A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to our Marketing head about the impact of marketing campaigns on traffic to our website and app. Well, to be honest, it was less talking from my side and more explaining from his side.

Our traffic has been growing tremendously all through this financial year, and while looking at the growth graphs, one of the key things that could be noticed was the impact of marketing campaigns.

While the organic traffic growth was at a steady pace, there were bumps in growth every now and then, before returning to the organic pace of growth. But, each time, the point it returned to (in terms of the absolute traffic number) was higher than where the absolute number would have been had it grown at the organic pace for the duration of the campaign.

If this is not true of any of your marketing campaigns, then the campaign has failed at driving up traffic to your site and app. This is interesting, yes, but not as interesting as the other side of this graph.

This is the graph that is seen by someone running the marketing campaign. But there are thousands of graphs, one for every person that has been touched by the marketing campaign. These people will have some people who are encountering the advertised product for the first time and some who are encountering it for not their first time (I want to draw these graphs, but it's 1am on a Saturday night and I've been writing for the last one hour, so I'll describe the graphs instead as I'm a bit lazy at this point to draw them). Let's look at both the cases. And in both cases, I will only look at the people who decide to interact with the product (download it, use it, whatever) after seeing the ad.

In the first case, the person is coming across your product for the first time. So, the interaction level jumps up from zero to some non-zero level X. Over a period of time, which could be anywhere between a few seconds and a few months, the user's interaction level falls to a level Y, which is anywhere between X and 0 (with the probability steadily increasing as the level approaches 0). Once it falls below a certain level is potentially a good time to launch the next marketing campaign. And since our products have multiple users (unlike our relationships which I will soon come to), we need to wait till a sizable number of users fall below the threshold interaction level before launching the next marketing campaign.

And the reaction to the next marketing campaign goes pretty much like the first except for the fact that some of the people don't react and drop off being your users.

If you observe any of your relationships, you will notice a similar pattern. This is not just in romantic relationships, but in relationships of any kind with any person or with any inanimate object or even intangible things like habits and feelings (motivation, depression, you name it). The equivalent of a marketing campaign here is an event. This event can be anything from a Friday night-out, a phone call, a meaningful conversation, a gesture, a fight, a letter, to something more physical.

The first time such an event occurs, there is a spike in the interaction level (or intimacy, or anything else that suits the relationship in question) from 0 to a level X, which soon (anywhere between a few seconds to a few months) falls to a level Y, which is anywhere between X and 0 (with the probability steadily increasing as the level approaches 0). This is the time to experience another event. And even here, there is a possibility of drop-off at each event.

I have always known it is necessary to do new things now and then to sustain a relationship and to keep it fresh (again, not just applicable to romantic relationships, but of every kind), but only now have I been able to theorize it in seemingly technical terms.

So, do you run marketing campaigns in your relationships? You should!



PS: I decided to draw a graph after all.