Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Maximizing Your Telemarketing Lists During Today's Job Climate

Posted on Apr 16, 2009 by Chris Engel, Vice President of Information Technology

In the current economy, almost every one of us has felt at least some of the effect of the business downturn. Ask anyone, and either they, or someone they know has either been “downsized”, “rightsized” or “globalized”. As the massive layoffs and restructurings continue, it has a direct impact on your customers and prospects that you can measure, in lost revenue or slowed growth. It also has an impact on the lists you might use for your marketing efforts, both internal and purchased from list providers. In effect, you take a double hit, because in many cases, your marketing budget has either remained flat or been reduced for 2009. So you end up with more email bounce-backs, returned mail and potentially lower results from telemarketing.

Not surprisingly, we are seeing a higher percentage of contacts that have left their company, or their roles have been consolidated, thereby reducing the number of viable contacts in your target market. In some cases, the percentage of contacts that have left their company has doubled or tripled over this time last year. Where many of our previous challenges with lists have been getting the correct phone numbers, or a direct line or mail stop for a contact, now it is getting who replaced whom and who handles what. When you add to this the fact that you have less budget to spend, it makes every touch more important.

In order to minimize the results of all this churn, you can take a couple of different approaches, and they can apply to any type of marketing touch, direct mail, email or telemarketing. If you have a mature CRM, customer list or prospect marketing database, it would make sense to leverage that, and then you gain the benefit of what is hopefully, more up to date data and also allows you to update any non viable records after the marketing effort is completed within your systems and databases.

A second option is to tap multiple list sources and then track the results by source so that you can measure the percentage of unusable records and then tailor future efforts based on the sources that prove most accurate. You would need to do this against a large enough effort where you can gain statistically valid data, and use the results to plan subsequent marketing campaigns. Many times, you can consult with your marketing vendor for list sources where they have seen better quality or have had successful campaigns for other clients.

Another way to maximize your investment in lists, is to perform a data cleanse and contact supplementation program against the lists and then use the list that results from this effort as the mainstay or your marketing plans. In this case, a list would be acquired, and called on, to verify the provided contacts, validate the demographic data, and identify the appropriate contacts that you would target in marketing efforts. It is also possible to get their email address and optin permissions on this call, and add them to your list of email prospects, which is valuable as well.

Tagged: lead generation, lead generation lists, telemarketing lead generation, telemarketing data hygiene, targeted lead generation

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