List Tutorials
Welcome to the Selectabase list tutorials. In this guide, we’ll show you how to get the most out of your campaigns.
Call your prospects now
The sooner you contact them the sooner you will make sales.
Your list is new and these prospects are hot, the sooner you contact them the sooner you will make sales. Remember, you snooze you lose!
Once you have downloaded your list save it with a clear file name, for example “New B2B 2017”. This will save time later when you come to follow up your initial contact with a telephone call.
When does your list become out of date?
Lists do degrade over time; people move, numbers change etc. You should use the list as soon as you receive it, that way you will maximise your opportunities.
What software application should I save my data in?
The most popular applications that people use are Microsoft Office products, Word, Excel or Access. There are other products out there but these are the most popular and widely used.
Will it take a long time to download my list?
No, it will be quite fast. These are data files rather than pictures so the overall file size is quite small.
Writing great sales letters is a skill, we help you prepare great sales letters either with the tutorial or the standard templates.
Don’t leave it to chance, use our powerful templates and tutorials that help you write letters that sell.
Pay attention to the layout and presentation.
Cheap paper looks cheap. Poorly selected “Clip Art” dotted around to fill white space does not look good and DON’T use brown envelopes, they look like bills. Invest a few extra pence in better quality paper, don’t go mad, you generally don’t need watermarked parchment, but a quality 100gsm white paper looks good.
If you printer cartridge is low change it!
Squeezing another 50 feint copies out of that tired old cartridge might save a few pence but to the recipient it will look like you can’t be bothered. Penny pinching here will not pay dividends.
If you have a small list why not hand address the envelopes?
A hand addressed envelope with a stamp will almost always get opened, it does not look like a bill or direct mail. Make sure you handwriting is neat and clear, if it is not get someone else to address the letters. If you want to be really clever take a day trip to France and post from there, who can resist a hand addressed letter with a foreign stamp?
Once the letters have gone out, you will need a way of tracking responses that come back. It may be that you are using other methods of marketing and you should accurately track how many responses you received specifically from your mailing campaign.
Did you mail your prospects soon after receiving them? Were the responses followed up? How many sales were achieved? Was the reply method effective? Was the offer right for this target audience?
If your response was not as good as you wanted, look at everything again, go back to step 1 of our tutorial, tweak a few things, small changes can make a huge difference. If you forgot before remember the P.S. is the second most read part of the direct mail letter after the heading, it is where you want to hammer home your message – make it work for you.
Once the letters have gone out, you will need a way of tracking responses that come back. It may be that you are using other methods of marketing and you should accurately track how many responses you received specifically from your mailing campaign.
Why follow up with a telephone call?
Normal direct mail generally gets a response rate of around 2% depending upon the skill of the marketer, the data and the product or service being offered. Following up with a telephone call can boost response rate to 10%. That’s 8% more response to each mailing, responses mean sales, sales mean money, how much do you want it?
Why use a script?
There are good scripts and bad scripts. We have all had calls from a sales person reading like a parrot from a prepared script, that is a bad script.
A good script uses a flow chart to keep the sales call moving along the right direction and provides a prompt to overcome objectives that prospects may raise.
I don’t like making telemarketing calls.
Often, after a mailing, your prospect wants or expects you to call, they are disappointed when you don’t. They want what you are offering they just need a little shove to buy.
Many people break the task down into chunks, if you have 100 prospects to follow up a whole day cold calling is going to be hard work, break it into smaller chunks and do 25 at a time, share it out amongst other people or even contract it out to a telemarketing company.