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Your online mentor for direct mail analysis and design Want to take your Marketing Analysts to the next level? Send them to DMsecrets.com, the online mentor for direct marketing analysis. Here you can learn the basics of designing valid marketing tests, creating meaningful back end analysis, determining confidence levels for lift between offers, calculating the ROI of your mail campaigns, and understanding how to make the most of your response models. In no time you'll be mailing smarter and learning more than ever from your campaigns! It all starts with your mailing list. Are you using the right ones? Choose your list source wisely. And before you even start planning your mailing, take ten minutes to put together a pro forma for your campaign. This will give you an idea whether you even have a chance of making money. Once you get the green light, you'll want to design your campaign. First, determine what your offer strategy will be. One straight offer, or a side by side test? If you're going to split your audience into two or more test groups, make sure you have enough sample size to draw sound conclusions on the back end. And don't forget the marketers best friend, the hold out group. Without it, you may be running blind. Next you need to develop your targeting strategy. This begins with segmenting your customer list. The premise here is that different groups of people have different characteristics. What's predictive of response for homeowners may not be so predictive for renters, for example. Now you are ready to create your selection criteria. This is where lots of marketers make mistakes by shooting from the hip. Watch out for the perils of single attribute cuts. Making twenty exclusions worked in the caveman days of direct marketing, but today there's a better way. You would be surprised how many marketers are still chopping the arms and legs off of their mailing list before they even get to their response model cuts. Try to keep your criteria narrow and let your response model do the targeting for you. Do you need a response model? You need a past mailing effort with enough responders. Once you build a killer response model, you are ready to make some decisions on mailing depth. Never mind how much budget you have - make your quantity decisions based on PROFIT. Mail too deep and you are throwing money away. Stop too short and you are leaving money on the table. Your quantity decisions come straight out of your gains table, where you will measure the profitability of each population decile. Once the mail drops, you sit back for a couple months and wait for the results to come in, then you put the back end analysis together. This is where you close the learning loop, measuring everything that you so carefully set up on the front end. If you do it right, your decisions for future campaign changes will be easy to make.
For all of these efforts, check out our handy analytics tool!
(Choosing your list) ...
(Building a pro forma) ...
(Creating your offer strategy) |