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When To Halt A Marketing Attack
 By Jay Conrad Levinson
©2003 All Rights Reserved
A concept for you to embrace is that a guerrilla marketing attack is never-ending. It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause in it. But you never stop it.
You spend a relatively brief time developing the attack and inaugurating it, but you spend the life of your business maintaining, monitoring and improving your attack. At no point should you fall into the pit of self-satisfaction because your attack is working. Never forget that others are studying you and doing their utmost to surpass you in the marketing arena.
Guerrillas thrive and prosper because they understand the deeper meanings of the phrases "customer base" and "long term commitment." They know that "relationship marketing" is more than a buzz phrase. This enables them to reinvent their marketing. An attack without flexibility is in danger of failing.
Keep alert for new niches at which you can aim your attack. Large companies don't have the luxury of profiting from a narrow niche. No matter how successful your attack, never lose contact with your customers. If you do, you lose your competitive advantage over huge companies that have too many layers of bureaucracy for personal contact. Guerrilla marketing is always authentic marketing and never acts or feels to be impersonal, by-the-number marketing. It never feels like selling.
Guerrillas know the enormous difference between their prospects and their prime prospects. This perspective enables them to narrow their aim only to the best prospects that marketing money can buy and the finest customers ever to grace their customer list. They treat all customers like royalty. They treat their best customers like family.
Once they have a customer, they do all they can to intensify the relationship, and they do not treat all customers and prospects equally. Consider the menswear chain with a database of 47,000 names. Mailings are never more than 3,000 at a time. Who receives the mail? Says the owner, "Only the people appropriate to mail to." When he received trousers of a specific style, he mailed only to those customers to whom he was certain they'd appeal -- and enjoyed a 30% response rate.
The cost of his mailing was a tiny fraction of the size of his profits. There's not a chance of reveling in a healthy response like that unless you're targeting your mailing with absolute precision. Recall the non-profit organization that increased its response rate 668% by treating its big donors special -- mailing to them with a handwritten envelope using a commemorative stamp and a handwritten 25-word note at the end of the letter. The cost to do this was low, indeed. But the payoff proved the value of precision and narrow-mindedness in a guerrilla marketing attack.
JAY CONRAD LEVINSON
is the author of the "Guerrilla Marketing" series of books, the most popular marketing series in history with 14 million sold, now in 39 languages. At his new GuerrillaMarketingAssociation.com, you'll find a new source of profit-producing ideas plus a list of 100 marketing weapons. Join up for telephone and online access to The Father of Guerrilla Marketing.)
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