Test your direct mail campaigns

Profitability is key

Direct mail is one of the easiest marketing activities to test. The key is to test a sample that is big enough to predict a response rate.

Despite what you may have heard, there is no such thing as a typical response rate. Some will achieve 1% while others 30%. Well targeted campaigns can get well over half. (If your campaign was offering a free drink to students, then you could probably expect a very high response rate!)
The important thing is what the profitable response rate is for you. If you are selling £15 CDs, you need a much higher response rate from your campaign that if you are selling £2m houses.
It is very important to understand the long term value of customers in order to determine

Try to sample a quantity that does not cost you a huge amount, but which gives you enough responses to predict the profitability. Aim for 15 to 20 responses. Depending on what you are promoting and whether you are targeting customers or non-customers, this could mean a sample of a few hundred or a few thousand.

Once you get the desired outcome, keep testing! There are various elements you can adapt to try and improve your response rate further, for example:

Headline
Packaging – type, colour and writing on it
Price or promotion
List criteria
Covering letter
Accompanying brochure

Do not test more than one element at a time though or you will not know what made the difference.

Go to my marketing team home page from direct mail testing.

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