Direct Mail: The Multi Touch vs. Single Touch Direct Mail Debate

One of the most frequently asked questions I get from clients about direct mail options is “Should we mail to the same audience multiple times or just once?”.  The answer I tell everyone is “it depends”.  Don’t get me wrong, a multi-touch, multi-medium campaign is always the best approach.  However, the realities of limited budgets and the composition of the customer database or prospect list can have a significant impact of on how we execute our marketing campaigns.  

There are probably as many different scenarios as there are businesses so let me focus on one very common scenario.  I have tested this many times over the past 10 years across different vertical industries and most recently just 3 months ago and believe it or not, the results are always the same. 

Example: Company A has a prospect universe of 100,000 records and a direct mail budget to mail 100,000 packages.  The question is, is it more profitable to mail everyone once, 50,000 prospects twice or even 25,000 prospects 4 times.   Assuming each prospect is of equal potential value and equal likelihood of responding, here is a good rule of thumb.  

For each subsequent time you mail the same package to the same prospect, you can expect a 50% drop in response rate. So if your response rate for the first mailing was 1%, you can expect a .5% response rate for the second mailing, .25% for the third mailing and .125% for the fourth.  A sample is provided below.

• Mail 100,000 prospects @ 1% response rate = 1,000 responses
• Mail 50,000 prospects twice = 750 total responses
   - Mailing #1 - 50,000 @ 1% response rate = 500 responses
   - Mailing #2 - 50,000 @ .5% response rate = 250 responses
   
•  Mail 25,000 prospects four times = 468 total responses
   - Mailing #1 - 25,000 @ 1% response rate = 250 responses
   - Mailing #2 - 25,000 @.5% response rate = 125 responses
   - Mailing #3 - 25,000 @.25% response rate = 62 responses
   - Mailing #4 - 25,000 @.125% response rate = 31 responses