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With Internet and email the hot topics these days, hawking subscriptions by phone may seem like yesterday's news delivered with last century's technology. But until subscribers stop misplacing requal forms, start remembering to send in their checks and quit ignoring their in-boxes, telephone sales will remain a necessary channel for reader renewal and acquisition.
If anything, the newer channels are but additional rungs in a marketing ladder in which telephone remains a critical step. "The telephone used to be an entity unto itself, but now it's totally integrated into the marketing mix," says Gail Stone, president of PTM Communications. "If you don't get enough mail responses, fax responses or email responses, you have to go to the phone."
Reserving telemarketing as an effort of last resort - the most popular prevailing strategy - does make economic sense. Phone is a relatively high-cost effort, but its robust response rates, even among subscribers who've been emailed and faxed and mailed ad infinitum, make it a relatively dependable clean-up hitter.
That success in itself works against developing new telephone strategies. "A lot of publishers treat telemarketing like a manufacturing process - they find something that works, and then turn the motor on and let it run forever," said Sandy Clark of Clark Consulting in Darien, CT. The miserly economy has only encouraged the status quo. Trying to make the most of restricted budgets, circulators over the last several years seem to be delaying phone efforts further and further, until the last possible moment. The result, notes Joan Marcus, senior VP, Lester Inc., is less experimentation and less time to take advantage of one of the telephone's biggest advantages over other sources - its potential for prompt feedback and adjustment in mid-campaign.
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