Friday, October 12, 2007

Law of decrecesing returns on Email Marketing

When I did my Direct Marketing Diploma there was a rule of decreasing returns which went along the lines of this:

Once you've mailed a file return to the same file again but exclude people who responded the first time. This rule generates more sales. You can keep doing this at least 10 times so that our list gets smaller and smaller but your only working on people who don't buy or respond.

I've been trying this same rule with email marketing. Using Campaign Monitor you can segment any list and include only those people who didn't open the initial email or click on a link etc. I opted for the didn't open as I figured that didn't click a link was a bit too risky and would produce a barrage of abuse and spam complaints.

I re-emailed about a week after the initial offer. The strange thing is that the law seems to be broken at least for these campaigns.

There are two options
  1. My campaign was crap (very likely)
  2. The rule doesn't work for email

I've seen independent result for this on a traditional paper based mailing. I've even done it myself and had a lot of success. But for some reason it's not worked with email.

If anyone has any different experiences I'd love to hear them as I'm sure this should work.

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