Читать книгу Direct Mail in the Digital Age - Lin Grensing-Pophal - Страница 6

You’re sitting down to eat dinner when the phone rings. You answer it and, to your chagrin, it’s a telemarketer trying to sell you something. This time that “something” is a magazine that you are really interested in and the price is right. You bite. Some clever businessperson just used telephone direct marketing to reach right into your home and make a sale.

While telephone solicitation, or telemarketing, is not direct mail, it does share one important element with direct mail — the need for a list of individuals who are likely to be interested in what the marketer has to sell. This is not true of other forms of direct marketing, as we’ll see.

Telephone direct marketing has the advantages of immediacy and personal interaction with the potential customer, but many people feel telephone marketing is intrusive and they will react negatively to a phone call. In addition, some offers are too complex to be explained adequately in a short phone conversation. Add to that the movement away from traditional land lines to mobile telephones.