Send the same message another way, once: a call, a voice note, a handwritten card, a visit. People respond to effort they can see. Nobody has tested whether automated effort counts.
Three emails, no reply. Whatever you put in the fourth, it lands in the same inbox as the first three.
Send the same message another way, once: a phone call, a voice note, a LinkedIn message, a short handwritten card, a visit if you are nearby. Keep the words. What changes is how much effort the buyer can see behind them.
Salesmotion's win-back sequence. Day 7, a follow-up that gives the buyer something useful, such as a case study. Day 14, a different channel: a call, or a LinkedIn message if email has failed. Day 21, a short message built on what the buyer said they needed. Day 30, the breakup email. The change of channel is a planned step in the sequence, not a last resort.
The note in Garner's experiments. A short handwritten request on a sticky note, stuck to the front of a survey, asking the person to fill it in. The same words handwritten on the cover letter did less well, and so did a blank sticky note. It took the note and the words together.
Nobody has tested it on a stalled deal. The sales evidence is vendor figures with no comparison group.
The vendor figures, and who publishes them. Vidyard, which sells video messaging, had Demand Metric survey more than 600 sales leaders in 2021: more than 70% of reps who send personally recorded video said it raised their response rates. The figures are self-reported. Sendoso, which sells gifting and direct mail, repeats a marketing-industry claim, credited to Chief Marketer, that direct mail gets more than thirty times the response of email. Forrester's 2024 buying survey says buyers want about half of their contact with vendors to be with a person, which supports a human channel without testing one. Salesmotion puts the channel change on a fixed day as method, not measurement.
A handwritten note doubled survey returns. Randy Garner ran four studies on surveys sent with and without a handwritten sticky note, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2005. In one of them, 76% of the surveys with the note came back, against 36% with no note. Across the studies, people with the note also answered faster and more fully. A more personal note helped further when the survey was long and made no difference when it was short. Garner's reading is that the note turns the request into a personal favour.
Visible effort raises what people think a service is worth. Ryan Buell and Michael Norton ran five experiments with travel and dating websites, published in Management Science in 2011. People preferred a site that showed its search at work, even with a wait, to one that returned the same results instantly. They call it the labor illusion. Seeing the effort made the service seem worth more.
Voter contact ranks the channels. Donald Green and Alan Gerber's Get Out the Vote pulls together decades of field experiments. A conversation at the door produces about one extra vote for every fourteen people reached. Leaflets produce about one for every two hundred. Robocalls and mass email produce close to none. The more human the contact, the more it moved people.
The measured effects are survey returns, website ratings and votes, not deals. The vendor figures for video and mail have no comparison group and come from companies selling the channel. Nobody has tested whether the effect survives once the buyer can tell the effort was automated.
Keep the message and change the medium, once. People respond to effort they can see: a note in someone's hand, a search that visibly works, a person at the door. Whether an automated version keeps that effect is untested, so do not build your follow-up on it.