Both email marketing and telemarketing have been around for a few decades now. Each is being used by sales organisations to start conversations with potential customers. However, marketers often have different opinions when it comes to pitting the two against each other.
Can telemarketing and email really compete?
After all, sales teams use both tactics for outbound marketing to drive action at the top of the sales funnel. Both also both create plenty of qualified leads if used right, but they aren’t the same.
Telemarketing is the oldest trick in the bag for many sales teams. It is also known as “cold-calling,” a word with negative connotations, giving it a bad name in the world of business. But there is no denying its effectiveness for reaching your ideal customers.
That’s because telemarketing offers one-on-one interaction making it more personal; it can be a potent strategy if handled by trained professionals. The trouble is that it can also be intrusive, time-consuming, and expensive. For more information on why telemarketing is still important in the digital world, check out our blog post.
On the other hand, email marketing is also a powerful marketing tool, but it lacks the feel of human-to-human interaction. Emails are sent in bulk, so the entire marketing process can be automated, saving time, effort, and money too.
It continues to be an essential tool to drive lead conversions and generate ROI. In fact, Australia leads in open rates with an average of 18.7%, indicating the audience here has a keen interest in email campaigns.
Telemarketing or Email Marketing: The Pros and Cons
Telemarketing and emailing are commonly practiced by companies to pitch their products or services to a potential client. Traditionally, telemarketing has been a permanent fixture in the market for lead generation. But with the advent of digital marketing tools, other marketing methods such as email have gained popularity.
But you should know that neither strategy can guarantee a sure win for your business. To help you choose, we’ve laid down some pros and cons of both the strategies so you can figure out which one is better for your business.
Pros of Telemarketing
Telemarketing can be a useful tool for your business, generating leads, and ultimately increasing your business’s profits. And that’s just the start; consider the following advantages of telemarketing for your organization:
Easy to Reach Customers
One of the most significant advantages of telemarketing is that it offers a foolproof way to connect to prospective customers. It allows you to have personal contact with them and answer any queries or concerns in real-time over a voice call. And isn’t it easier to reach a customer through a phone call instead of selling door to door? They are more likely to listen to you over the phone as long as you use the right sales technique.
That’s how telemarketing helps you bridge that distance and expand your sales territory by reaching a global audience.
Instant Feedback
Another benefit of using telemarketing is that it allows you to immediately decipher the level of interest customers have in your products or services. It enables direct communication, giving the telemarketer tools to generate quick feedback by asking the right questions. This is why many businesses rely on telemarketing tactics to record customer feedback.
This marketing tactic lets you get the job done much faster as compared to email marketing, where it’ll take time to figure out if the emails were effective. The most you would have to go on is open rates and click-through rates for the emails.
Easily Measurable Results
With telemarketing, you can quickly analyse, measure, and create reports on the results garnered; this can help you gauge the campaign’s success.
After that, you can focus on the points of contention or improvement to ensure that your telemarketing strategy continues to be a success.
Increase your Sales and Profits
This strategy is an effective way of finding new customers and following up with the existing ones, giving you the ability to build a credible brand image.
Use telemarketing to remind your customers about new offers and deals, and call up new prospects and entice them to order from you. This tactic can give you a significant advantage over your
Therefore, it can be a significant advantage to use telemarketing for your business and gain more sales ground.
Cons of Telemarketing
Let’s be honest; many customers resent telemarketing for targeting, and for not being timely.
Following are some of the cons associated with telemarketing:
Inexperienced Telemarketing Salesmen
New and untrained salespeople can do more harm than good to your campaigns; they can irritate potential clientele and cause irreparable damage to your business repute.
Usually, organizations that use telemarketing have a few pre-approved scripts for their salesmen to use in different situations. And if sales associates don’t follow the protocol, they can render your campaign ineffective, resulting in lousy customer calls, heated arguments, loss of clients, etc.
Bad Reputation
The main disadvantage of telemarketing is that people think it’s a nuisacnce. This is because many sales teams are guilty of calling prospects at unusual hours, i.e., at dinner time or during busy hours at work. On top of that, telemarketing teams can also be persistent until they get what they want, either a sale or the promise of a follow-up.
As a result, people either ignore or reject these calls outright or put their number on no-call lists to avoid telemarketers. The government of Australia has permitted certain hours for telemarketing, and has also set specific standards to be followed by all businesses.
Costly Training and Customer Lists
Telemarketing can be costly in terms of both process and workforce needed to execute it. It can be expensive to obtain customer lists, and even that contact information might be useless sometimes.
Moreover, training inexperienced salespeople on how to sell your product or service over the phone also requires many resources.
Besides, the more workforce you hire, the more expensive it will be for your business to execute telemarketing, especially if the calls end up being ineffective at lead generation.
Perceived as an Outdated Strategy
Most people believe that in this age of information technology, telemarketing is an outdated marketing technique. Their opinion is that telemarketing is a thing of the past – only useful back when digital marketing was non-existent.
However, the old and dreaded cold-calling strategy is not dead yet. Yes, it can be quite annoying for customers, especially if they are busy, but telemarketing continues to be a leading lead gen tool for many businesses.
Pros of Email Marketing
Email is said to generate $38 for every $1 spent on it, which makes for an astounding ROI of 3,800%. This makes email marketing one of the most effective sales strategies available.
Following are some of the pros for this less-invasive and regulated marketing strategy:
Low Costs
Cost-effectiveness is one of the most obvious advantages of email marketing. You do not have to bear the expenses for print or postage, train a team to do it right, or ever again have to worry about how expensive it is to put your ads on billboard, magazine, or TV – all as long as you do email marketing right.
However, it might be a good idea to invest in email automation software that tracks, sends, and evaluates your email campaigns. There might be a small overhead for sending a large number of emails at the same time. However, these costs are far lower than what you would have to pay for using other marketing channels.
Create Targeted Messages
Email marketing allows you to target people who are already interested in your brand and meet the buyer criteria set by your business. So if you sell sports goods, create an email campaign that targets those who’ve previously shown an interest in sports.
It’s essential to have an email segmentation instead of sending emails the old way – the same one to every subscriber.
Improves Sales
Not only is email marketing an excellent marketing tool, but it can also be an effective method of increasing sales for your business. A study found that 59% of marketers agree that email is their biggest source of ROI. With the right content and copy to power your emails, you can encourage customers to purchase from your business through special offers while also reducing the rate of cart abandonment.
Direct Traffic to your Site
Email marketing lets you can generate traffic, attract the audience, and direct them towards your site.
All you need to do is place a call to action or CTA button at the end of your email and invite readers to click through and land on your website.
Cons of Email Marketing
Now, although email marketing is an effective lead generation strategy, it has its challenges. Following are some of the potential disadvantages of email marketing:
Emails get Marked as Spam
If your target audience is already overwhelmed with marketing emails that continually sell stuff, they may mark your email as spam or junk and might even delete it without opening. Also, if you send emails very frequently, your audience will unsubscribe to your business that will hurt your bottom line.
Therefore, only creating personal, informative, and engaging emails will help you stand out in the crowd.
Limited Space for Creativity
Your business’s marketing strategy will include some new and creative tactics – but email marketing won’t be anywhere near as exhilarating.
It takes deliberate effort and a lot of A/B testing to get email campaigns right, so these might restrict the creativeness of your ad or a campaign. Therefore, to reach your audience, you’ll have to employ other creative tactics than email marketing.
File Size Issues
The files that you send in the emails must be small enough so that your subscribers can download them quickly.
Also, emails containing many images or videos of greater size will take too long to load. This might frustrate your audience, compelling them to ignore your message altogether.
High Competition
Almost every company sends promotional emails every day that pile up in the receiver’s inbox.
That’s the problem with email marketing – everyone’s doing it. So how can you make sure that your emails are even being read?
Which is Better for your Business?
The digital world has completely transformed the way we do business. Not only are we moving online, but we are also moving away from human interaction.
The number of smartphone users worldwide has surpassed three billion, and it is forecasted to grow by several hundred million in the next few years. This has created endless possibilities for businesses to approach their prospects through multiple communication channels. When communicating through the phone, salespeople can work more effectively in drawing out your prospects as well as their queries and concerns. They can also help your customers better understand the benefits of the products or services that you are selling.
Moreover, the human touch will help your prospects to relate to your business positively, and it will create high-quality leads for you. You can only assess your prospects’ needs through direct contact. This will give you an idea of their demand-supply cycle and how they will respond to your sales call. A little personalisation will go a long way.
Therefore, telemarketing is still not ready to exit the marketing world as it is needed everywhere, whether to demonstrate a product or to close a deal.
However, if you are willing to compromise on the humanity of telemarketing, email has plenty to offer your business. It can take you farther – giving you the ability to reach hundreds of potential clients with bulk email. In contrast, it would take days to call each one of them up individually.
So, in the end, it does not matter how you approach your audience as long as you get the desired results. All you need is a positive business image and a problem-solving approach. These points will work as your core-strengths when you are selling to your audience.
It might be wiser to use the two marketing techniques in combination to achieve your communication goals.
Why is email marketing successful?
Email is one of the best channels for maintaining and strengthening customer relationships over time, and can be used for both acquisition of new customers and retention of current customers.
Email marketing campaigns can be designed to increase conversion rates, increase the frequency of purchases, encourage future purchases and win back customers.
What are cart abandonment emails?
The average rate of cart abandonment is 60-80%. An abandoned cart email campaign is a one-off or series of timed messages sent to someone who leaves your website without completing the purchase of the items they have added to their shopping cart. This automated sequence of emails can recover between 5-11% of this otherwise lost revenue.
Do telemarketing and email marketing compliment each other?
Yes. Integrating multiple marketing channels allows a business to get the best return on investment. You can use telemarketing to qualify or more personally share a message.
