Getting The Most From Re-Touch Efforts
Posted by Bill Leming on July 15th, 2009
Several months ago I wrote a post about Re-Touch Efforts and Seeing Positive Results. In it I noted some unexpected success with re-mailing the exact same offer to individuals who neither opened nor clicked the original email they received three to four days earlier. What was surprising to me at the time was the fact that the re-touch effort resulted in the same response rate as the original. And it was surprising because the rule of thumb in direct mail was always that you’d get about half the response rate that you received in the initial mailing everything being equal.
But when you think about it, when are all things ever equal? They never are. Today is not like yesterday; next Wednesday won’t be like this past Wednesday, July 15 this year won’t be like July 15 next year. And that may well be the reason for email re-touches being much more effective than direct mail re-touches. Despite the differences, yesterday is generally more like tomorrow than a day 28 months from now just as an individual’s recent past behavior is more like is/her near term future behavior than their behavior at some distant point in the future.
I don’t have any empirical evidence but I think the reason email re-touches are more successful than direct mail re-touches is that they generally occur so much faster. You don’t need to wait 30 days for results or even two weeks for projected-results to determine which segments are responding to which offers using which creative approaches. Nor do you have to worry about production schedules and print queues. With email your questions are answered in hours. You not only know which segment(s) responded at what rate to which offer using which creative, you know that you can deploy the re-touch email to the right target in minutes with the winning offer tucked neatly into the winning design.
Since April we’ve had the opportunity to use these findings in combination with one another with some even more impressive results. Not only have we managed to equal the response rate’s of the initial offering, in more than one instance we’ve managed to triple it by combining the most responsive list segments with the most appealing creative.
In each of these scenarios we’ve chosen to hold the offer constant for purposes of simplicity and I think we’ve made a mistake in doing so. Inasmuch as the “offer” generally carries more weight in the email success equation than does “creative”, the next effort will be to measure the effect of quickly re-touching winning segments with winning offers using winning creative to see if we can’t raise the response rates even further. The trick will be to do that without getting so narrow and so microscopic that we find the one guy in 100,000 who’s ready to buy and no one else. Will keep you posted on our progress.
Bill,
I enjoyed the post and have also been closely watching re-touch metrics. You mentioned equaling or increasing ‘response rates’ — what metrics are you using to define this?
In my own re-touch tests, I’ve seen decreased open rates, bust significantly increased CTRs and conversion rates on re-touch emails when implemented fairly close to the original.
Cheers,
Forest