Keurboom! A blow for cold calling and a win for inbound marketing

As "marketing company" Keurboom are hit with a record fine of £400,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and EU laws on data regulation are on their, it's time for firms to make the inevitable, necessary and just plain moral switch from cold calling to inbound marketing.

The times are changing, outbound is outdated and in some cases, can be potentially dangerous for your brand financially and in a reputational sense. Big fines are being handed out to serial data offenders. With inbound you can avoid this and get the best from your leads so read our blog “Futureproof your business against EU Data Protctions” for more information.

Yesterday on my bus ride home, there were two kids next to me playing a simple role play game. One would hold a fake phone to their ear and pretend to be calling the other, first offering to help with the recent car accident they were in, and then asking if they had any credit cards.

They'd then take it in turns to do an impression of their irate mother on the other end of the call, shouting "I told you once, why are you so stupid?"

The whole thing was admittedly adorable when acted out by two cute kids (the Mum was a nice lady too, despite the kids' best attempts to disparage her). However, it left me thinking how sad it is that nuisance calls are so ingrained in our culture that children are incorporating them into their games.

Even after shows like Phonejacker have parodied them to within an inch of their lives, they insist on carrying on the charade, as if they have no respect for Christian Metz' theory on genre cycles.

Record fine for nuisance calls

So this morning's breaking news on "marketing company" Keurboom (the irony of this name will not be lost on anybody who has watched Parks and Recreation) being hit with a record fine of £400,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for making just these kind of calls seemed particularly poignant. 

With the EU laws on data regulation taking a little while to come into effect, it's going to take fines like this to scare companies out of these practices and embrace the better option that is inbound marketing.

I'll admit, I understand why they do it. It's shortcut marketing. Buy a dodgy data list from your mate Tony who works at Lead Squid for peanuts - if you make a sale out of the 1,000 calls you make, who cares if you've pissed off 999 other people?

We care, Tony.

It's because of those 999 people that I'm proud to work at an inbound marketing agency and wouldn't ever consider going back to the old way of doing things.

Let people come to you. Be nice to them. Offer them free things and see how much more likely they are to buy your actual thing. Have nice conversations, and even better, sell nice products that actually help the environment (we work with several renewable energy companies and it helps with the warm fuzzies).

Be nice, choose an inbound marketing campaign

Not only is it more pleasant for everybody involved, you can also automate a whole load of it. As a result, it can actually be less work than passing 20 leads to Steve to call, 13 of them with Batman as the surname and the other 7 shouting at him and demanding to know how you got their number. Poor Steve.

What's even more telling about the Keurboom story is that they have already gone out of business despite their shortcut tactics (Keurboom! And the dirt is gone, to paraphrase Barry Scott). It just shows how unsustainable the outbound model is.

I'm sure there are plenty of businesses out there using outbound tactics that aren't evil. It's probably just how they've always done things. But we assure you, there is another way and we'd be happy to show you. Please, think of the children. Choose inbound marketing.

The times are changing, outbound is outdated and in some cases, can be potentially dangerous for your brand financially and in a reputational sense. Big fines are being handed out to serial data offenders. With inbound you can avoid this and get the best from your leads so read our blog “Futureproof your business against EU Data Protctions” for more information.