Dialogue method

The dialogue method is a direct marketing technique for written market communication that was developed by Siegfried Vögele in the late 1970s . It transfers elements of the personal sales pitch to written, sales-oriented communication. While the seller can react to his counterpart in direct dialogue, it is the duty of the copywriter to anticipate possible questions, wishes or objections of the person being sought. This creates an imaginary dialogue with the target group, which should lead to a sale ( response ).

Vögele incorporated experience from its sales and consultancy activities and the mail order business in the 1960s. He lectures u. a. at the Department of Psychology at the University of Munich and has founded his own institute for direct marketing.

Eye camera

With an eye camera is eye movement of the subject when viewing visual advertising media recorded. The sequence, duration and intensity of the effect of individual elements on the test person can be observed and conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of the advertising material.

From his work, Vögele derived a number of general rules for creating written advertising materials, for example for advertising letters:

The most important advertising messages must reach the reader within 20 seconds, after which the attention is lost.
After the address and salutation, the PS postscript is read before the text of the letter , so the PS should contain a powerful advertising message. Vögele summarized the findings in his book Dialog Method: The Sales Discussion by Letter and Reply Card .

criticism

Due to today's flood of information, critics rate the 20 seconds review time of an advertising medium as too long, and they also doubt the importance of the postscript and the advertising letter compared to the brochure insert. Such claims can only be corroborated for specific advertising measures through statistically secured tests. The latest studies by the Siegfried Vögele Institute, which is now a 100% subsidiary of Deutsche Post AG, show an assessment time of just seven seconds.

Realization of the dialogue method through software

The Vögeles dialogue method is based on the idea of the “written sales pitch” and was originally developed to replace the personal sales pitch. With the increasing mapping of business processes by IT in the 90s, it made sense to revisit Vögele's dialogue concept and implement it in terms of software.

The first company to pursue this approach was VALyou Software GmbH. The Munich-based company launched the database-supported dialog marketing tool VALyou Professional in direct cooperation with Vögele in 1996 . The tool, which was distributed by the direct marketing centers of Deutsche Post in the first few years, implements the dialogue method in the context of digital dialogue marketing campaigns. Each campaign consists of up to three assigned actions, each action in turn consists of up to two communicative actions. As part of an initial campaign, a series letter or series mailing with a response element can be sent, the response is recorded in the database and forms the basis for further customized campaigns. Each campaign can then be analyzed and evaluated using various report templates. The targeted customer approach, which is made possible by this digital implementation of the dialogue method, can be seen as an important element and as a preliminary form of electronic customer relationship management ( eCRM ).

literature

Siegfried Vögele: Dialogue method: The sales talk by letter and reply card. 12th edition, 2002, ISBN 3478211808