As you know, over the years the charity lottery landscape has changed drastically. It’s become harder and harder for charities to raise funds. We have more charities than ever and less money to go around.

A lot of charities are using lotteries and raffles as a key strategy to raise funds, which has increased the competition to sell tickets.

Marketing has changed drastically too. Traditionally, the methods used are direct mail and telemarketing, but now we have digital marketing as well. This is a huge and ever-expanding area, including websites, email, social media, web search and so on.

Results are what count, though. To get the results we believe that telemarketing needs to form a vital part of your fundraising strategy. Here are the top three reasons why telemarketing should be part of your lottery and raffle marketing strategy:

1 – Telemarketing still gets great results

Telemarketing has a fantastic response rate, with strong ticket sales and a good ROI. It might require a higher investment than a digital or direct mail campaign, but generally the results are better and more predictable.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that telemarketing is a lot harder to ignore!

• We are inundated with emails so they’re easy to miss,
• we often glance over a digital ad, and
• we usually ignore the mail we receive.

Your supporters, especially those who prefer the ease and convenience of buying on the phone, are far more likely to answer their phone.

Would you get out of the shower to get the mail? No, but you might do to answer your ringing telephone.

Also, telemarketing has another huge advantage: the human connection. A good telemarketer with experience in the charity sector will be able to build a relationship with your supporters, promote your cause and sell tickets there and then.

Direct mail and email marketing are important, and direct mail is enjoying a comeback, but it’s a lot easier to ignore; even with good intentions people put it down and forget to take action.

When you have someone on the phone you can guide them through the process of buying tickets, while deepening the relationship.

The telephone can work in conjunction with direct mail and email to enhance those channels and improve results.

And remember, with telemarketing you have full control of your campaign in real time. You can monitor your income per hour and as soon as it drops below the level you’re happy with, then you can stop and evaluate.

2 – It can blend in and support your other strategies

The best marketing strategy for your lottery or raffle is an integrated one with multiple communication channels.

There are so many distractions in today’s digital world that to make an impact on your audience, you need a multi-pronged approach. You need direct mail, emails, social media, a website and search engine marketing.

Telemarketing has the flexibility to fit around these marketing strategies to support them and improve results.

The challenge with the other strategies is that, generally the percentage that take action won’t be enough to support the campaign’s revenue targets. Telemarketing, on the  otherhand, can help achieve those revenue targets.

Telemarketing is a way of going deeper into your database to get a better result from your supporters.

Digital marketing might be great for generating new supporters with marketing online and on social media, and email marketing might be a cost-effective way of targeting some lists.

But to make sure you maximise your sales from all your different list segments (short of knocking on their door!), telemarketing is a very effective way of targeting them.

Telemarketing is also a great way of following up a direct mail or email campaign. We all know one of the most important ways of increasing ticket sales is by following up.

Supporters might not:

• see your email or direct mail, or
• they might forget to take action.

Telemarketing is a way of personally following up and guiding them through the process so they can purchase their tickets.

3 – It gives you a chance to update and clean your database

A clean and well-targeted database is crucial for keeping your marketing strategy streamlined, improving communications, nurturing your supporter relationships across time and being successful.

Failing to maintain your supporter database, on the other hand, can actually:

• cost your charity valuable time;
• cost your charity money; and,
• ultimately, cost your charity supporters.

Keeping your database in check can help you to reactivate old supporters and lapsed supporters. It could even, for example, identify someone who’d like to leave a gift in their will to your charity.

Life gets busy and many ex-supporters may have just forgotten to keep coming back. A friendly call can be that nudge they need to begin giving again.

Updating your database of supporters can be a big task, especially if it’s let go for too long. That’s why keeping it maintained on a regular basis is the most efficient way to work.

As your telemarketers are talking to your supporters each day, they can check and update their details to make sure they have the;

• best number,
• the right email address, and
• the right postal address.

They can then keep the database clean on a daily basis, helping the charity with its most important assets, its supporters.

Next Step

I hope you found this information useful in helping you understand why telemarketing should be part of your marketing strategy for your lottery or raffle.

Your next step should be to look into selecting the right telemarketing company for your charity.

To help you, we’ve developed a useful guide called ‘The 6 Things to Consider When Selecting a Telemarketing Company for Your Charity’ Click here to download your copy.

Book Your Test Campaign

If you’re considering telemarketing, then the best way to find out if we’re the right fit for you is by booking one of our complimentary test campaigns. We’d like to donate 10-hours of telemarketing to your charity so you can test us out.

Click here or call 07 5588 2888 now to book your test campaign or to talk with one of our team about your campaign.

Every campaign is only as good as its metrics; therefore a good company will clearly define understandable metrics before your new campaign is launched. Stats can be misleading and you need to understand exactly how the identified metrics are contributing to your NFP.

First up, make sure you identify the key results and message that you need to achieve to know if the campaign is successful. Often this can be as simple as sales or donations per hour.

Next, think about any supporting stats you’d like to receive about your campaign that measure activities that drive your desired results. This could be things like calls per hour and the number of no answers or in a myriad of metrics. Be careful here, though. This is where you can start to slip into overanalyzing numbers if you’re not careful.

Lastly, establish your reporting requirements and agree on the timing of the reports.

Make sure that the company doesn’t plan to bombard you with analysis so that it becomes too hard to understand and decipher. This is not helpful for you or them.

Reach out to a Thomas Direct team member today to discuss the right direction for your NFP and book your complimentary 10 hour telemarketing campaign.

Do you want a thriving NFP database and positive supporter relationship? To build this positive connection, it is important to make sure you’re working with a quality telemarketer. The below questions are designed to help you identify a healthy and successful telemarketing company.

A sign of a good company is happy employees. It means they feel the company cares for them and they are representing something that they are proud of. This leads to retention of quality employees and, even more importantly, a telemarketing company that is doing well. In turn, this leads to a better outcome for you and better representation of your brand.

Here are some questions to ask your prospective telemarketing company:

• What kind of training do your employees get and how often?
• Do employees only get initial training, or do they get continuing education to improve their job performance?
• What is your corporate culture like? What is the company’s vision and how do you implement it?
• What is your staff retention rate? Remeber culture eats strategy from breakfast
• Are you based in Australia and are all calls made from Australia? (Check that ALL calls are made from Australia and not just some of them.)
• What is your incentive structure and how are staff rewarded?

Remember: A telemarketing company with a strong, steady team is going to produce better results for you.

Quality is fimportant. Ensure that your callers are Australian and that the calls are actually coming from Australia. This will go a long way in helping you achieve your desired results. We want to make sure you’re building a healthy rapport with your database and connecting them with those of a similar demographic in the same country will be invaluable support.

Get in touch with a Thomas Direct team member today to discuss the right direction for your NFP and book your complimentary 10 hour telemarketing campaign.

Do you want to see the best possible results for your telefundraising lottery campaign?

Often, when you talk to a telemarketing company they’ll throw numbers at you about the results you can expect from your campaign. You need to be careful here and take those numbers with a pinch of salt.

The challenge you have is that it’s almost impossible to predict results on a campaign before starting. Of course, there are industry standards which can act as a guide, but watch out for numbers that sound too good to be true. Every campaign is different, every segment of data is different and every script is different. There are lots of variables that have to be taken into consideration.

The only way to get any idea is to run a small test campaign with a well-briefed telemarketing team. In our experience, the test needs to be run for at least 20 hours. You also need to take into consideration what segment of data we put through the test.

Data segmentation is the process of taking your data and segmenting it so that you can use it more effectively within marketing. Segmentation of your data is vital to the success of your campaign. Segmentation basically means putting your database into similar groups. Some examples of segments could include:

• people who purchased lottery tickets by phone
• people who purchased lottery tickets by email
• people who haven’t donated for two years
• people who have never donated, and so much more

As you can imagine, some segments will perform much better than others. But by segmenting your data you can adjust the strategy for each campaign and prepare the team accordingly, as well as adjust your expected results and monitor against that target.

When testing your campaign to see potential results, it’s important that you think carefully about which segment to test first. (Please let us know if you’d like help in planning how to segment your data.)

The other thing to note about the numbers is to be careful not to overanalyze. The numbers are important – really important! But we need to be careful and get the balance right on how far we go with analysing the numbers.

As the saying goes, “analysis paralysis”. Everything is a metric, everything is a stat, and the collection and proper interpretation of those stats are paramount.

We just need to be careful too, as numbers can be twisted to look better or mean things that they were not intended to mean.
The key things you need to remember and think carefully about are as follows:

• Don’t just believe all the numbers that get thrown at you straight away.
• Recognise that every charity is different.
• Recognise that even every segment of data is different.
• The best way to find out if the numbers are true is to run a small test to determine performance. This may mean running a small trial campaign to test the validity of the numbers being presented to you.

Reach out to a Thomas Direct team member today to discuss the right direction for your NFP and book your complimentary 10 hour telemarketing campaign.

Do you want the best return for your investment?

At the end of the day, your telemarketing campaign needs to provide a good return on investment. You need to make sure it raises the funds you need over and above your costs.

Getting the right pricing structure in place that is fair to all parties is vital to the success of your campaigns. It’s important that you pay for what your telefundraiser partner does and not what they say they can do. Always ask for a price which includes all fees and costs.

Establish upfront that there won’t be any extra costs like meetings, phone call costs, postage, stationery and printing added on later. Cost-per-call or cost-per-minute contracts can encourage the telemarketers to simply dial as many people as they can without taking the time to listen and engage with your supporters.

The key things you need to remember and think carefully about are as follows:

• Getting the right pricing structure is vital to the success of the campaign.
• What and how you’re paying for the service is critical for both a return on your investment and to keep the team working on the campaign appropriately motivated.
• Be aware of commission structures that encourage people to “stretch the truth” to get the sale or donation.
• Make sure you are working directly with the key people.
• Check you don’t have any penalty clauses in your contract that makes you pay when the telemarketing campaign hasn’t performed to expectation and you need to cancel the campaign early.
• Always have a written agreement in place.

Get in touch with a Thomas Direct team member today to discuss the right direction for your NFP and book your complimentary 10 hour telemarketing campaign.