If you have been following the articles so far you will be aware of your audience, have created packages to meet their requirements and started your promotion. You will have thought about the barriers to sale and making migrations easy. You will have created a sense of urgency by offering a promotion, for example free line rental for three months or free set up in exchange for the signing of 12 or 24 month contracts. You will have engaged your sales team to ensure they are trained and motivated to follow up your leads and to sell broadband. But which marketing campaign works best?
Newsletters
Well, it depends on your audience and traditional methods of communication. If you have a loyal customer base, who avidly read your newsletter, communicate via this mode. Add in a full page promotion explaining what you are selling, the benefits of it, how much it costs and how they can sign up. It needs to be clear and easy to respond to. Don’t be afraid to follow up this campaign with your telemarketing team.
Emails and Telemarketing
If your audience prefers written communication and you have their email addresses, send them an email. Make sure you have the names and email addresses of the decision makers. Send it at an appropriate time of day, make sure your email is properly referenced with a subject header and personalised message. I am more likely to read an email that starts; Dear Cherie, than Dear Sir or Madam. Don’t be afraid of telemarketing. We all hate cold calls that always seem to interrupt our tea, but calling a customer in the day to see if they have received your email and if it was of interest is valuable. Here you will see if your message has been understood and if it was effective. This will increase your response rates and therefore your sales.
Advertising
Have a look at your customer base and the habits of your main prospects, do they all read the same publication? There are loads of titles out there such as Business XL, Business 550, and The Economist etc. Or are they more niche market? What journals do they read? What forums do they visit online? Find out and advertise there. Adding in a piece of editorial with a local or human interest angle or a full case study is a useful addition and often helps response rates. You will need to run your campaign for a minimum of three months to know if it is effective. Don’t forget the follow up. Can you get a list of the readers’ names and phone numbers to do a phone follow up?
Events
A lot of our Partners use events to take their product bundles and offers to their audience physically. I met Britannic Technologies enjoying a successful event at Technology in Marketing at Earls Court last month and Gamma Telecom have just completed a very successful national road show, for existing customers and new prospects. Exhibiting at general business events can be expensive and wasteful. Work out where your core competence is and in which industries you have had the most success and target their trade events.
Further Information
I could go on and on about successful marketing campaigns, but the secret is to try different approaches and carefully measure outcomes until you find a recipe, which matches your product offering with your audience at the right time at the right price. If you have any questions about this article please feel free to contact me at marketing@griffin.com.
Source: Comms Dealer March.
Cherie Everett
