The objective of this thesis is to find pros and cons for combining e-mail marketing with telemarketing in business-to-business direct marketing. This topic is current because more and more businesses want to properly use this combination but have no skills of doing it successfully. One of the example company is EcoTelematics Group, for whom this thesis has been written for. However, due to the general level of the content other businesses struggling with the same issues can find help from it as well.

The research started with understanding fully the concepts behind e-mail marketing and telemarketing. It was important to study them in separate in order to formulate an accurate research framework. Additionally, it was also noticed that not many studies about this specific combination have been conducted in the past. This leads to the fact that, whatever the outcome of this thesis will be, it will provide something new to the area of direct marketing.

The actual research was done by conducting qualitative in-depth interviews. There were 10 of them in total and the interviewees were divided into 2 separate groups. First, the company side or the sender side (like called in this thesis) was interviewed in order to understand why they use the combination of e-mail marketing and telemarketing. Nevertheless, this was not enough because the opinions of the customers or receivers (like called in this thesis) were crucial for the success of the combination. Due to this reason, both of the sides were interviewed for comprehending the process of sending and receiving e-mails and telemarketing calls.

The outcomes of this thesis were interesting. The company side and the customer side (or senders and receivers) agreed on many things, like the shortness of the e-mail messages and telemarketing calls and the effectiveness of the combination, but there were many found differences as well. The order of the process was most likely to be the biggest, because companies preferred to start with e-mail and then continue with telemarketing, whereas customers liked being contacted first by phone and then receive e-mail.