Honesty Goes A Long Way

Why do sales people try and hide the sales call as a service call? Surely it would be better to respect your prospect /customer by being polite, honest and to see if you can genuinely help rather than disguising the reason for a call. We live in the 21st century so let’s get with it. There are numerous reasons why the decision maker won’t speak with you so don’t lie in your message about why you want to speak with them. Be up front - I don’t mean over direct or aggressive - but a good balance and honesty will go a long way. Daryl Jay, Business Development Director

10 key questions you should be asking your data supplier and why.

You need to know that the data you buy is legal, up-to-date and targeted. Here are our top 10 key questions you should be asking your data supplier. An explanation of why is provided after each question.

GENERAL
1. How often is the data updated? Business data can decay at up to 40% a year, leading to a decline in response rates and deterioration in the cost-effectiveness of your campaign.

2. How is it updated? Different methods can be used for updating data which do not always equate to the best solution for direct marketing purposes. For example, relying on downloads from the latest set of Companies House data will only provide information on registered businesses and will not give details of non-limited/sole traders.

3. Are you registered with the Data Protection Act 1998? All list owners in the UK must go through the process of notification/registration with the Information Commissioner's Office and must collect data both fairly and lawfully.

4. Do you have deliverability guarantees? Deliverability guarantees can be a good measure of the confidence of the data supplier in the currency of their data and provides reassurance to you.

EMAIL SPECIFIC
5. Are the addresses collected in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Direct Marketing Association's DM Code of Practice? This can reduce the risk of being viewed as a spammer with potentially damaging consequences such as being blacklisted by your ISP and suspension of all your online operations.

6. Have the recipients agreed to their details being passed to third party organizations for direct marketing purposes - essential for non-corporates? Reason as 5 above.

7. Can the email address be linked to a qualified trading postal address? Reason as 5 above, plus the benefit of using more than one communication channel.

DIRECT MAIL SPECIFIC
8. Are the addresses at registered or trading sites? Registered addresses are very often not the same as the trading address. Send your mailing piece to the former and you could end up with a lot of wasted costs.

9. Is the decision-maker based at the address supplied? Not all data suppliers can provide the names of decision makers at the site from which they operate. Again, make sure costs are not lost through using the wrong data.

TELEMARKETING SPECIFIC
10. Are telephone numbers suppressed against the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and Corporate Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and how regularly does suppression take place? Prospect a business or individual by telephone that's on the TPS or CTPS register and you could end up with a £5000 fine. Julie Knight, Managing Director

Questions to ask when buying email data

In order to reduce the risk of being viewed as a spammer with potentially damaging consequences such as being blacklisted by your ISP and suspension of all your online operations, several pertinent questions should be put to your supplier. In my opinion, numbers 1-3 are essential with 4 and 5 being desirable.

1. Are the addresses collected in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Direct Marketing Association's DM Code of Practice

2. Have the recipients agreed to their details being passed to third party organizations for direct marketing purposes - essential for non-corporates

3. How often are they updated/verified

4. Does the supplier have a deliverability guarantee

5. Can the email address be linked to a qualified trading postal address

Also ask whether the supplier will release the data if your preferred option is to manage the campaign internally, as not all do.

Email marketing may be a cost-effective option, but buying data from un-qualified sources may result in damaging your brand and ultimately costing you business.
Julie Knight, Managing Director

Email Alienation!

It seems that whilst some suppliers might be holding back on acquiring new customers they could be alienating existing customers in the process. I cannot remember how many websites I have a subscription with but I used to receive a promotional email from a range of websites, say, once a quarter or once a month. My inbox is now getting fuller by the day with some suppliers emailing almost on a daily basis.

They are running the risk of alienating me as a customer which in some cases gets a knee-jerk reaction to unsubscribe and reach for the delete button. I welcome relevant, well-targeted messages but overdo it and I may be persuaded otherwise.

7 tips on using B2B data effectively in a new business creation process

For most business leaders, the idea of ringing up a list of strangers and asking for a sales meeting or generating interest in a product or service sends a shiver down their spine. On the other hand, most of them also agree that a professionally planned and executed telemarketing project is the marketing technique most likely to succeed in growing new business sales for most businesses.

Like many things in life, success lies in carefully planning, designing, implementing and managing the project; and everything that this simple to read sentence entails; certainly more than can be written in one short article. So let's start with the basics. Any new business creation activity needs to start with a good prospect list to target.

If you're attempting to promote or sell to prospects that are unlikely to want or need your product or service, it's all going to be a very frustrating uphill struggle. In this article we look at seven tips to making sure you have the right prospects to target, and you have a campaign that will give you the best chance of success.

The seven tips:-

1. We all know the 80/20 rule where most companies find that 80% of their profit comes from 20% of their customers? If only we could clone the profitable 20%, then we could double our profit whilst only growing our business by 20%. Profile your customer base and use the profile of your most profitable 20% clients when building your prospect list.

2. Create a profile of your ideal prospect. Get a flip chart and your sales team around you and together describe your ideal client - who are they, what do they look like, what sort of job do they do in what sort of business, etc. As before, use this when building your prospect list.

3. Understand prospects' pressure points. When communicating with prospects, you really want to join in with the conversations they are already having - you need to join in with their real world. Think carefully about the pressure points in your prospects' businesses and what will be in the front of their minds. Do everything you can to enable the benefits of your product or service to bring solutions to their current problems in their current real world.

4. Build your prospect list. Use a data specialist to select a prospect list that matches up with the profile and prospect numbers that you will now understand if you've gone through steps 1 - 3. Start communicating with prospects.

5. Make sure that you have material that you can send to prospects or a website or page to point them to. If you're telephoning prospects then it's great to have some information to email to them or a website to direct them to whilst they are still on the phone.

6. Don't try to sell the product or service during the first communication step. You are only selling the next step in your new business creation process. So you may be on the telephone trying to arrange a sales appointment; only 'sell' the sales appointment - you simply want to meet face to face when you can really sell the product/service.

7. Feedback. Continually hone your prospect list and your approach by feeding back your learnings into your prospect data and into your sales and marketing processes and tools.

Above all, learn to enjoy the experience and treat it as the highly rewarding challenge that it is.

New database gets the sales leads others cannot reach

Marketscan Adds New Source to Megabase

Marketscan (http://www.marketscan.co.uk), finalises its arrangement with infoUK to provide B2B data for Marketscan’s Megabase of UK businesses. The new data source will be the fifth to be combined into this single marketing database, Megabase, which provides unparalleled coverage of active businesses and contact detail. infoUK have been chosen as a supplier, as its data quality meets the high standards required for inclusion into Marketscan’s Megabase. A monthly data feed from infoUK of over one million records will be matched against Marketscan’s existing data and any missing data added to Megabase.

Daryl Jay, Marketscan’s business development director, comments: “Clients will find that searches for sales leads are quicker and more rewarding. With the addition of another high quality data source they can also be confident that they are getting maximum coverage of their markets, the benefits of which are particularly important in times when budgets are under pressure.”

As with all Megabase sources, data from infoUK is telephone researched and email data complies with the DMA’s Direct Marketing Code of Practice and the Data Protection Act 1998. Marketscan’s Megabase is updated monthly, ensuring that any mailing, telemarketing or email data will include the latest updates when downloaded.

6 Tips for Writing Better Subject Lines

Create interest with your first few words

As Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music,"Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start." When people on your mailing list read your messages, they may not begin with A-B-C, but they do begin with your subject line.The subject line is perhaps the most critical aspect of your message. Think about it: The subject line is often what readers use to decide whether to open an email at all. In fact, a 2007 study by Jupiter Research showed that 35 percent of email users open messages simply because of what's contained in the subject line.

Usually it takes three seconds or less to make this decision. If your subject line isn't compelling enough, your message could end up unread or in the trash folder.With that in mind, here are six pieces of conventional wisdom to consider when writing your subject lines. In all cases, it's a good idea to consider the type of message you are sending before you apply any of these tips. A promotional offer would call for a different type of subject than an informational mailing, for example.

Be Quick
According to Return Path, subject lines with less than 50 characters have open rates that are 12.5 percent higher than those with 50 or more characters, and click-through rates that are 75 percent higher. Don't give away all your content in the subject line; just offer a taste by sharing the most important piece of information.

Be Informative
Your subject line should convey not just what's inside your email, but that the contents are important, timely, and relevant. Essentially, the subject line should say to the recipient that if she doesn't open your message, she could be missing out on something of real value. For example, "These special offers won't last long."

Be Personal
A personalized message will cut through the clutter of an over-filled inbox. No, you don't have to mention the recipient by name. But using words like "you," "your," "we," or "our" will help make a warmer impression than a generic or impersonal subject line would. "The Park City Symphony needs your help" would be an effective pitch, for example.

Be Interesting
To increase your chances of having your email opened, your subject line must intrigue your recipient the same way that a good headline on a news article does. You want to stimulate and excite the reader so he or she wants to open your message right away. And then, of course, your email has to deliver on that tease. Asking "Does your dog have a favorite toy?" is one way to capture your readers' attention.

Be Trustworthy
Your subject line is another communication of your brand image, and accordingly, you do not want to mislead recipients by promising one thing in your subject line and then delivering another. Similarly, if you call something out in your subject line (such as a special offer or event details), make sure this information is easy to find in the body of your mail. Believe it or not, a good subject line can make customers feel better about your business or organization.

Be Inspirational
The more active your subject line, the more compelled your recipient will be to act. You can accomplish this simply, by using verbs. For example, "Money-saving tips" may not inspire someone to open your email, but "Save money with these tips" probably would.

Of course, incorporating all six of these tips into one subject line would be quite a challenge (we did say keep it short). That's why it's a good idea to test various subject lines, and keep watch of your open rates and the response from your readers to see which ones are the most effective.

You may be surprised what a difference five or six words can make.