To know whether your promotion works, start with the simplest number: how much went out from you. Next check how much came back, and only then look at income, which always arrives late.
The natural instinct is to ask first how good the message was, whether the wording worked and whether the design pulls. Those are legitimate questions, and still they are the wrong place to start.
Volume before content
The source offers a rough and useful measure: “Mail volume is important, quite aside from what the envelopes contain.”
In today's terms, the first number worth knowing is how many messages, approaches or updates left you. You control that number completely, and it comes before everything else.
The source also warns against the argument that usually starts here. As soon as people begin debating quality against quantity, it says, that shows somebody is uninformed.
There is a practical side as well. You can argue about wording for a long time without reaching a decision. The number of messages that went out can simply be counted, and it tells you at once whether there was enough promotion to expect a result.
Suppose a consultant who counted how many approaches she sent in a month. Seven. That explained her result better than any analysis of her wording.
Or a heating engineer who raised his output from twenty messages a month to fifty, with the wording left untouched. His enquiries rose in step.
The ratio
Once there is volume, the second measure is the ratio: how much came back out of what went out. The source divides it into levels, from poor promotion to what it calls a miracle, and the full table sits in the booklet.
It is worth noticing that the source qualifies its own figures. It says no exact index of this has ever been made, and it calls the numbers an educated guesstimate. So treat the table as a ruler that helps you see where you stand.
The rule drawn from it is simple: the better the promotion, the more comes back in proportion to what goes out.
Suppose a business owner who sent 200 messages and got 6 replies. Now he knows where he stands and what to aim at.
Or a consultant who sent 30 personal messages and got 12 replies. Her list is far smaller, and her ratio is far higher.
The ratio adds an angle that the count alone does not give. Someone who looks only at the number of replies could conclude that a big list works better, and the ratio shows that a few personal messages can bring back much more.
Income arrives late
Volume matters for another reason: it leads income. According to the source, a drop in what goes out is always followed by a drop in income within a few weeks, which makes it a warning: “So it's a valuable danger signal.” The reverse also holds. A rise in volume foreshadows a rise in income over the following weeks.
That makes volume a leading indicator. Your income a few weeks from now is largely settled by what you send this week.
Suppose a business owner who saw his enquiries fall and, after checking, traced the drop to a month in which he had sent nothing. Without knowing about the lag, he would never have connected the two.
Or a clinic owner who watches the number of approaches she sends as an early indicator, ahead of income. She sees problems weeks before they reach the bank.
Without knowing about the lag, it is easy to draw the opposite conclusions. A good month looks like proof that the promotion of that month worked, and a weak month looks like its failure, when both are the result of what went out some weeks earlier.
Why a weak month breeds a weaker one
A familiar trap follows. When a month is weak, the first thing cut is promotion. Because of the lag, that cut reaches your income some weeks later, and the month after is worse still.
Someone who understands the lag treats promotion in a weak month differently. They know that today's saving is the income drop of a few weeks from now. The reverse holds too: whoever keeps promoting through a weak month is building the income of the coming weeks, even before any result shows.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to measure and one to place yourself, followed by a self-check. It also holds the levels of the ratio in full.
The next time you want to know whether your promotion works, start with the volume that went out from you, and only then ask how good it was.