2 + 3 = 1?

I know you may not be a math major, and I certainly wasn’t, but stay with me on this one as we start a discussion on sequential marketing.

Sequential marketing is a sequence of marketing, with each one clearly referring to the previous one, all sent in a fairly condensed period of time, usually 4-6 weeks. You’ll usually double your response with 3 touches. This is where my fuzzy math comes in. Let me explain.

We know that using 3 steps will almost always double our response. Let’s say we’re mailing out 500 bank bags as the first step in a sequence to our in-house list. We get a 4% response rate, or 20 responses. Now let’s say we send a postcard as our second step and the mini trash-can as our third step.

When you do the math and calculate response and return on investment, you’ll almost always get 20 additional responses from steps 2 and 3 combined. So my fuzzy math would mean:

Step 2 (postcard) + Step 3 (trash can) = The same response at Step 1 (bank bag)

The math may not hold exactly with each marketing sequence you do, but you’ll usually be within a few percentage points either way.

Later in the week we’ll talk about a few other sequential marketing strategies you can use.