Yesterday I shared an hour with Jean from Auckland... and we were discussing how our area of speciality had changed... we both are teachers of Sales Techniques and were lamenting how Cold Calling had continued its decline as a method to build sales.
It prompted me to contemplate my journey in marketing over 40 plus years...
In the 1970's we used long copy sales letters delivered one at a time by Australia Post... not a viable option now as each stamp sets you back $1 plus and Australia Post may or may not deliver your letter - if you are in Perth it takes upward of 10 business days for a letter from Sydney to reach Perth... so, cost and unreliability made this type of marketing obsolete.
Still in the 70's and pushing into the 80's we started using Post Office Letter Box Drops with 4 page flyers printed in their thousands... I remember it was $80 a 1,000 to have them stuffed in Local Business Letter Boxes but fewer and fewer businesses had letter boxes at PO and the effectiveness dropped - my question now is "Do you have a letter box still?" I do but I think April 2019 [ that's the renewal date ] might signal its end... all I get there now are copies of stuff already emailed...
We flirted with telemarketing - we a team of up to 20 and for a while it started working well until the advent of answering machines and pagers... people stopped liking answering phones [ who do you know who answers "Call number withheld" calls on their mobile phone?
The 1980's saw us embrace faxing with great success [ much better than Telemarketing and less costly ] until too many started using it and now it is possible to find people who do not know what a fax machine is... any many companies don't even have a fax number any more.
By the 90's we were pioneering email marketing - a $5.5 million fine is testimony to being a pioneer. Our business - Business Education expanded rapidly with office in the UK and Middle East [ Doha ] where open rates for email were regularly 80% and we had to divert phones to places to "catch" the hate.
Fast forward to 2018 - email has stopped working - open rates are barely 10% and people are jaded by political uncertainty... in Australia we change PM's more often than Italy...
My question is this - is it the delivery method [ letters, mail box stuffing, telemarketing, fax, email ] or the subject Business Education? or something else?
I think it is something else but at the moment I am not sure what that something else is?? Do you have any ideas?
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