Phone Marketing Fail

If you know me personally or have been following me for a while, you’re aware that my specialty is data, and the technology you can use to leverage that data. Given that, lets see if you can guess pretty quickly what could have been done to make this fail a potential success.

The other day my cell phone starting ringing near 10:00 PM. I personally never call any of my friends or family much past 9:00 or 9:30 PM, unless it is an emergency, so I grabbed my phone feeling a little apprehensive. When I looked at the number, it wasn’t one I recognized, so I figured that it was a wrong number, and just let it go.

I didn’t look at my phone again until the next morning. That’s when I noticed I had a voice mail message. The message was from someone (actually their assistant) who I had met at a recent event in Las Vegas., reminding me about something I had signed up for at that event. The message was time stamped around 10:00 PM.

I became a little irritated when I realized last night’s call had simply been part of someone’s phone marketing. I tried to figure out why they thought it was a good idea to call someone that late at night. Then I realized, they hadn’t thought that at all. Realizing that most of their contacts from the event would be solo-entrepreneurs, I believe they  thought (quite correctly) that the best time to reach these people was in the early evening… assuming of course that the people they were calling were on the West Coast, where they were calling from.

The fail should be obvious to you now. Rather than look at their data, and divide up their list into the various time zones – a little bit time-consuming, but we’re probably talking only a few hundred leads at most, they just started calling. They didn’t pause to think that maybe some east coasters came out for a west coast event.  Can they recover with some of these prospects? Probably. But they just made their job harder.

When people think of data analysis, they think of the hard stuff. Checking an area code for the time zone is data analysis too and isn’t terribly hard. The money is in the data, even with something this simple.