Diversity leads to stability

On Wednesday we started a discussion on sequential marketing and how 2 + 3 = 1. If you didn’t read it, check out the blog entry below and that will make sense. I’ll continue today with a few other strategies in sequential marketing.

This may sound a bit weird coming from the 3D Mail Guru, but you’ll always want to use multiple media, multiple different ways. That means direct mail using 3D Mail and more traditional mail, email, faxes, phone calling, voice broadcasting etc.

Here’s the reason. Different people respond to different medias. Some like email, others fax, still others direct mail. You never want to rely on one sole way to get new or repeat clients to purchase. As one of my mentors Bill Glazer says, “Diversity leads to stability.”

Second, you want to keep adding touches until it is no longer profitable or you can no longer make the offer.

For years we used a 3-step new client sequence, and that was it. It worked exceptionally well for many years. We decided to test a fourth step to see if we could again be profitable. Guess, what? It worked and
for many more years we used a 4-step sequence.

Finally, if you read my emails, you know I’m against most Madison Avenue, brand building style marketing you see. However, there is an accumulative effect of such exposure that creates additional customers
over a long period of time.

Maybe they’re just not ready for what you got right now, or, after 3 letters, if finally hits them that maybe they have a friend or relative that could use what you’re offering. Whatever it is, sequential marketing can and will have that affect on your customers.

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.