Telemarketing

use of the telephone as an interactive medium for promotion or promotion response; also known as teleselling. Telemarketing, a response vehicle, includes receiving orders, inquiries, and donation pledges in response to print and broadcast advertising, catalogs, and direct-mail promotions, and also receiving customer inquiries and complaints. Incoming telephone callers are usually given access to an in-WATS number but may also call collect or call at their own expense. Outbound telemarketing is used to follow-up on inquiries, to sell products or services, to clarify or upgrade an order, or to gather information about consumers or other aspects of the market.

Unlike other promotion mediums, outbound telemarketing calls interrupt the consumer by demanding immediate attention and are not identifiable as a promotion before the consumer is interrupted. Therefore, telemarketers must be particularly careful not to antagonize the consumer. For example, calls should not be made at inconvenient hours such as dinnertime or early morning. A carefully written script should be utilized by every caller to get the most value from the time and money spent on each call and to avoid angering or annoying the person receiving the call. Some elaborate calling scripts include answers to every objection a prospective buyer might mention. In contrast, a few telemarketers have utilized a prerecorded message rather than a "live" caller; the consumer can respond to the recording by pressing numbers on a touch-tone telephone dial. Telephone numbers can be dialed at random by a computer that relays the call to an operator when a contact is made. Calls are frequently made to preselected individuals such as current or prior customers or likely prospects selected from a rented list.

Telemarketing is used heavily by business-to-business marketers to identify qualified leads, avoiding travel and other costs associated with personal sales calls. One telemarketing call can cost four times as much as a direct-mail piece but can generate as much as two to six times the response. The success of a telemarketing program is measured in terms of contacts made (reaching the right person), attempts made (calls that do not reach the right person, busy signals, or no-answers), and conversions (completed sales, surveys, etc.).

The Direct Marketing Association has established guidelines for telemarketing, concerning issues such as calling hours, use of unlisted telephone numbers, and recording of conversations.