Five years ago, businesses were told electronic marketing to customers was an easy, seamless and above all else inexpensive marketing solution. Erm, without TeleMarketing that’s nonsense… kind of.

Often at Imperatif, we are asked how a business can increase their open-and-click rate from HTML emails sent to their valued customer database. Sadly, there is no easy solution on offer other than good old fashioned elbow grease…but it does not have to be an expensive and fruitless drag.

My first question to clients, when asked why open-and-click rate seems to be down from the last email blast, is invariably…‘when was the last time you asked the customer what their email address actually was?” More often than not I am met with answers ranging between, ‘at the beginning of the relationship’ through to ‘never…but they opened the last email months ago’. It is always clear in that second…the client has solved their own puzzle. Email addresses need to be kept current at all times. But what to do about it? Simple, speak to your customers.

Let’s take a step back and put this into the context of a real life situation.

Imperatif have an automotive client who downgraded their services from outbound TeleMarketing calls, TeleSurvey calls and electronic marketing emails to electronic marketing emails only . The client decided to downgrade the services around 6 months ago as they felt they could do the telemarketing and TeleSurveying component ‘in-house’ however they still needed assistance with the design and sending of HTML marketing emails. Over the period of six months, the client has noticed that the open-and-click rate from their email blasts has substantially decreased but are unsure why. More importantly they realised that the bounce rate of their emails has increased…what gives?

As the client was no longer speaking to their customers via Imperatif Call Centre Partners and therefore updating the customer’s details during the course of these calls, data was getting old and irrelevant. Therefore sending the customer an email, perhaps to a company email address, that they no longer worked for, was increasing their bounce rate and decreasing their open rate. All makes sense…but what to do?

Well, it is just super simple stuff, via undertaking regular TeleMarketing or TeleSurveying of your customers, you are not only identifying and acting upon any potential sales lead interest or dissatisfaction with a service or product, but you are actively cleansing data at the same time. This not only ensures that you are qualifying and acting upon potential sales leads now but are ensuring that your data is clean and will increase open-and-click-through rates of your future email blasts.

Armed with the facts, the client and Imperatif decided to reinstate the TeleMarketing calls that Imperatif used to perform. Did it work?…

Let’s take a sample of 100 Imperatif-made outbound calls on behalf of our client (50 TeleMarketing Calls and 50 TeleSurvey calls) and look at what Imperatif have gained on behalf of our client:

18 sales leads or appointments set | 24 potential leads for the future (between 2014 and 2017) | 36 updated details (address | role) etc | 38 updated email addresses

So, with the proof most certainly being in the pudding, here are the facts:

• Open rate before cancelling Imperatif Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 61%
• Bounce rate before cancelling Imperatif Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 1%

• Open rate 6 months after cancelling Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 23%
• Bounce rate before cancelling Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 9%

• Open rate 2 months after reinstating Imperatif Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 45%
• Bounce rate 2 months after reinstating  Imperatif Telemarketing / TeleSurvering services: 3%

Therefore, it is an undeniable truth, if we don’t keep regular contact with our valued customers, they are going to go elsewhere. As marriages go, I can’t see any being more blissful than TeleMarketing and eDM’s.

Paul McMahon