US Farm Data Response Plus Telemarketing Lists

The Telemarketing Challenge

Calling campaigns may sound like torture to anyone familiar with today’s communication methods. “There has to be an easier way. Why not just use Facebook or something?” For complex products and services, or if you’re selling a solution to an organization with complex decision making, contact over the phone is a must. And if you’re trying to reach a population not on social media, phone calls are a viable part of your marketing mix.

US Farm Data has been in the direct marketing business for decades. While we’re happy to provide a list for telemarketing, we’ve found we can enhance results by combining telemarketing with modern communication methods. These methods won’t replace calls, but make the calls more effective. We do this by increasing brand, product, or problem awareness in your target market before you make calls. Then we reinforce your message among curious prospects who may be too early in the process to make a decision.

An Insurance Campaign

Let’s use an example. We’re going to be an insurance agency targeting acreage owners living outside of major metropolitan areas with an interest in horses. The normal approach would be to purchase a list of horse owners by zip codes with phone numbers present. The leads would be sent to agents in the areas being targeted with instructions for the agents to call and introduce themselves and the insurance products designed for horse owners. From past experience, from a list of 5,000 names we could expect as much as 10% of this list to request more information, 30% of the requestors to accept a proposal and 33-50% of the proposals to turn into new policies. Assuming the list isn’t too expensive and the agency writes policies of a certain dollar size, it’s a winning formula.

Response Plus Telemarketing Lists

With the Response Plus Telemarketing Program list option from US Farm Data, we’re going to include ad impressions to the campaign. We can find our list of horse owners online and in the two weeks leading up to the phone calls, start running ads to raise awareness of the insurance agency (brand), the horse owner insurance policy (product), or the need for special coverage stable owners have (problem). If the list is 5,000 names, we plan for 50-60,000 ad impressions to run before the calling campaign. These very targeted ads show up only to the names on the list in their social media, on their local online news sites, on their mobile apps, and countless other ad spaces. Display advertising like this isn’t very effective for generating inquiries, but it’s great for raising awareness.

Results

Now when your agents call the list of 5,000, we expect a 10-25% bump in effectiveness. We go from 500 requests for information on the old campaign to 550-600 in the Response Plus Telemarketing campaign. We go from 150 proposals to 165-180 in the new campaign. We go from 50-75 policies to 55-80 policies in the effort. It may not sound like much, but for this insurance agency, every extra policy in force over the course of a lifetime can be the difference between a break even year and an insanely profitable one.

The best part is what happens with the targeted prospects that aren’t ready to purchase. The Response Plus Telemarketing Program sets up a special display ad campaign for the people who visit your site but don’t respond to calls. Using re-targeting, we can help you pull three or five more responses from the list and add one more policy to your book of business.