Throughout the last six months I’ve received contrasting phone calls from firms that use direct mail and email to sell their products.

Some have been saying that response rates are really down, while others report that things are picking up and response rates are improving all the time.

To find out what’s going on, I’ve undertaken a study into how these two contradictory effects can be happening simultaneously.

What I have found is this: the firms that are doing well are doing something rather clever. They are using their promotions both to get sales, and to get potential customers onto their email list.

This list is then emailed every couple of weeks on a simple rota that looks like this…

Week A: advert with special offers and new products etc

Week B: chatty article on other items of interest

These “other items of interest” emails are really important – because it is they that keep people reading the email each time it arrives. The firms that insist on just mailing special offers and the like quickly lose their response levels.

Directors of companies that don’t try “Week B” type emails generally justify themselves by saying “we have to make money on every promotion.” But in the end they achieve exactly the opposite of what they want. Their public gets bored, and stops reading.

So we have two implications.

1: The need to talk to customers via email, in a relaxed conversational style, about issues of interest, rather than just about sales issues.

2: The realisation that sales promotions have two tasks – one is to get some sales, and the other is to generate more names for their marketing customer list, in order to get sales later on.

If you’d like to know more about all our findings and how you could make this approach work for your company please call Stephen or myself on 01536 399 013 and we’ll be pleased to talk it through. Or you can email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood