How Direct Marketing Testing is like Star Wars
Posted on Tue, Jul 06, 2010
By Bill Goldstein, Vice President, Client Services
Yoda would have made a fantastic marketer. Being a diehard fan of the Star Wars films (yes, even the prequels); I cannot tell you how often his little nuggets of wisdom apply to our roles as direct response marketing strategists.
As we look forward to developing smart and innovative tests to grow our clients’ membership sizes, retain members, reduce expense, and improve revenues, consider some of these great quotes and how we can take them to heart in our testing strategies.
“Size matters not ... Look at me. Judge me by size, do you?” Too often, the tests which have the largest impact on our programs revenue and performance are the ones with the smallest changes to our packages and segmentation strategies. How many times has something as simple as 1st vs. 3rd class postage, a return address envelope vs. business reply envelope, or removing an insert dramatically improved results? It is important for us to be innovators. It is just as important to use best practices.
“Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.” Have you reviewed your client’s past testing results? Have the winning tests been rolled out yet? A strong testing agenda builds on what has been done so you are not repeating the same tests over and over again. If you have tested BRE vs. RAE multiple times, what is the consensus? You can save a client considerable expense by not repeating tests that are clearly one-sided.
“Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice.” We spend considerable time and expense developing new messages, creative and testing strategies to improve programs. But all that work is for naught if the control and test are not correctly set up. Make sure you have isolated only one variable that you are comparing, such as segments; there is a stratification of the data; and a large enough sample size to read results.
“Always in motion is the future.” A smart marketer never accepts the status quo. As direct marketing strategists, it is our job to always test the conventional wisdom for our client’s programs.
"Reckless he is. Matters are worse." While it is criminal to rollout 2 million pieces of acquisition mail without a single test – we also do not want to throw a bunch of tests into a large campaign to say we did testing. Test smart and test with a purpose! If possible develop a testing agenda during the budget process and lay out your strategies for the next 12 months.
May the force be with you.
Let us know what testing strategies you use? What’s made the biggest impact?