Continuity

Name of the pattern:

Continuity

Summary:

The continuity pattern is all about keeping in contact with the prospect or a customer to enable you to sell to him again and again.

How to use this pattern:

To apply the continuity pattern, customer action should commit him to repeat something on a regular basis, for example, to receive mail or to buy a new shipment of the product every month.

Continuity is a category of patterns and is implemented as one of the specific continuity patters.

Continuity for prospects is normally based on mailing list, subscription or membership patterns or a combination of them.

Continuity for customers (when the customer actually pays for being in a continuity) is normally based on subscription, membership, shopping/buyers club, monthly offers, automatic billing patterns in combination with some risk reversal patterns like risk-free inspection / try before you buy, cancel any time.

When to use this pattern:

Always when you need more than one time contact to reach your sales goals and make your business model work. That’s nearly always.

If working with prospects: when you want to present more offers, have longer exposure for conversion, and an opportunity to apply a sales funnel to name a few.

If working with paying customers: when you want much more stable income and an improved opportunity to upsell.

Attribution:

Core pre-Internet pattern (e.g. BMG Music Club, Gevalia Caffe,...)

Related patterns:

Mailing list, subscription, membership, shopping/buyers club, monthly offer, automatic billing patterns, risk reversal, risk-free inspection / try before you buy, cancel any time, opt-in continuity.

Related anti-patterns:

Forced continuity (although, there are different opinions on "anti" part)

Comments and details:

Getting a lead is expensive. You need to get as much as possible from each lead to break even and turn a profit.

With most traffic generation techniques and normal conversion rates this is very hard to achieve. Continuity instantly increases your conversions and, in time, profits. For example, if your conversion rate is about 1%, you get traffic with AdWords, and an AdWords click cost you 20 cents, then you need to make at least 0.20*100 = $20 profit on every sale to break even. If you get the prospect into a continuity program with a 10 article mini-course with 1% conversion rate each, then you conversion rate instantly jump to 10% (10 sales per 100 leads), so each sale only has to bring you a $2 profit to break even.

This also means that you can sell lower cost and lower margin products using a continuity pattern.

Continuity with sales is even more attractive because, especially with automatic billing, you get paid again and again until the member or subscriber leaves the program. This way you can concentrate on getting new customers while still enjoying income from existing ones.