Can Telemarketing Help an E-business?

The simple and short answer is yes and eMarketing can help a telemarketing campaign. Before the internet became as big as it is today and gave everybody more choice and freedom telemarketing was the form of marketing with the greatest return on investment, although most marketing professionals did not like to admit it.

Simply put you could see how many calls it took to close a sale and therefore easily track how successful it was and the return it was bringing you. Unfortunately telemarketing also got a bad rap from pushy sales people tricking people into things they didn’t want and of course conmen ticking little old ladies out of their savings.

In the B2B market they can be used to clean data for email marketing and lead generation, follow up call back requests that come through the website and where people have agreed to follow up marketing or filled out a survey online telemarketers can be used to follow up to close sales that wouldn’t normally happen and make offers a computer program can’t.

Having a telemarketing or call centre hotline for your website will give you greater chance of closing sales that would leave if they do not like purchasing over the internet or are undecided.

We have touched on this before but it is probably due another look. Google the ever present customer focused search engine that it is has decided to roll out an experiment that could change the face of SEO for good. They are giving the user more choice, more decision on the results they want to see.

This could mean massive shifts in Google’s search engine results pages and therefore a lot of hard work from SEO’s over the last few years could all come to nothing and SERPs would be less important.

We have touched in the past on how Google has add the facility, when logged into Google Accounts, for users to remove, promote and make comments about the sites that appear in your search engine results. This hopefully leading to more relevant search engine results for the query or keywords typed in.

Google are now experimenting with search preferences and preferred sites. Again you need to be logged into your Google Account so in the short term this is not going to have a major affect but Google being Google no doubt they are looking for a way of automating this so that people do not have to personally set their preferences but rather based on search history Google may track these preferences. This would mean that search engine results pages would be different for every user making SEO a much harder task.

Should SEO’s be worried? Well this is where SEO’s should think of more than just search engine results. I know that might sound a little daft as that is what SEO is all about but if we think more as an eMarketer then we will find that the search engine results will look after themselves when this shift happens.

Let me explain; it is one thing to get great SEO results but is the website itself of good enough quality to initiate customer satisfaction? Does the page the customer lands on reflect the search made? Do you measure bounce rate? Is your content sticky? Some SEO’s will say “this is not my concern that’s the concern of the marketing manager or the website designer”.  Well now it’s time to make it your concern because if your website is one that does not get on the preferred list of users you could find all your SEO work is wasted.

So make it your business. Use analytics now to track how people move around your site and what your bounce rate is and where possible fix the problems that are occurring. Do a full analysis of your site as it stands today. Take your time and track what is and isn’t working and make a case to management (if your situation requires it) for improvements. This will mean that when a shift happens you are less likely to fall behind if your customers have you as their preferred or most visit site for the query type in. It will also make you more valuable to the company in the long run.