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How to Boost Profits With Follow-up Mailings

This past week a reader emailed me with an interesting question that seems to be coming up fairly often lately. He asks:

"I’m considering doing identical follow-up mailings to see if we can boost response and lower our costs. What I want to do is a short time after the initial mailing is do another drop, exactly the same as the first, to the very same list. (I can save significant money by printing twice as many mailers.) What type of results should I expect compared to the first mailing?" --- David Parish, Los Angeles, California.

There are a number of questions I would have before advising David to proceed. First, I would ask him to calculate the return on investment for the first mailing before sending the second.

  

If it is a standard mailing that he has been doing in the past, he probably has some history to fall back on. If not, he’ll have to wait until you see what the first drop did before committing to the second. Even if he does have some history, the condition and source of his list, seasonality, and other factors can act to effect response rates. But here’s my point--- in my experience he should expect no more than a 15 to 20% increase in response from a second identical mailing.

It can be really tough to achieve adequate returns with duplicate mailings. If the prospect discarded your offer the first time, they will most likely trash it the second too. A better strategy might be to send different mailers to the same list over a longer period of time, with different features and benefits spelled out that might better appeal to non-responders to the first mailing. I have never considered saving money on printing to be a reason to mail or not, as postage has almost always been the bigger expense item.

There are also some crazy things that can happen with closely timed identical direct mail. Some prospects may be irked by the second contact, especially of they ordered off the first mailing. They may also become concerned that their order was lost or not processed properly--- not a feeling you want new customers to have. So I’m not a big fan of identical follow-up mailings over a short time span--- such as those done just two or three weeks after the first mailing.

A lot of times, it can take a lot longer than 2 weeks to determine exactly how profitable your mailing will be, even if using a doubling date in your calculations. A mailing’s doubling date is that that point in time when exactly 50% of the returns for the mailing can be expected to have been received. So if your normal doubling date is 21 days, then on the 21st day after the first response is received you will have received half of all business you will get from that mailing. The rest will trickle in over a period of months and even a year unless there is a hard deadline built into your offer. This assumes all pieces are mailed on the same day and reach the prospect about the same time. This can be difficult to determine if you are using bulk mail.

Of course if you are doing email, everything changes. Since you have no postage or printing expense, your risk is proportionately lower. I always advise my clients to work hard to get the email addresses of at least their customers and as many prospects as they can. Email campaigns can be a great adjunct to snail mailings to help boost response by creating a synergy between the two. Again, however, I would caution against too frequent mailings lest you be accused of spamming your customer or prospect list!

Direct Mail Strategy:
More viable approaches to increasing short-term response rates might include running radio or TV spots, newspaper ads, or a telemarketing campaign in support of your mailing. Still another is to do split mailings with different copy mailed on the same day to every other name on the list to see which one pulls better, then abandoning the lesser performing package for future mailings.
     
Strartegy