Accurate Data For Selling To Schools
As regular readers will know, my wife works in a Secondary School. The down side of this can be the regular discussions about staffroom politics over the dinner table. On the positive side, however, I do get to find out first hand about what is going on in schools. Last night, I was told about a meeting some staff at school had earlier this week with a company that allows schools to contact parents in a simpler, more effective way using email and text messaging services. Nothing new there but one thing of interest was a telephone service they were offering. The first stage was a facility for the software to recognise the telephone number calling school and, if it was a parent, to automatically bring up their child’s details on screen in front of the office staff. This would undoubtedly save the school time and give the office staff the chance to deal with enquiries quicker and more effectively. The second part of the software allowed the recipient of the call to type in who it was from if it was a new or unrecognised number. So, Mrs Jones calls school for the first time (or from a different number) and the school types this name into the software, thereby saving it for future use. The interesting point is that the company was selling this product as a way of blocking unwanted telemarketing calls. If the local supply teaching agency calls school to promote their services, the school can then save their number and decide on future occasions whether to answer their call, block it or simply send it straight to an answer phone service. Whether this will happen in reality is another question. School offices are very busy places and it is unlikely that the staff are going to save every single number. Indeed, even if they do, they may well answer the call as office staff would not know whether a teacher in the Geography Department deals with a specific company or not. I think it does, however, highlight the difficulty of telemarketing to schools and we often get asked whether it is worthwhile. It certainly can be but it is tough. You need good data, a knowledge of the right times to call schools, a plan for finding out the best time to call back (assuming your point of contact is unavailable first time) and a good script. We can certainly help with the data element of any campaign, whether it is telemarketing, email or direct mail. We are always happy to provide advice for any marketing campaign you may undertake too.
Thanks for your time.
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