How many times should i send out my advertisment by mail?

Speaking of rubbish ( ok half rubbish ).... look you don't want to send it once a week... once a month maybe. a mailing such as this is about timing. be it they had the need for the service OR they were talking to someone and they had it. The same in my case with Directv mailings. multiple mailings over and over.. some mailings get sales, some get a lot, and others fall flat. Its a matter of being at the right place at the right time.


You really need to do some small mailings and get the message right. Out of say 100 mailings in theory you should get at least 1 bite. if you are sending out and getting nothing in return, you need to adjust the message until you get it right. From that point.. that is where you scale the delivery of the message. Decrease your per piece cost and start in with EDDM type mailing.

Interesting. Do you have any theories as to why...?

Brings to mind that we used to receive lots of postal mailing from roadside assistance companies but lately there have been none. Possibly coinciding with this is every car insurance policy has basic roadside assistance included. I suspect that here in UK, the insurance companies have figured out a targeted JV with insurance companies is far more cost effective than their own independent campaigns...

If this isn't the case in US, then maybe OP should be looking at brokering JV deals with car insurance companies...

Your example isn't an exception. Yes, if you are looking for one sale or two, you can get it after multiple mailings, where you didn't get that sale before.

But the odds of selling it on the first mailing were actually greater than on each individual subsequent mailings to the same list.

I bought an expensive course on the 22nd mailing I got (I can't remember the company). But they received more orders on the first mailing, even though I wasn't one of them.

It was just still profitable for them to mail to the non-responder list I was on.

Where many mailers get confused (Not you) is that the total number of sales increases with multiple mailings, but the number of sales from that specific mailing, decreases with repetition.

We are talking about the exact same offer to the exact same list.


Your examples seem like exceptions, but the probabilities work out exactly the same.

For example;

First mailing, 1% odds of that one person buying from you.
2nd mailing, .5%
3rd mailing, .45%
4th mailing, .4%

And on down it goes. But by the tenth mailing, you may have a cumulative 5% chance of that one person responding. And by the 30th mailing, a 10% chance.

Marcia;

Of course, that's how you would do it. Every mailing has a different appeal, a different reason for buying.

But beginners that hear about sales from multiple mailings...think it's the exact same mailing. I was trying to dispel that fantasy.

And they also think that multiple mailings increase the odds of a sale, in that specific mailing. They are told that by advertising sales reps.

Every sales rep I ever had told me that "you need to advertise 5 (or 7) times, to get a result"

But my ads were always the most profitable, the first time they ran. That's why I kept changing them, to appeal to different segments of the people who didn't buy before.

Good stuff. I'm a fan of your work.

Nailed it! I'm not sure what it is, but something happened here. I guess email is a type of mail.

I don't mean this personally.

But I've heard this so many times. It takes these variations;
"It takes 5 closing attempts to make a sale"
"They need to see your ad 5 times before they by"
"It takes 5 calls to make a sale"

Here is where this came from;

In the 1950s, an advertising agency used a Focus Group to test a brand name. They found that the average person had to see the brand name 5 times, before they would remember it.

That's it. That's where it came from. Just remembering the brand name. Not buying, not closing, not number of ads...it was 5 times hearing the brand name.

And somehow, this got picked up in various advertising and sales training programs...and became Gospel.


Humans.