Why marketing tactics decay, and what to do about it

A marketing tactic that once brought in good leads can become harder to justify. Your team is still doing the work, but it takes more messages, more creative or more spending to get the same result. You have to decide whether to improve the campaign, reduce its budget or put that money somewhere else.

I faced that decision while running Lead Cookie, an outreach business. The outreach that helped build the business became harder to deliver, and copying the old approach at greater volume was a poor answer. Improving it meant changing the service, its price and the team behind it.

The useful lesson for a marketing leader is to understand what gave a tactic its advantage and whether that advantage still exists. I'd investigate where performance has weakened before changing channels, then test a specific response while there is still room to learn.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which this essay links to.

Why does a tactic that once worked lose its advantage?

The conditions behind its early results change. Andrew Chen named the pattern the law of shitty clickthroughs (opens in a new tab) in a 2012 essay and described three main drivers: people get used to a message and learn to ignore it, competitors copy what works, and growth carries a campaign past the early customers most likely to respond.

Those are different problems. A familiar message may need a better idea. An offer that looks like every competitor's needs a clearer reason to choose it. A campaign that reaches a less suitable audience needs its targeting reconsidered.

I would use Chen's argument to question the assumption that early results will hold as spending grows, while keeping other explanations open. A tracking change, a delivery problem or slower sales follow-up can produce the same drop in a report.

What happened at Lead Cookie

Before Lead Cookie, in the cold-email campaigns for my first company, 100 emails sent by hand could bring in three or four clients. By April 2020, I was seeing a much harder market. Sending tools and widely copied scripts had made outreach easier to reproduce, more email was landing in spam folders, and responses were harder to get.

I saw a similar change on LinkedIn. When I began using it heavily in early 2017, a decent offer could lead to calls and deals without much selling. Over time, I saw more generic messages and automation, alongside LinkedIn's restrictions on outreach.

Even if a message reached someone, they still needed a reason to answer it. A familiar sales pitch had to compete with other pitches that looked much the same.

I was slow to act. After I recognized where the industry was heading, I spent almost six months unsure what to do. Then the team began developing new capabilities and service lines in small weekly steps, and by May 2020 it had been doing that for a year.

Lead Cookie was moving away from a standardized package toward lower-volume, higher-quality work. Appointment setting and cold calling were part of that shift, alongside more specific targeting and an option to have leads qualified by hand.

The transition was difficult. Better work cost more, so I needed customers willing to pay more. The team needed new systems and training. A sale that had taken one call moved to two. The new model also needed fewer people with a different mix of skills, which meant layoffs.

I saw better results from the quality-focused tests than from our standard outreach. By May 2020, nearly 35% of Lead Cookie's revenue came from the higher-quality services.

That experience is why I would put the cost of changing delivery into the marketing decision early. A promise of more relevant outreach means little if the budget still assumes the same amount of research, the same skills and the same production process.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

Find where performance has weakened

Start by finding the stage where results changed: delivery, response, qualification or sales conversion. Each stage points to a different fix, and at any of them the weaker results may come only from newer audiences.

Compare similar audiences and offers over a period long enough for the expected response to arrive, and check whether tracking, delivery, staffing or sales follow-up changed at the same time.

A lower click-through rate alone would not make me abandon a campaign that still produces qualified opportunities at an acceptable cost.

This assumes the tactic used to work. If a campaign never produced good results, the question is a different one, and why your marketing isn't working is the better starting point: it asks whether the message, the market or the medium is wrong.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

As of October 2026, Google's sender guidelines (opens in a new tab) for delivery to personal Gmail accounts advise keeping the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10%, never letting it reach 0.30%, and emailing only people who signed up to receive messages. Google says these guidelines do not apply to messages sent to Google Workspace accounts (opens in a new tab).

Use the diagnosis to choose a test. If delivery has broken, fix that first. If the wrong people are responding, investigate targeting and the offer before commissioning another set of creative. If similar prospects have seen the same ad so often that they stop noticing it, that is audience fatigue, and the guide to user fatigue in social ads goes deeper into that problem.

The diagnosis also settles the budget question: repair, reduce or stop. If it finds an execution problem, such as broken delivery, a stale message or weak follow-up, repair it before judging the channel. If execution is sound but each qualified opportunity now costs more than the business can justify, reduce spending to the audiences and offers that still pay back, and use the difference to fund tests. Stop when even those segments no longer earn their cost. At Lead Cookie, the standard service still worked for some customers, and in May 2020 we were selling it alongside the higher-quality services.

Make relevance worth paying for

At Lead Cookie, we targeted smaller segments for each customer instead of sending one message to every prospect, so each group could hear something that mattered to it. Our higher-quality service also cost more to deliver. I'd judge extra research and production work by whether it brings in qualified opportunities at a cost the business can accept.

Chen made a related point in the same essay: "When you are marketing with useful information, then CTRs stay high." Advertising that offers only novelty, he wrote, has a limited shelf life.

For an enterprise campaign, I'd start with the decision the buyer faces. A hypothetical campaign for finance leaders preparing to integrate an acquisition gives the team a specific problem to address. It can explain how the service helps with that integration and provide evidence from comparable work. Simply adding the executive's name and company to a generic pitch would leave the substance unchanged.

If more research means the team reaches fewer contacts, the better results have to cover that cost. Treat a smaller send as an operating choice to test, and measure it by the opportunities it creates.

For a buyer comparing agencies, I'd ask how the proposed team learns about your customers' needs. Who speaks to customers? Who turns those conversations into a useful message? What work is included in the fee? Those questions make a promise of quality concrete enough to evaluate.

How do you test alternatives without losing what still works?

Test a small number of alternatives while the channel that still pays stays properly staffed. It is still earning money, and a neglected channel would make any comparison with the new tests misleading.

Find a channel that produces results, build a repeatable process around it and scale it. Once that process is running, test another channel. I learned that from Russ Perry, who I believe first opened my eyes to it, and from Alex McClafferty, a business advisor I had worked with years earlier. I explained it in a November 2021 podcast episode on marketing.

At Content Allies, when a second channel began working well, we neglected the first. I eventually hired someone to run the earlier channel because it still produced a return. A channel that has lost its owner's attention deserves a different response from one whose economics have deteriorated despite good execution.

My advice in that episode was to test two or three channels at a time and look for early signs of progress over about three months. For an enterprise team, I'd set the review period around the evidence the campaign can reasonably produce. If a sale takes longer than the test window, define the earlier progress that would justify continuing, then follow those opportunities through to the sales outcome.

Before a test starts, agree on the audience, offer, budget, owner and review date. Write down what result would justify more investment, what would prompt a revision and what would cause you to stop.

I'd be careful with an agency's case study here. Ask when the results were achieved, who the campaign reached and how much work went into them, then what the agency would test for your business. A previous result is a reason to investigate the approach; your own test still has to show whether it works for you.

What to bring to the next budget review

I'd want the team to answer these questions before recommending either more volume or a new channel:

• Where exactly have results weakened, and what changed at the same time?
• Is that an execution problem we can repair, or does each qualified opportunity now cost more even when the work is done well?
• Which audience and offer still produce qualified opportunities at an acceptable cost?
• What specific improvement are we testing, and what will the extra work cost?
• Who will keep the working campaigns running while the test takes place?
• What evidence will determine the next investment decision, and when will we review it?

The mistake I made at Lead Cookie was waiting after I could already see the problem. I'd start with a change small enough to try and clear enough to learn from. You do not need to replace the entire marketing program to find out whether a more relevant message, a better-qualified audience or another channel deserves more of the budget.

Which part of your marketing needs that test first?