It’s the biggest milestone since the day the GlobalTmail concept first popped into my head back in 2005 . . . “D-Day” . . . which stands for “Dialing Day”. It has taken years to get to this stage of our development where we can finally have multiple inquiries each and every day. The inquiries consist of NEW people who want to know all about GlobalTmail, having heard about it by getting a recorded message from our system! THIS is part of what we’ve been talking about all along! Our new GroupCaller system went to work at 9:00 am this morning, starting our first outbound voice broadcast campaign designed specifically to recruit new Associates and members for the Asset Management Group. These are fully FTC/FCC compliant calls and are being made to small business phone numbers in a 4-state area: Utah, Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico. Today’s campaign will begin calling 216,631 phones in the Mountain Time Zone, seeking people who need to increase their income. Our top sales people have access to these new leads and will begin following up later this afternoon and evening, depending on the responses we get.
Part of the key to success in this, or any other type of promotional advertising is to have realistic expectations, and then continually analyze the results and adjust both the message and the audience until a maximum response rate has been achieved. I’m only expecting about Five Hundredths of one percent response rate today (0.05%) without making any adjustments. This means, if we made the number of calls I expect to make, which is around 5,400 today, we should get either 2 or 3 inquiries. Although it’s entirely possible we won’t even achieve this rate. We’re starting out with a list that’s about 15 months old. Lists must be continually updated because phone numbers change at a rapid pace when you’re dealing with the masses. Nonetheless, in my judgment it’s prudent to do our testing on a low-cost platform and under difficult circumstances (i.e. a “bad” list). By increasing our response rate to profitability under these circumstances, we’re virtually assured of great success simply by acquiring a much higher quality list. (By the way, lists can be VERY expensive, so we don’t want to roll out a large campaign without first conducting a thorough test of the audience and the message to assure ourselves of profitability BEFORE spending the money on a costly but more accurate list).
A very small response rate is entirely normal when starting a massive new campaign like this. Perhaps the greatest thing about this type of promotional advertising is the fact that we can monitor the response rates in real time . . . quite literally, we can listen in on “live” calls which helps us analyze and improve the responses. No other media allows this type of “live” analysis, not even SEO, pay-per-click or any of the other great online methods! Each day, and even multiple times throughout each day, we can change the message and adjust it, attempting to find just the right combination of words and phrases that will gain the highest response. By doing this, extraordinary results can be achieved. We can literally go from 0.05%, or even 0.0% response, up to 0.5%, or even a hefty 1.0% or better! That may not sound like much if you’re not used to marketing analysis, but put another way, that’s the same as increasing the response by 5, 10 or even 20 times what we originally start with!
We’re beginning this campaign with 6 channels (that’s VoIP lingo for 6 phone lines dialing concurrently). That gives us a capacity of somewhere around 5,400 calls per day, assuming a 13-hour calling day. The legal hours for calling are 8:00 a.m. until 9:00 pm, Monday through Saturday. Today, we started 1 hour late due to a problem loading the initial database. I’ll be monitoring the system throughout the day, to check on the VoIP lines and make sure they’re operating properly, and also monitoring several of the phone lines by listening in on the call progress to ensure call quality.
This first campaign is designed to call all the small business phone numbers in America. After removing all the “Do Not Call” numbers and other inappropriate numbers (nursing homes, hospitals, government offices, universities, etc.) I expect we’ll call somewhere between 6,000,000 and 8,000,000 phone numbers. Even if the response rate is only 0.1% on the minimum number of calls, that will give us about 6,000 inquiries…FAR more than we’ve seen since we first lifted the veil of secrecy around this project. And even if we consider we can’t get any more than HALF of the lowest expected response rate, we’re STILL looking at 3,000 inquiries. Right now we have only two full-time and fully qualified Associates to follow up on these leads. No doubt we’re going to need a lot more help before we can ramp up any significant volume in this promotion.
Yesterday, we made tentative arrangements with a new VoIP service provider to acquire a minimum of 500 channels in the near future. This means that once we solidify the scripting and the list so our response rate is adequate, we’ll be able to call a maximum of about 450,000 numbers each and every day. And even THIS is just a fraction of the capacity we’re striving to achieve in the future. By the end of 2012, I expect to have a maximum calling capacity of several million calls each and every day. Naturally, to achieve the goals we set as a company, and pay the amounts we discuss with the Port Income Calculator, this has been our plan since the very beginning. After all, we can’t generate sales volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually without the capacity of sending and receiving millions of messages each and every day. So when I talk of call-capacity in this range, it should not surprise those of you who have been following our progress for some time now.
At any rate, this is a milestone day for us, and we’re thrilled to report such great progress! I’ll fill you in on call results in the coming days and weeks so you can see the effect of this outbound voice broadcast campaign on our recruitment and sales efforts. Stay tuned!
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