Like Singapore fashion where baggy fisherman pants aren’t a great look, but classic casual shirts, denim, and flip flops are still the way to go practically stylish, telemarketing has remained at its comfy personalized fashion.
The Internet has provided businesses with more opportunities to attract customers and grow their profits, but this is not easy work. Persuasion becomes more intricate as consumers are filled with many options and no longer attracted to offers without intrinsic benefits. Now, consumers value products and services tailored to their lifestyles and preferences.
Many brands have seen the importance of delivering information about their products and services to accelerate their business, but choosing the most helpful form of marketing and the right marketing channel can be tricky. For businesses to lead their consumers into their offers, they need to establish stronger connections with their potential and existing customers to serve a better experience through digital technology plus personalized interaction.
But, first things first: What is telemarketing?
Telemarketing is the selling of products or services by telephone calls, direct contact, or in-person meetings that include cold calling, direct selling, over the phone, or via email. The marketing agency outsourced by businesses will reach and engage with the prospects to introduce the brand, qualify them, and book meetings through sales appointment settings, call-to-invite, and phone surveys.
It is not as simple as calling the customers out of the blue. Rather, it’s more than selling as there is the process from lead gen prospecting to conversion. This ensures that whoever the telemarketer calls has an interest in buying the offer.
Telemarketing in Singapore and APAC
Modern telemarketing is game-changing for marketing and advertising companies. For instance, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence technology paved the way to ease the language barriers between countries, especially in the Asia Pacific region. Some advantages of AI are refined user segmentation, sales forecasting, and ad optimization.
Singaporeans are quite known for outsourcing marketing companies for lead gen services due to their high level of knowledge and understanding of the city’s economic growth.
Business 2 Community
They believe telemarketing can help their businesses achieve new business opportunities, leading to financial success. Several companies in Singapore have also acknowledged the importance of humanized interaction in business outreach.
Hence, understanding the right prospects and delivering the appropriate promotions keeps the business ahead of the competition. With that, let’s discuss in the next section the key points why telemarketing should still be used in enhancing the region’s marketing and lead generation efforts.
Telemarketing in the Digital Stitch
About 4.96 million Internet users in Singapore actively use social media platforms for gathering information, entertainment, and communication. The strong online presence of consumers gave telemarketing companies endless opportunities from gathering more information about the target market to reaching them online.
AI-driven lead generation is suitable and convenient for the digital lifestyle today, given the region’s mobile-first population and youthful demography. The old ways of telemarketing won’t be effective anymore – companies should integrate advanced telemarketing into their strategies to thrive in the digitally-driven region.
The telemarketing industry acknowledges the fact that the use of apps possesses the potential for high productivity.
Brands lean on the tech power of apps that help them retain customers and get new ones such as Salesforce, Nimble, and Zendesk.
Grasshopper.com
These tools allow businesses to manage all aspects of customer relationships by means of email, live web chats, social media, and all other customer-centric activities. Not only does the digital space provide an avenue to generate more sales and achieve target sales in the short term, but it also enhances the engagement of potential customers. However, the use of these technological advancements may become impersonal at some point and still require a human touch.
Through telemarketing, consumers can receive more important information, relevant and timely to their needs. The best telemarketing campaigns are run following the ABC (Account-based marketing) process to lead the prospects in every step of the funnel (Identity, Expand, Engage, and Convert) until they gain loyalty from the clients. It may seem old-fashioned, but the human connection it brings is something the technology cannot replace in elevating the consumer journey.
It’s given that today’s customer acquisition strategy starts with engaging target prospects using customer relationship tools before exercising any face-to-face presentation. However, B2B sales deals only happen, most of the time, after in-person meetings, which means that human interaction still plays a major role in building stronger connections with customers above any tech app.
Telemarketing is Data Woven
Data is a prime component of telemarketing, but clean data boosts successful campaigns. However, data ages quickly due to job or post a change, relocation, business close down, and rebranding, to name a few.
That is why it needs to be regularly profiled (cleansed, validated, deduped) in order to yield the best results from your telemarketing campaign. Telemarketing regularly tracks the data and ensures that the database is accurate and up-to-date.
Company strategies for improving sales performance are often formulated based on the implications of the consumer insights uncovered from large data sets gathered through telemarketing.
There is much demand and spending on data and analytics in APAC.
In fact, Singapore, China, India, Thailand, Japan, and Australia were the six APAC countries surveyed to be consistently increasing the use of digital apps.
Econsultancy
For example, 53% of APAC consumers are more likely to use an app to hire a transport service like Grab, including 64% of users in Singapore. On the contrary, nearly half of APAC consumers (44%) took actions to reduce sharing data online and 75% are willing to withdraw their support to businesses that have misused their data, despite superior offers. Meanwhile,
3 in 5 marketers and sales professionals in Singapore have invested in generative AI tools and plan to continue investing as they find AI-driven lead generation efficient in reducing their time for market research and data analysis.
HubSpot
However, relying solely on generative AI support also carries some risks. Therefore, it is used conveniently to let marketers and sales reps focus on more important tasks, without desensitizing the consumers.
In today’s digital age where data is an asset, an accurate, relevant, and timely database is a valuable sales-generating advantage that helps businesses make informed decisions and gain good economic results. The paradox is an added challenge for telemarketing providers, but it’s not something that could hinder them from running an effective, data-driven telemarketing campaign.
Telemarketing’s Empowered Customer Experience Patchwork
When we talk about customer experience in today’s telemarketing, your manner of communicating via phone – tone, choice of words, and rapport building, may still impress. But technology advancements like social media and real-time interaction swayed the course to engaging customers in digital ways – what apps they use, which social platform they hang out and their purchase behaviors. Such interactions are less invasive and more convenient for customers.
With empowered customer engagement, telemarketing goals shifted. Brands can now integrate a friendly approach through warm calling to build a more personalized customer experience with their existing customers in addition to cold calling that attracts prospects who are unaware of the brand. Making a sale now only comes second to creating trust with a prospect and building relationships.
Today, customer experience is the main reason why companies invest in AI technology, followed by cost reduction.
Statistics showed that half of brands say they are planning to increase customer experience-related technology spending next year.
Adobe
20 tools under four categories were pronounced to enhance customer experience:
- Sensing which comprises Sensory, Biometric, and Sensor.
- Deciding involves Episode Maps and Analytics, Experience Dashboards, AI, Predictive Analytics, and Automated Decision Engines.
- Acting which is composed of Personalized Experience, One-to-one Sales and Marketing, Salesforce Automation, Omnichannel Customer Support, Next Generation Contact Centers, Augmented Reality and Delivery Drones.
- Managing includes Net Promoter System, Episode Design, Episode Management, Privacy Management, and Blockchain.
Customers may prefer to talk to someone about the issue to get solved right away. They are looking for personalized approaches that are perfectly tailored to their problems, unlike templated marketing and sales solutions. Increasing customer engagement builds rapport, trust, and loyalty while expanding brand awareness and sentiments.
Telemarketing Provides A Runway for Immediate Feedback
Customer feedback is the groundwork of customer loyalty. Without it, you will never know what drives customer satisfaction, what actions to take for product and service improvement, how to create a top customer experience, improve customer retention, and come up with wise business decisions.
Every customer has their own takeaway from different brands. Hence, their feedback, positive or negative, is necessary and significant in enhancing the support process. Real-time feedback helps you to adapt immediately and provide timely responses, boosting the chances of converting them into customers.
To be able to act on the data you have gathered, get the most accurate feedback from the right target, and follow up. The collected data will then help you come up with holistic, deeper insights that will serve as the backbone of your future lead-generation campaigns that will strengthen customer service.
Despite the evolution of sophisticated tools that telemarketing adopted, Singapore and the whole APAC region cling to its classic ensemble of tools and strategies and winning customer-centric approach.
Check out our Latest Blog: Customer-Centricity: At the Core of Successful B2B Marketing
To wrap it up…
Telemarketing’s potential for customer-centric experience strengthened with technological advancements, allows it to remain effective despite the more sophisticated tools at present. However, effective telemarketing can only be harnessed with the right strategies, expertise, and people. Partnering with telemarketing services providers serves as one option for your company to create customer-centric experiences for your prospects and nurture them to be clients, one such provider is Callbox.
As a premier B2B lead generation service provider in Singapore and across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region since 2004, Callbox has been instrumental in driving business growth for numerous companies. Leveraging our expertise in telemarketing and appointment setting services, backed by a powerful multi-touch, multi-channel strategy and AI-powered tools, we are well-equipped to assist your business in reaching, acquiring, and effectively following up with your target prospects, converting them into valuable clients.
Elevate your business growth by securing quality leads and appointments through our effective telemarketing solutions.
Partner with us today and experience the transformative impact of our services! Contact us now to get started!
