How to Take Orders for TV Infomercials
More than 63 percent of Americans watch some form of direct-response TV advertising, also known as infomercials, according to Electronic Retailing Association. That translates to 136 million potential customers for your product or service. More than 55 percent of the U.S. public has actually purchased goods or service through direct-response advertising, according to trade group Direct Selling Association. Although infomercials allow you to reach a huge audience cost-effectively, the enterprise is also challenging. Taking and fulfilling orders successfully is a fundamental key to success.
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Instructions
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Assess your needs. For example, decide whether you are creating a business model and vendor resources for the long term, or whether this is a one-time undertaking based on limited availability of a particular product that will no longer be available after you sell your current inventory. Regardless of whether you do one infomercial that airs only once, or you plan to become the new titan of the industry, the successful application of the established disciplines of order taking and fulfillment for direct-response TV advertising (DRTV) will be a critical factor in your outcome. The goal: no missed calls, because a busy line often means a lost sale.
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Open a merchant account at your bank or with an independent service provider of credit card services. Credit card payment is the standard mode of order completion in the infomercial business. Accept checks by mail, so you still can get orders from people without credit cards. If a customer pays by check, you do not ship the order until the check has cleared your bank.
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Anticipate call volume. Work with your ad agency or media buying service to use available market data to predict your call volume. That will be the basic metric you will use in creating your order-taking and fulfillment capabilities. Allow more capacity than what you think you'll need in order to account for the possibility of better-than-expected results.
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Decide on the "call window," or the times during which calls will be accepted. Based on the type of product or customer, the amount of time necessary to allow someone to make a buying decision and pick up the phone varies from minutes to hours, depending on such factors as cost and payment terms. On the other hand, your costs rise as phone lines remain open longer. Use available industry data to make an informed decision about how long after the infomercial your call center will take calls.
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Use a virtual call center. LiveOps is the world's largest operator of virtual call centers. The company says its service "frees businesses from the complexity and constraints of traditional call center models." LiveOps offers customized, on-demand call center services to marketers of all sizes and types. Another option for an established virtual call center model is Contactual.
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Farm the call center function out to a traditional, full-service DRTV call center. Use a full-service vendor if you aim to become a large national marketer over the long term. A full-service call center offers capabilities and services that smaller virtual call centers do not, like detailed reporting that can be used for market analysis. Omni Call Center specializes in high-volume infomercial order-taking. Another established provider is RESPONSE Call Center. Use a resource like VendorSeek to get free price quotes from a number of call centers, based on your exact requirements.
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Fulfill orders efficiently. Getting the order and charging the customer's credit card is only half of the equation. The other half is sending the customer what they ordered as quickly as possible. Ask your call center to integrate the fulfillment process into the information package they provide. Keep careful records that account for every order in case a customer ever has a complaint.
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References
- Photo Credit TV image by Ilija Mitrevski from Fotolia.com
