Chicken or Egg?
Telemarketers usually use databases to enhance the quality of their calls by projecting likelihood of response among a given file, or customizing offers. In a twist on this, the western Pennsylvania division of the Salvation Army used a telemarketing reactivation campaign to enhance its database of contributors.
The contact campaigns allow the Pittsburgh-based division to clean up its database and make status updates, according to the local director of development Robert Molinari. Sometimes one or more members of the household have retired, curtailing its ability to make pledges. When a communicator (the coordinating agency’s preferred term for its reps) gleans this information, it is entered into the database and future requests are adjusted accordingly. If a contact mentions specific hardships communicators will offer to pray with the contact, or make a recommendation to the nearest Salvation Army location, and put into a “do not promote” file.
Recaptured donors
One of the western division’s reactivation campaigns was based off a prospecting program it undertook in late 1996. After the initial contact, roughly 14,000 donors were not contacted until the file was rediscovered. A telephone-based recapture effort in July 1998 brought back somewhere between 11% and 14% of them, netting around $20,000 at the time.
But Molinari points out that once a donor is recovered, they are much more likely to make future contributions. “They will give us another gift that costs us between three hundred and four hundred dollars per thousand dollars raised [in follow-up direct mail efforts],” he says.
While it may cut into the pay-up rate, the Salvation Army does not take credit card pledges over the telephone. “If a caller says they do, they are not from the Salvation Army,” says Molinari firmly.
Instead, InfoCision Management Corp., the Akron, OH-based firm that handles the western Pennsylvania division’s telemarketing needs, puts a first-class follow-up letter in the mail within 24 hours. Donors who are interested in specific programs are sent follow-up letters that highlight the programs. Occasionally, a handwritten note is attached to the pledge card, a tactic Molinari first used when he was in a similar position with the Salvation Army’s Syracuse, NY, division. There, it led to an eight percentage point lift over non-inscribed letters, and Molinari is looking forward to tracking its effectiveness in upcoming campaigns.
The reactivated donors were recently targeted by mail for additional contributions, but the effort pulled in only between a 4% and 8% response rate. “Which tells us that they are telemarketing donors, not mail donors,” says Molinari. In the spring of 2000, he is planning another telemarketing campaign to the file, which he anticipates will bring in between 15% to 20%.
Consistent channels
Research done by InfoCision seems to bear this out: The company found that more than 50% of individuals acquired by telephone will, if followed up with both mail and phone efforts, give additional donations only by phone in follow-up efforts during the next two years. Just fewer than 3% will give only by mail, with the rest spurred to donations by both telemarketing and direct mail efforts. Conversely, only 25% of those who gave after being brought in through direct mail gave exclusively when recontacted through the telephone, while another 30% gave only via direct mail.
In both cases, individuals who gave through both methods were found to have contributed twice as much as those who preferred only one channel exclusively.
Distinct audiences
InfoCision got a further surprise when it sent the response data back to Donnelley Marketing for overlay analysis: The average age of the direct mail donors was 60, while those who gave after being solicited by telephone was 54.
“That confirmed that the telephone is not competing with direct mail – we were reaching a different audience,” says InfoCision’s senior vice president of marketing Nick Stavarz.
