Testing Direct Marketing for Better Insights (and Better Campaigns)

​Whether you use direct mail, email or both, testing and refinement can help to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Most direct marketing managers are compulsive about testing, and for good reason: Testing yields customer insights that can help you boost response rates and increase profits.

Generally speaking, there are three direct mail testing and refinement processes:

• Baselining. Establishing baseline response rates allows you to set expectations for improvement.
• A/B Testing. This refers to the process of changing one element at a time to gauge the results. This is usually done with a small subset of your mailing list so that you can apply the benefits learned during A/B testing to the rest of your list, leading to a more cost-effective campaign.
• Multi-Variate Testing. This testing method is often used for multiple, large mailings and refers to the process of changing multiple elements of a campaign at the same time.

Be sure to test only one of the following elements at a time to ensure measurable results:
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• Offer. You can tweak your offer to include freebies, free shipping, “buy one, get one” specials, etc.
• Timing. Just a few weeks earlier or later can mean a big boost in response rates.
• Mailing List. Always test rented lists against your house list, but keep in mind that a qualified house list typically outperforms rented lists by 2 to1.
• Design. Try changing colors, fonts and headlines to find the sweet spot that can maximize impact.
• Copy/Messaging. Changing the messaging, including the call to action, can yield different results.

Response mechanism. Some customers prefer to call, some prefer to reply via the mail, some prefer to reply online. Test what works best with your audience.

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