Businesses often fail to intercept the best method to reach potential customers.
Some took telemarketing, where email marketing was more suitable. And some take social selling where telemarketing would be a suitable option.
The truth is, the suitable method depends on your business type, industry, affordability and how fast you need to respond to your potential customers’ queries.
This blog will walk you through telemarketing, email marketing and social selling in detail. And after that answer a critical question, which one works well for B2B settings?
What is Telemarketing and Why Does It Still Work?
Telemarketing is relatively old but still a relevant marketing approach. It means contacting people over the phone to promote products and services.
Often people mistake telemarketing, telesales and call centers as the same thing. But their functions are significantly different. Tele-marketing can be from an in-house operation, offshore outsourcing, or in some cases from a call center.
But in all cases, an agent stays behind on these calls, targeting potential customers. Recently, AI-based automatic calling agents have been introduced in the industry. But they are still under development phase.
Normally, the calling agent calls and explains offerings of a business. But telemarketing services vary from business to business in their requirements.
Telemarketing can be categorized into two segments: inbound and outbound telemarketing.
Inbound Telemarketing
Inbound telemarketing occurs when a prospect calls to purchase or to get more information. This telemarketing method is complex and expensive to accomplish. A wide business funnel is used to get these calls from customers.
Let’s think of a scenario, upon browsing you saw a video content of a magnet sticky-note. It caught your eye, and you thought it would be a perfect tool for your task management. To know more details like pricing, shipping time and warranty you call the service line.
After getting all the details, you loved it and decided make a purchase. This whole process from watching the content to buying it is an example of inbound telemarketing.
Stages of inbound telemarketing:
- Strategy: The process starts with a strategy development and plan to select promotional channels. Common channels used in this process are, billboard, TV commercials, news commercials, word-of-mouth promotion, social media contents or SEO friendly contents.
- Attract: An attractive promotional campaign will draw customers’ attention. It will influence them to contact the agent and create an action.
- Conversion: After getting the call, it’s totally on the agent’s skills that drives a mere interest into a deal closure. This process is called conversion.
- Closure: If the prospect becomes an actual customer then it’s the deal-closure stage where the agent thanks the customer and closes the deal.
- Follow-up: This is a proactive measure that enables a business to stay in touch with the customers and gain a long term relation. It is important because follow-ups brings new sales too.
Outbound Telemarketing
Outbound telemarketing is the process where businesses make the calls to potential customers. This process requires skilled agents to convey the brand’s message in a soothing manner.
An outbound agent dials potential or existing customers to observe their view on their products and services. Outbound marketing is suitable for B2B settings. When your customers are different businesses, you have to remain precise on timing, offering and pricing.
The conversion process of B2B is far more complex than B2C. Before closing a deal in B2B, there are different stages that have to be accomplished.
The stages to convert a prospect into customer in B2B are:
- Collecting contacts of prospects
- Setting-up appointments or meeting
- Maintain a healthy communication to observe requirements
- Deliver a well prepared pitch targeting their specific needs, budget limits and time frame
- Convey offerings into closure of the deal.
Managing all these critical stages needs constant real time communication. This real time communication can be difficult to maintain through just email-marketing and not even possible through social-selling.
Besides promotion and selling, all these types of telemarketing help generate leads. By telemarketing an agent can talk with prospects more deeply. It enables a way for broader communication.
This broader communication helps to observe people’s views. Which is important for lead qualification. Especially for B2B lead generation and lead qualification telemarketing is the most suitable method.
Telemarketing also helps to survey and research market situations with its broader communication proximity. This insight gives business data for strategy development, makes necessary changes in products and services and promotions targeting customers requirements.
Eventually all the different types of telemarketing have some common key points:
- It can communicate directly to prospects
- Can get an immediate response from the customer
- Works well for complex or high-value products
- Can provide customer feedback, essential insights for strategy development
- Generate awareness of the brand’s existence fast in rapid environment
What is Email Marketing?
Similar to telemarketing, email-marketing contacts people to promote products and services. But here, e-mails are used to contact prospects rather than phone calls.
Though email and telemarketing are from different eras, they saw a wide adoption during the early 80s.
E-mail marketing works well for B2C. A combination of email and telemarketing can even provide a better result.
How Does E-mail Marketing Work?
It may have sounded easy when we explained that e-mail marketing means contacting prospects via email. But the scenes behind maintaining an email marketing operation are far more difficult.
There are different ways to maintain an email marketing operation. It depends on
- How you’re generating your email-leads
- Who are you offering to
- What are your products and services
Email-marketing Process Consists of These Actions
Finding contacts
Diverse methods are used to get email contacts of different prospects. Some common methods are:
- Manually generating the leads from social media
- Your business’s website traffic data
- Subscription data
- From a third party
- By running a campaign
Segmenting customers
The benefit of e-mail marketing is that you can deliver a common message to a customer segment. Which saves precious time and resources.
You also can also send scheduled and individual mails. These help effectively on special occasion targeting. For example, wishing a customer on his anniversary or birthday.
Delivering offers
Similar to tele-marketing, here agents avoid direct selling approaches. Rather, e-mail marketing tries to emerge as an assistant, build trust and a long-term relationship with you.
In email-marketing, timing is important. Perfectly timed pitches get higher conversion rates. But that requires constant communication as well.
Following legal requirements
Scam rate via email has seen a dramatic rise since the early 2000s. Thus, the US Federal Trade Commission has introduced the CAN-SPAM Act to protect everyone from fraud.
But this also comes with difficulties. It makes sending targeted emails for a segment more complicated.
Common Uses of Email Marketing
Even though it’s complicated, some businesses still use this for convenience, low pricing and for its automation. Business use email marketing for:
- Nurturing and qualifying leads
- Product promotions
- Market penetration
- Customer outreach
- Customer relationship management
- Sending newsletters
- Customer onboarding management
What is Social Selling and How is It Shaping Business?
Social selling refers to maintaining a direct communication with leads via social media. It’s a totally new approach but becoming more and more popular over time.
From the late 2000s, social media started to boom all over the world. In the beginning people were using these sites just for friendly chatting and uploading their thoughts.
But now even professionals use social media like LinkedIn to share their work, achievements and experiences.
Thus, social media got a wider reach now and is directly connected to people. Some businesses started to use this as an opportunity to market their products and services. And this is how the social selling concept got this far.
But people often think that social media marketing and social selling are the same thing. But in reality social selling is a niche of social media marketing.
How Does Social Selling Work?
Social selling works almost similarly like telemarketing and e-mail marketing but using social media as the channel.
First, the lead team collects a prospect list. Then the outreach team communicates with the prospects via social media and qualifies them with their potentiality.
Then the sales team either gets to make a conversion or sometimes the prospect needs a long-term nourishment.
There are 4 key aspects needed to have an efficient social selling operation:
- Build brands identity
For a successful social selling operation, a good brand image is needed. This is for both businesses that have entire operations in social media or use it as a channel for sales.
When a sales agent reaches out to prospects, the first thing they notice is the brand’s value. A reputed brand always gets benefits in these scenarios.
People tend to trust bigger brands as well. Even though their reputation remains slightly less than a smaller brand. That’s why having a good brand image is needed.
- Generating accurate leads
Even good brand value won’t work if the potential customer list is inaccurate. Contacting prospects who have no chance to take an action is a waste of resources.
For this, a clear market segmentation is needed before generating leads. This helps to increase prospect’s accuracy rate.
- Gathering customer insight
Before outreach, a good understanding of market trends is crucial.
For example, baggy pants are currently trendy in the market. A retail shop completely ignored the trend and began outreach for skinny pants.
Now, this going against the trend significantly reduces the chance of getting desired sales number.
- Building a long-term relationship
Lastly, maintaining a long-term relationship is needed to get a better sales outcome.
In an industry where competition is intense, a good reputation and long-term relationship with customers make all the difference.
Besides that, when a business has a long term relation with its consumer base, it generally gets more word-of-mouth promotion.
Social-selling can be categorized into two groups; inbound social selling and outbound social selling.
Inbound Social Selling
A customer watched a content of a product on Facebook, he likes it, and wants to know more. So he give a call to the business’s official page. Learnt more about it and got convinced to buy it.
This whole scenario is an example of inbound social selling.
Inbound social selling is similar to inbound telemarketing. But here, more precise and targeted marketing can be possible.
For example, Meta offers a wide range of services for businesses to generate leads and show ads. They collect user data consistently.
These data helped them to learn about a customer’s interests, buying patterns and situation. Later, these are used to show precise ads only to people who are or might be interested.
Ads are not the only channel to get inbound sales. Influencer marketing, latent marketing or sometimes sponsored videos also help to get a viewer response.
But the crucial aspect of social selling is how the agent is handling the interaction. If the interaction is occurring through phone calls, then the agent can observe the caller’s tone, gesture and deliver a response according to that.
But if it’s in a text format, then the agents have to be cautious with their interactions. Especially with professional sites like Linkedin where users are keen about what they want.
Outbound Social Selling
In outbound social selling, agents directly contact customers via social media. It’s an outreach practice that is becoming more popular by time.
There is a unique benefit of outbound social selling. An agent can go to a prospect’s profile, observe their life thoroughly and present a pitch that may hit them emotionally.
Comparison of Telemarketing vs Email Marketing vs Social Selling
The previous discussion was a detailed walkthrough of telemarketing, email marketing and social selling.
Now this comparison table will help you to understand key differences among them. You will be able to get an idea of which one might be better for your business.
| Characteristics | Telemarketing | Email Marketing | Social Selling |
| Main channel for contact | Phone calls | Emails | Social media |
| Communication style | Direct conversation | One-way message | Two-way interaction |
| Time takes to deliver | It can deliver a message fast | It takes a moderate time | The process sometimes take much longer time to accomplish |
| Personal touch | High | Medium to low | High |
| Cost | Telemarketing’s costs are higher among these three. | The cost level here is low | Depending on the interaction, cost levels vary from medium to high. |
| Ability to serve | Quick qualification | Mass outreach | Trust building |
| Best for | B2B | B2C | B2C |
Which Method Works Best for B2B?
So after all these discussions, one key question arises.
Which one works better for B2B?
Well, the answer is telemarketing.
Let me explain, both e-mail and social selling possess different good characteristics. But they take way more time than telemarketing.
In B2B, time plays a crucial role. Delivering a pitch on time increases the chances of getting an action. Besides that, selling takes time because it has different stages involved.
First meeting setup, then pitch delivery, after that further communication is needed regarding queries. After all these, if the buyer felt convinced with everything, then a sales action happens.
Yet, all these stages need a fast and accurate response. And that is only possible in telemarketing.
Conclusion
Choosing one from telemarketing, email marketing and social selling depends on how fast and deep your business needs to engage prospects. Every method has its own better qualities.
Email is convenient, inexpensive and professional. But it takes time to see action.
Social selling is new, loved by younger audiences. But it lacks professionalism.
Lastly, telemarketing is fast and can deliver direct communication, which is essential for B2B. But it can be a bit expensive too.
FAQs
Is Telemarketing Still Effective?
Of course! Telemarketing can bring your business a fortune. If you have accurate leads and trained calling agents then it’s a great option for you.
Is Social Selling Better Than Cold Calling?
Social selling is better for trust building. And cold calling brings fast responses. So rather alone, together they can bring you a better result.
Is Email Marketing Better for Lead Generation?
Email marketing works for nurturing leads. It works best when contacts are interested. Cold email may need personalization to succeed.
Can You Combine All Three Methods?
Yes! Many businesses use social selling for creating awareness, email for lead nurturing, and calls or telemarketing for closing.
