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Put it to the test
Once you've decided what your goals are, next is deciding who gets your business. Unless your universe is extremely small (say, only a few hundred subscribers), most experts advise that you ship your telemarketing to an outside vendor. It's simply too costly to set up an operation in-house.
"We had our own telemarketing company until about two years ago, but we closed it down because it was highly labor-intensive and the profit margins weren't good enough," says Panehal at Wenner. "For a smaller operation to get things like predictive dialing [software that automatically dials a second number if the first doesn't go through] it's very expensive. So then you have someone actually sitting there and dialing, which is very time-consuming."
Ellen Higgins, circulation manager at Gloucester, Massachusetts-based Old-House Journal, just started telemarketing to her post-expire renewals this year. She decided to ship it outside, to "go with the experts." When choosing a company, Higgins says, she asked her industry contacts for recommendations, and then called a few and asked to see copies of their reports from previous campaigns. For Higgins, it was most important to find a telemarketer that shared her values regarding customer service. "Some telemarketers will try to keep people on the phone no matter what," Higgins says. "But if [a reader] gets irate, [a telemarketer] should get off and say, 'I'm sorry; it was just a reminder.' "
Once you've lined up a handful of prospective telemarketing companies, you should test them out before signing up for a full-fledged campaign. For this, you'll have to provide each vendor with a list of names. An accurate test eliciting a few hundred responses is likely to require at least 2,000 to 3,000 phone numbers, because some of those won't be accurate and only 10 percent of those called will actually be at home.
When Susan Anson, circulation manager at Morris Plains, New Jersey-based Gordon Publications (a division of Reed Elsevier Business Publishing that puts out 18 titles in the manufacturing, medical and high-tech fields, including 31,000-circulation Pharmaceutical Processing and 200,000-circulation Industrial Product Bulletin), is looking for a new telemarketing vendor, she'll give portions of the same list to two companies to see which does a better job. "I'll give 5,000 names to each and compare the number of calls, the number of respondents and the number of yeses and nos in the same number of days," she says.
Anson prefers to write the scripts herself and let the vendor make small changes, but many publishers choose the opposite approach. Either way, remember that the more information you provide about your magazine, the more your telemarketer can adequately represent you.
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