Telemarketing Software Featured Article

A new blog post by social media firm, Buffer, sums up a current problem with marketing. The company just announced that its social referral traffic is now half of what it was last year, and the company is honest enough to admit that it is groping for answers. Buffer is not alone; companies of all sizes and specialties are struggling to generate quality leads and sales from Internet marketing and sales channels right now.

The problem is partially because there’s just too much content, and too much vying for the attention of potential customers. A recent blog post on the Finance Magnates website further highlights the problem.

The blog notes that the typical business will get nine leads from every 300 website visitors. That doesn’t sound too bad, but when starting with nine leads that translates into only a single conversion if you take the 5-15 percent average conversion rate.

Email marketing is not much better, the blog notes; for every 900 emails sent, on average only 180 will be read. Less will then click on the links in the email, leading to a disastrously low rate of success.

What is needed is smarter sales and marketing, because the current methods are just not cutting it.

One method that businesses might try is leveraging phone sales more; it is easy to ignore emails and Web page signup forms, but there’s a lot better chance if a sales agent is talking with a potential customer.

The trick is making calling campaigns more efficient. For example, with the use of an auto dialer, businesses only spend time talking to actual customers; the auto dialer weeds out the busy signals, voicemail and calls that are not answered. This translates into sales staff spending all their time talking with real potential customers, and that’s a lot more likely to lead to a sale than email or Web-based approaches.

“When you add enhanced VoIP capabilities like a cloud-based PBX (News - Alert) with a predictive dialer, you can effectively raise the productivity of your sales agents by 400 percent,” notes the Finance Magnate blog. “This is because the predictive dialer is only going to contact the leads whose information was submitted from the same efforts that led to the creation of the landing page.”

So instead of wasting time and effort on Web marketing that is ineffective, consider a smarter approach: leveraging calling campaigns and auto dialers for more effective sales and marketing.