monitor my campaigns so that I can tell if the agent has a good handle on things.”

For Cowart, flexibility comes first and foremost. “It’s all about the company’s willingness to obtain and maintain the high level of quality that we expect,” he says.

Second in line is cost, followed by tools. “How quickly the company can report the results of our campaigns provides an added value to our marketing strategy,” he says. “Having reports that are in real-time is more desirable than having results a month later.”

For Poole, trust in the company is essential. “You absolutely have to trust the company you have chosen to do your telemarketing,” she says. “You are sending them very valuable data that can be easily compromised. Before I try a new vendor, I like to make some calls to some of their current customers to find out for myself what they think. I also like to try a test with the company. If they have problems getting my scripts loaded in the way that I want them or take too long to get the scripts loaded and approved, I instantly become wary. It makes me think that they’ve spread themselves too thin and are trying to book business that they don’t physically have the manpower to accomplish.”