The recession decreases effectiveness of outbound marketing

Outbound marketing under threat

Due to the recession, people get fired and nobody takes their position.
Thus all contact databases are becoming incorrect.
These are both the contact data bases:
- You have build.
- You buy.

This implies that your outbound actions like:
- Direct mailing campaigns
- Emailing campaigns
- Call center operations
- Cold calling
Will or have already become less efficient as there is nobody to pick up the telephone, to open your envelope or to read your email (if it didn’t bounce already).
Thus the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns becomes even lesser than before.

Drip marketing under threat

Not only outbound marketing actions, but also your newsletters might end up nowhere. Thus even your drip marketing for nurturing your customers could be much less effective due this recession.
People who had opt-in for your newsletters are no longer on the job. And even if someone is receiving your newsletters instead, it is likely he or she will not be interested as they have other occupations on their minds.

The contact data base maintenance challenge

Due to the scale of lay-offs, keeping the contact data bases up-to-date has become an even bigger challenge than ever before. As people leave, there is no notification to you that this event has happened. Why should they as they have no interest for informing you.

Keeping track of changes in companies at the high rate it is currently happening is rather impossible.
You only can keep track by trial and error.
Thus you have to pay attention to the undelivered emails and letters as well as the unanswered telephone calls.
All these fail events need to be registered and the action for updating the contact data base is a must.

Inbound marketing for online lead generation

As the ROI (Return On Investment) of your outbound marketing campaigns and drip marketing has decreased and will keep on decreasing significantly until the decrease in workforce stops, you need to start looking for improving your online lead generation.
Your best alternative is to focus on inbound online lead generation as this creates new contacts, new opportunities and leads.

Inbound lead generation like:
- Registrations for white paper downloads
- Registrations for webinars (web based seminar)
- Identifying website visitors on your website without their involvement (Post-click marketing)

These methods require to change from “Push Marketing” to “Pull Marketing” in which your website plays a more prominent role (if not the most important).

How is the shape of your contact data bases? Bad, worse or you don’t know?