AGORA DIRECT

A lot of businesses do not appreciate the value of their client lists. Building and maintaining a list of contacts is very important for any business which can be used in a numbers of ways.

It is a list of people who have already bought from you or have expressed an interest in your product or service. These could be called “hot prospects” and a lot of these contacts will purchase from you in the future but you have to let them know that you are at least still there.

In general advertising, a company is contacting new people that may or may not have an interest in your companies products or services. When using general advertising it is always a good idea to work out how much it costs you to generate a lead or hot prospect. If you do not do this already, you may be very surprised when you do.

It is important to keep a list of people who have contacted you in the past and it is generally a lot less expensive trying to attract the attention of new customers.

When you have a list, make sure you use it. It is very easy to get caught up in the day to day activities of your job and forget about this. Keep in mind that it often takes a number of e-mails or letters sent before you get a response from some people

Australia’s Do Not call Register is going to be expanded to include fax numbers. Currently the Do Not Call Register does not apply to businesses or Fax numbers.

The Australian Government is providing $4.7 AUD over the next four years to get this operational. Of this $3.5 will be contributed by telemarketing and fax marketing companies in the form of fees paid to the register.

The negative effect of this is that it is the small business that will be affected. The small cleaning company that relies on this type of advertising to bring in new business will have to pay more for the same service.  The small businesses seldom have large cash flow or profits that they can dip into if needed.

Currently fax broadcasting is relatively inexpensive in comparison to other forms of direct response marketing while getting simillar, if not better results.  It is ideal for businesses which do not have large marketing budgets like small business.

There are those who receive advertising faxes who are offended. The vast majority of fax broadcasting companies go to great efforts to remove these fax numbers from their lists. After all there is no point in advertising to those who will not respond anyway.

For more information, have a look at what the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy says.

What is the best way to know how an ad will be received? In fax broadcasting, like any advertising, it is possible to miss and get no response. You need to survey.

Would it not be better to know what people are looking for or to what they are likely to react to before you spend time on a marketing campaign? Knowing this is Possible.

There are companies which charge a lot of money for all kinds of information about potential or past companies. This information is quite easy to get if you know what you are doing.

There are two major areas that you look at to find this information. They are your existing clients or potential clients.

This is done by survey. You have to ask to find out.

If you have a number of services or products you sell, you can look at what has been popular in the past and push that. You can also ask clients what prompted them to contact you in the first place.

In contacting those who are not already clients you find out what they need or want. Not just the product or service they are after but what feature or characteristic do they want.

Once this information has been found, use it in your marketing.

Remember that you may have a number of markets that you have to cater for. If you were selling cars, a mother would have a completely different idea to a businessman as to what a good car is.

Below is an extract from an e-mail regarding the sale of a web product – thought it may be of use.

I was asked to put down some ideas regarding the use of bulk faxing to promote your website. From what I understand, the product is a mini website that is somehow connected to your website with a content manager so a layman can put up and manage their site.

I have seen a very similar type of product where someone was selling domains with hosting that came with a content manager. This guy would send out about 100,000 faxes a day and have a call centre take the calls and do the closing. You may not want to do it on this scale to start off with but you may want to build up to it once success has been proven.

Things to remember about bulk fax marketing:

1. The fax does not sell the product or service – It just generates leads. The sale is generated either by a person or a web page etc.
2. Getting a Bulk fax to work efficiently takes testing. What image creates the best response? It would be a waste of time to send out a few faxes to see if it works and then give up if the first run did not get much of a result.

I suggest that you use bulk faxing to compliment your sales efforts by driving the leads onto those who are already selling your service. This way you can minimize the expense by not getting new people which have to be trained to handle the calls.

An idea would be to send out faxes daily for a week using one image and then evaluating the result at the end of that week to see what is needed for the following week.  Faxing works best on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  You can make your message time sensitive ie:  This month only, Call today, First 50 callers.