With this one simple change to any marketing campaign you can improve up to DOUBLE your results over all.

In fact, this small change has taken campaigns I have worked on from negative to super profitable.

The problem is, this tactic is so simple and straightforward, it is often overlooked.

Are you guessing what this important factor is? …

You might have guessed from the picture, but the answer is repetition.

Why is repitition so important?

The fact is the first time you communicate with your prospects or audience they might miss the message completely. Your email might go missing, they might be busy and distracted, it might be misinterpreted, there could be a technical error, the listener or viewer might switch channels, or might not be alert when your advert goes out. Print adverts are at the mercy of printing problems, skimming, current events, and the stories your ad is sandwiched in between.

Just repeating once gives your message more chance of being seen and acted upon. But you should not stop at one repeat. In fact, some studies have shown you need to repeat up to seven times to hit your market well.

• Post follow up direct mail letters and post cards.
• Send a sequence of emails.
• Tweet multiple times through the day to catch different time zones.
• Place print ads for multiple issues run rather than a one-off.

It’s cheap and easy for electronic marketers to repeat a message and there are very few arguments against it. There are ways to remind people without duplicating your exact wording if you are worried about being boring or annoying!

In traditional media then there are obvious budgetary reasons why someone might stick to one attempt, but even then the additional costs of having another round almost always pale in comparison to the returns you get. Even when your prospects do see the first message, the follow ups can often spur them into action, especially when time  or scarcity are involved.

Just small incremental improvements can be well worth while. Even with a tiny additional growth in response you can more than double over all response when you repeat, repeat and repeat.

Don’t believe me? The numbers do not lie – Try it!

What happens if you send out the same email message for seven iterations and get a small additional response each time? Let’s see

1. 100 total responses
2. 115 total responses
3. 132 total responses
4. 152 total responses
5. 175 total responses
6. 201 total responses
7. 231 total responses

So in this case if we had only sent the email once, even with just a 15% boost from each email we would have missed out on 131 potential sales. In fact this is quite restrained, ordinarily the second and third emails would tend to do much better, and when done in an auto responder sequence can actually see a lift at email six or seven as prospects make their mind up to buy in.

Regardless of your actual results you absolutely should test this. You could be losing out a lot by not repeating yourself.

Photo: hryckowian