Should you do more drip campaigns or newsletters? Will order confirmations and “thank you” offers bring add-on business? Should you mail more often (or less) to prospects?

How many renewal notices before rock-bottom pricing? What? How many? How often? When? To whom?

The correct answers to these questions would yield increased sales and profits. But, unfortunately, there are no totally correct answers — only informed guesses.

What’s a marketer to do?

Why no correct answers?
Every company and customer list is unique. People value some brands; other brands need help. I like Coke; you may like Pepsi.

What works for one organization won’t necessarily work for another. Everything is dynamic. What works today could fail miserably tomorrow.

Imagine the difference in financial-offer response rates before the current bailout emergency and what’s happening now. Consumer confidence and business credit availability are totally different now. And those will change, too.

The only constant is change. A marketer needs to change along with the changes. The only way to do that is to make informed guesses by testing and then quickly roll out the best test offer before too much change can alter the results.

I like to think that the mix of types and methods of customer-prospect touch points is also different for each company and that change is necessary in that mix also.

Remember the “power of nine?”
That’s the half-baked theory that nine is the optimum number of times to contact a prospect to get the desired action. Baloney! Hogwash! Bull!

I’ve been a marketer for more years than I care to admit. Ok, I’ll admit — since 1964. And in those 44 years, I’m proud to say I’ve sold literally billions of dollars in goods and services in B2C and B2B.

There is no power of nine. It could be the power of one or two. And, if you’re really good, it could morph into the power of 1,000, where you develop long-term relationships with customers and contact them with a variety of successful offers for many, many years.

Maybe the “power of nine” exists in different types of email contacts. For example:

1. Acquisition newsletters
2. Customer retention and support newsletters
3. Drip campaigns that start after some action takes place
4. Order confirmation emails
5. Happy birthday or anniversary emails
6. Service policy emails
7. Renewal emails
8. Surveys

And there are many others, like Webinar invitations, alerts, meet our new [insert staff position], polls, what’s hot on your blog … you name it, and email can probably deliver it.

I love email! I love it, love it, love it!
Let me count the ways.

#1
Email is inexpensive, especially if you own the list. No envelopes, no U.S. postage, no printing costs, no lettershop charges — the only expenses are for the technology to mail and measure, design, copy and population into the tool.

#2
Email is immediate. Push the send button, and within seconds, you start to get results and can adapt these results into better next offers.

Years ago, I used to spend over $50,000 every month in print advertising. I’d pick the products to offer, design and write the ads, and place them with the magazines either directly or through an ad agency. Since most magazines had 60-day closing dates, I had to wait a long time from ad placement to results. During that time, things would change that sometimes affected results. It was hard to do meaningful tests.

After some time (again longer than I care to admit), I finally wised up and started testing product ads in newspapers, which had very short closing dates. I used The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal with good results. However, newspapers did not have a long life like the magazines so test results (although fairly quick) were somewhat different when rolled out in the magazines.

Email is now, right away, no waiting … just push the send button, take a deep breath and, to take a note from Sinatra, “start spreading the news” by reading the opens, click-throughs, Web site hits and order rates.

#3
Email makes testing easier and more economical. In addition to the immediacy factor, email has other benefits. You can test offers, ad copy, design, timing, from lines, subject lines, video, graphics — and many other things — all without expensive small-run printing costs.

Splitting the list into test segments is easy — all the results from the variety of tests are easy to read and evaluate.

Versioning is relatively easy in email, not just for testing, but for actual campaigns and newsletters. Just change the “from” line and a photo, maybe the banner, and your message can be from the sales rep for the particular account, or from one of your many distributors.

#4
Email is personal. It’s a perfect medium to deliver value to recipients. Send them interesting and helpful things. Don’t always try to sell them something. If you can help them, they will value you and your brand. You’ll build trust and establish a relationship. You need a technology that enables you to learn recipient preferences and tailor the emails to those preferences and needs.

What is the right email mix?
And the answer is … maybe all of them. You won’t know until you try all the types of email. Test each type, evaluate each type, create new types, and tie them to your other marketing media efforts and channels. If one type doesn’t work well today, it may next month so keep trying it, at least occasionally.

Test, evaluate, adapt. Tweak, analyze and tweak again. Remember, everything changes but with email, you can test and immediately take action using information from the tests. Informed guesses from a variety of touch points lead to better results, more customers.

The right email mix is variable, and it will change as the market changes and as channels change and new ones develop. Look at social media for example. What other new media or delivery method will develop? Whatever and whenever, take it from me, you must test and react. More touch points using a strong email mix equate to more business.