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When to pick up the phone
Conventional wisdom calls for telemarketing renewals only, and then just as a last resort. But if your renewals need a boost, Conway suggests replacing your third or fourth mail effort with a phone call. "Every renewal series has a curve, and there's always a place it falls off," she says. "If my first effort gets a 20 percent response, my second gets 12 percent, my third gets 8 percent and my fourth gets only 2 percent, that's where I would place a call."
Most experts advise against telemarketing a start-up (people don't respond to offers for things they've never seen), so one option for new publishers is to send the premier issue and follow up over the phone. However, experts recommend you do this only if you want to build circulation fast and can afford the expense, or if your price point is high enough to make telemarketing worth the effort. For example, pitching a two- or three-year subscription could warrant the cost of large-scale calling.
If your magazine is already well known, you could also hire telemarketers to call around for new subscribers. Gigi Panehal, subscription director at New York City's Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Men's Journal and Us, finds leads this way. She's been most successful when telemarketers give part of the subscription price to a charitable cause, such as the Police Athletic League. "There's a hook if people feel like they're making a donation," Panehal says. DialAmerica, for example, donates to everything from local sports teams to the Leukemia Society, sending money to 70 different organizations. Few companies will reveal the percent they actually give to charity, but DialAmerica has contributed $140 million since the mid-sixties.
If you currently have no teleservices at all, you should first test out the phones on your renewals, suggests Carole Ireland, circulation consultant and president of Mamaroneck, New York-based Quality Circulation Services. This way you can see how already-established readers respond to phone solicitations. With business titles, Ireland advises you take into account the nature of the target audience. "There may be industries that are particularly sensitive to telephone calls," she says. "For instance, restaurant businesses are terribly hard to reach by mail, so they may respond better to the phone."
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