Direct Marketing News

Youve got a good database, which you believe is correctly targeted for the market you want to reach with your sales letter.

Do you send your letter to all the names on that database?

No! Not until you are as sure as you can be that youll get the highest possible response.

How can you be certain? None of us are fortune tellers and, with so many outside influences affecting how our mailing is regarded, it means any campaign can, to a certain extent, be a bit of a gamble.

But any marketing expert worth their salt will explain how testing before launching any full-blown direct response sales letter campaign, can give you an edge; a better chance of succeeding.

By testing with smaller numbers first you avoid losing your hard earned money on a mailing campaign that could be doomed to failure.

The reality is, a letter you think will score a direct hit with your target audience may leave them cold. And testing is the only way to be confident that your final creation has the best chance of doing the job for you. But how, and what, do you test?

Here’s a step-by-step sequence you can follow to discover which sales letter works best for you…

What to Test:

Test as many variables as you can. Just a single word changed in a headline can turn a campaign completely around.

But the crucial thing to remember only test one element at a time. If you change more than one thing in your letter you won’t know which element has increased, or decreased, the response. And that could mean missing a huge amount of business.

Here are just a few of the elements you can test in your mailing campaign:

Headline; one against another
Opening paragraph
Sub heading content
Offer; one price against another
Letter length: short versus long
With/without sales brochure
Envelopes size/printed/plain/window
Response form

How To Test?

Split Testing, sometimes referred to as an A/B split, is usually the most effective way for establishing what works for you.

Split your target audience so each version of your letter goes to a similar number of people, with a similar level of appropriateness.

What on earth do you mean by that? I hear you ask.

To get the most accurate result you can, take your database of contacts and organise them by the most important targeting criteria, from your point of view. For example if you are targeting consumers with a high disposable income and dont have that information available you might organise your records by postcode, knowing where your wealthier prospects are likely to be living. If you are writing to businesses, you’d probably organise them by business types, or annual turnover or the number of employees they have.

Now you have relevant businesses, or people with similar demographics, following on from each other.

The next thing to do is to split your records into two ready to carry out an A/B split-test.

But you don’t do that by sending one letter to the first half and your second letter to the second half of your contacts. To carry out a true A/B split send letter 1 to the first contact, letter 2 to the second contact, letter 1 to the third contact and so on. Measuring Results You can’t measure results; compare the response to one letter against the other, unless you have some way of distinguishing which letter has created a response. That’s why a different code in each letter and on its accompanying reply form is so important. The code can be used to indicate what you are testing (e.g. headlines) as well as which letter elicited the response.

Make a note of how many letters were sent out in each grouping and then check the number of responses you got. Whichever performed the best, keep that as your control and test your next variation against that version.

If on your second test the new version gets a better result then that becomes your new control to test against. Continue this process until you find the best performing mailing package for you. Only at this point should you roll your final letter to the whole of your database.

Who Should You Include In Your Roll-Out Mailing?

A question I’m often asked is “Do I exclude the people I’ve already written to when we have our final letter ready to go?”

The answer is “If they’ve not already responded, no!”

Anyone who has not taken up your offer from any of your previous letters should be included in the roll-out mailing campaign. Even if they have already seen that same letter 2 or 3 weeks previously, you should still send it again.

Why?

Because people are busy they rarely remember exactly what your earlier letter said - especially if they didn’t read or do anything with it. And if they do recall seeing it, and perhaps meant to do something about it, this letter acts as a reminder for them and may boost your responses even further.

Useful Links:

Find the perfect jewellery gift online.