One of our clients worked this out on his own, which is usually how the good ideas arrive. He had been buying phone data and calling it. Results were fine. Then he started taking the email addresses too, sending first and calling afterwards.
Same people. Same budget. A noticeably different conversation at the other end of the phone.
Why the order matters
A cold call starts from nothing. The person has never heard of you, has no idea why you are calling, and spends the first fifteen seconds deciding how to get off the phone. Whoever is making those calls knows exactly what that feels like.
A call to someone who received an email from you last Tuesday is a different exchange. They may not remember it clearly. They may not have opened it. But the name is faintly familiar, and faintly familiar is a long way from completely cold.
If they did open it, you are not making a cold call at all. You are following up.
What a sequence looks like
There is no single correct pattern, but a common one runs:
- Email. Low cost, scales to the whole list, does the explaining. Sets up everything that follows.
- SMS a few days later. Short, high visibility, and useful for the people who never open email. Needs a reason to exist — a deadline, an offer, something specific.
- Phone call. Expensive per contact, so it goes to the warmest part of the list: people who opened, clicked, or match your best profile.
- Direct mail for the ones worth it. Physical mail has become unusual enough to be noticed again, which makes it a strong close on a high-value segment.
The principle underneath is simple. Cheap channels go wide and qualify. Expensive channels go narrow and convert. Each step tells you who deserves the next one.
The part that makes it possible
You cannot run this with a phone-only file, and you cannot run it with an email list you are not allowed to email.
Australian law requires consent before a commercial email or SMS. Phone contact requires screening against the Do Not Call Register. A sequence across all three means every one of those bases has to be covered for the same person.
That is the quiet reason sequences are rarer than they should be. Most data is single-channel, and stitching together consented email, screened phone and a postal address for the same individual is harder than it sounds.
Our data is fully consented and we hold the consent ourselves, which is why we can supply the whole picture for one person rather than three separate files you have to match up.
Running it without four suppliers
The other reason sequences do not happen is logistics. Email on one platform, SMS on another, a call centre on a third, mail house on a fourth. The scheduling alone defeats most people, and if the SMS lands before the email the whole logic inverts.
We send all of it. Same system, same schedule, same list. The email goes Tuesday, the SMS goes Thursday, the call list is pulled Friday from who engaged. That is a configuration, not a project plan.
Start smaller than you think
If you have never run a sequence, do not begin with your whole database. Take a few thousand well-selected records and run email, then SMS, then calls to the people who engaged. Compare it against the same offer sent once to a larger list.
You will learn more from that than from any amount of planning, and it costs very little to find out.
Want to try a sequenced campaign on a small segment? We will build the selection and run all of it. Get in touch.
This article describes how we operate and is general information, not legal advice.
