Direct mail and e-mail: Does the 'campaign effect' really work?

Editor's note: Richard Geller's column, Marketing Madness, appears regularly on the DrBicuspid.com advice and opinion page, Second Opinion.

"Be patient ... it takes time for your advertising to build."

How many times has a salesperson told you that? Is it even true?

I call it the "campaign effect" -- the idea that you are supposed to enjoy a rising curve the longer you advertise in a given campaign. If a prospect sees your message more times, supposedly he or she will be more likely to respond.

But again -- is this true?

There is a campaign effect on radio and television. People need to see or hear your ad four to six times for you to get maximum results. However, since most dentists don't saturate the airwaves, it is hard to get four to six exposures to a given viewer or listener.

Direct mail and e-mail are a different story.

A few years back, I owned a company that was a pioneer in the development of the Taguchi Method, which lets you test advertising much less expensively than traditional testing.

We did some careful mailing studies with dental offices. We found that with direct mail, the first letter gets the most response. The second gets roughly a third of the first one. The third gets roughly a third of the second one.

We saw somewhat of a campaign effect after we created an "alert letter" that simply said, "You will be getting another mailer from us." This boosted the results of the second mailer.

But I would say that, overall, there is negligible campaign effect in direct mail, especially if you are mailing the same offer to the same list. Your results will drop off until it does not pay to continue mailing.

You then may want to consider mailing a different offer to that same list.

A famous marketer Gary Halbert observed that mailing a simple letter that offers a specific service to your patients could result in a high response rate.

Say you mail a letter offering veneers. Then you mail another letter a few weeks later with an offer for gum treatment. Both should get high response rates because the two different offers are both appealing.

With e-mail marketing, this kind of campaign effect is very strong. The more often you e-mail, the higher your response. This is may seem counterintuitive; you are probably saying to yourself, "I wouldn't like to get an e-mail every day."

But my experience puts me strongly in favor of frequent e-mails, very frequent -- daily, in fact.

Of course, you have to make the e-mails entertaining and interesting. They can't be sage advice on how to brush your teeth. You want people to look forward to the e-mails.

Even the bulk of the recipients who don't open the e-mails for days or weeks on end will eventually open them when they are ready to change dentists.

So with the right e-mails and direct mail letters, the campaign effect means that the more often you mail, the more entertaining and interesting you make them, and if you vary your offers, the better your response will be.

And please visit www.cases4dentists.com for a white paper on advertising and building your house list using the Internet and e-mail.

The comments and observations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DrBicuspid.com, nor should they be construed as an endorsement or admonishment of any particular idea, vendor, or organization.

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