Telemarketing and the familiarity effect
Too many businesses put effort into the initial outreach but fail to stay in touch even though they know that it is in the follow up that the magic happens.
Nobody is buying cold. When we are looking to purchase we look to what we know and where we are comfortable, that includes asking friends and colleagues for recommendations. Let’s explore how you can harness these principles to create a thoughtful, repeatable follow up strategy that resonates with your audience and how telemarketing can play a pivotal role in enhancing it.
Telemarketing in effective familiarity building
Telemarketing provides great two way engagement with prospects. It adds a personal, human element that is often missing from automated or digital communications. Here’s how to fit it into your follow-up strategy:
Building relationships. Conversations help establish familiarity and rapport, bridging the gap between outreach and deeper connections.
The familiarity effect. Regular calls ensure your name and message stay in front of prospects, building trust over time.
Addressing concerns. Unlike emails, telemarketing allows you to address questions or hesitations in the moment, turning potential barriers into opportunities.
Over time, your audience will feel like they know you, which increases the likelihood of them taking your calls, opening your emails, calling you on the phone and turning to you when they are ready to buy or referring you to others.
The Familiarity Effect
The “familiarity effect” has been afforded years of study and is a key factor in why people buy. Follow up is a huge part of building that familiarity.
The concept of familiarity building has deep roots in psychology and buyer behaviour. The first recorded study of this phenomenon dates back to Gustav Fechner in 1876. More recently, psychologist Robert Zajonc expanded on the idea, theorising that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases recognition and influences individuals to form attitudes toward it. Zajonc’s experiments demonstrated that subjects consistently rated stimuli they had encountered before more positively than similar ones they hadn’t experienced.
This idea, often referred to as the familiarity effect, suggests that the more you see, feel, or experience something, the more likely you are to develop positive associations with it, whether it’s a feeling, a person, a place, a product, or a brand. However, the opposite is also true, if you start with strong negative feelings toward something, repeated exposure can intensify your aversion rather than mitigate it (a warning for overly persistent cold callers and spammers, find your tribe first!).
Our brains like certainty and turn to things we are familiar with (think how difficult we find it to get out of our comfort zone).
We can bring all the strengths of the familiarity effect to building a winning repeatable follow up strategy
7 Steps for creating the familiarity effect
1.Simplify your message
- Focus on a few key ideas that resonate deeply with your audience.
- Repetition and clarity make your message stick so find a few different ways to get your message across using messaging, email , phone and face to face where possible
- It’s not about having 1,000 stories or reasons it is about having a few key ways to deliver the same message so it goes deep and sticks. Our brains like simplicity which is why ads are so powerful.
- Your messaging will get “boring” to you but it won’t be to your tribe – they only think about you when you are about, their minds are not constantly thinking about your business only you are.
2.Stand for something
- Develop opinions on topics your audience cares about and share these consistently.
- Position yourself as a thought leader by exploring a few core topics in depth.
- When you align with their interests, your audience will actively engage with you and will welcome the depth you take them to on those few topics.
3. Show up consistently
- Regular engagement is key to staying top of mind and building the familiarity effect.
- Commit to following up periodically to build trust and familiarity.
- Consistency demonstrates seriousness and reliability. Telemarketing adds a personal and human touch, keeping you connected and demonstrating reliability.
4. Omnipresence
- Diversify your approach and the style of communication
- Combine phone calls, emails, social media, networking events, and even handwritten notes, the different communication each channel offers is great for getting a personality across.
- Omnipresence ensures you connect with prospects where they are in different ways.
- Telemarketing allows for direct and meaningful conversations, offering an alternative to the often impersonal nature of digital outreach.
5. Add value in every touch
- Have a purpose for each follow up and provide something meaningful, such as a resource, insight, or personalised suggestion.
- Use telemarketing as an opportunity to refer back to previous conversations and demonstrate that you’ve been listening.
- Avoid lazy or generic “checking in” messages.
6. Keep your plan manageable
- Start small and focus on a couple of channels or techniques to refine and test – link up LinkedIn, email and the phone for maximum attention.
- A manageable strategy ensures consistency, builds your confidence and prevents burnout.
- Quality over quantity for the majority of the time. it’s better to execute a few things well than to spread yourself too thin.
7.Create clear next steps
- Always end with a specific, actionable next step to keep momentum.
- Remove ambiguity so prospects know exactly how to respond.
- Telemarketing is particularly effective for creating these next steps, as it allows for real time interaction and immediate agreement.
By building a familiarity building process based on these 7 steps, it becomes an actionable to do list which for us here at Your Lead Generation makes it a list of actions that gets done.
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