Marketing - direct mail and phone calls

Marketing - direct mail and phone calls

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The recent thread on practice growth got me thinking about my own marketing efforts this year.

I send out direct mail to a bought list of local businesses. As yet, though, I haven't followed these up with phone calls.

I've been told that doing a follow-up phone call to offer the free meeting mentioned in the letter can increase effectiveness from around 1% to about 5%.

Has anyone tried this, and if so what methods did you use for the phone call (script ,for example)?

Thanks,

AJ
AJ

Replies (4)

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By User deleted
27th Feb 2007 10:50

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Out of say 50 letters we would probably get 1 appointment from just the letter (i.e. they would call us first) and another 2 from the telephone calls.

Another big factor is the quality of the letter and this depends on the businesses you are focusing on.

Our experience has told us that the more formal the less likely it is to work!

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By User deleted
26th Feb 2007 21:57

Thanks for the reply. What sort of % do you get in terms of appointments compared to number of mailshots sent out?

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By User deleted
26th Feb 2007 12:06

Dramatic difference...
...AJ. Like you we access a list of potential clients each month. We used to just send the letter without a follow up call and this proved useless - a complete waste of money.

We then decided to either scrap the idea completely or try follow up calls. Fortunately we opted for the second and actually hired the services of someone to do this for us. He calls each prospective client around 3-4 days after we send the letter. He knows our business and we pay £30 for each meeting he gets us.

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By martinfoley07
27th Feb 2007 00:26

amazed...
....that cold mail shots got a response as high as 1% !! I suspect that's pretty good going.

I would agree the cold-call approach and it does seem to work at around the 5% mark IF you use a good telesales person .Whether "profesional" or not , the caller must be familiar with your business, must know enough to answer all obvious questions, must have a clear menu/structure for the call, and his/her "script" is a summary of key matters, not a word by word script. Nothing more designed to lose the caller than a "script" in the literal sense.

But I would question whether the cost of sending out the cold letters in advance is any benefit or increases the hit rate - just drop the letters and start the calls..

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