Opinion: What today’s marketers can learn from the direct mail era

“Test and Learn” is a ubiquitous phrase in any strategic marketing plan. We all know that brands should be testing all components of their marketing efforts, from brand positioning to creative messaging, to offers to the target audience, to marketing channels, to data sources. Yet, despite instant access to an enormous amount of data, many marketers have lost sight of what it actually means to truly “test and learn.” Too many brands merely pay lip service to the idea. I spent a good part of my career in the direct mail world where testing and learning was everything. One of my biggest clients was Reader’s Digest, a company that was revered for its prowess in this area. It set standards that everyone wanted to emulate. There was a war room on the company’s sprawling campus where every piece of mail ever sent to consumers hung on the wall with various phrases highlighted to indicate what had been tested and with detailed notes indicating how each had performed relative to the control. Similar rigor was also part of the marketing operations excellence at other leading direct marketing clients including Columbia House, Time Life and Book-of-the-Month Club. In a single piece of direct mail are a myriad of elements that can be tested against a standard control letter. Sure, changing the cost per issue or the number of “freebies” that come with a customer’s purchase could drastically change conversion—but so could subtle changes in copy, especially the copy customers could see before they even opened the package. Letters often had a highlighted box (called a “Johnson Box” after Frank Johnson, who invented this along with other classic direct mail techniques). A company might test 50 or 60 different phrases in this box to see what grabbed consumers’ attention. Believe it or not, a change in the use of words could yield a 10% to 15% lift in response rate. Marketers in those days could never have imagined the vast amount of data that we now have and how fast we get it. Decades ago, it took months to send out marketing materials, get responses, analyze what worked and redeploy after incorporating the learnings from results after testing. Today, we can set up A/B tests of copy, graphics and creative and get nearly instantaneous results. Think of an email subject line as the modern version of an envelope’s Johnson Box—in minutes we can know which combination of words had the highest open rate. In addition, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning can add to our ability to assess massive amounts of data quickly, uncover response patterns and predict future performance results. But testing is more than just access to the data. Brands need to identify their key performance indicators and start with clear goals and objectives. Testing also requires a bit of bravado (or, as I call it, chutzpah) because it costs money. Marketers have to commit to putting some short-term revenue at risk for the longer-term gains of learning what performs best before investing the budget into rolling it out. How much you test depends on your performance goals, risk tolerance in terms of spending and the desired short-term performance impact. This past year during the pandemic, testing took a bit of a back seat to measured advertising where performance could be more predictable. That’s understandable, but as life returns to this next normal, testing is more important than ever. Let’s face it, everything has changed from consumers’ media consumption to their shopping and buying patterns to their concerns around privacy. Couple this with the loss of the cookie as a unique identifier. Many brands invested in their direct-to-consumer platforms during the pandemic. Now it’s time to take a lesson from the masters of the past and make testing standard. One-off testing of a specific campaign is not sufficient. Continual testing should be part of any brand’s growth culture. The test matrix a brand comes up with should include many components. Here are six important steps for testing: Determine the KPIs you are measuring, such as front-end response, conversion, basket size, lifetime value, or ROAS. Set up a test design structure for each of the variables you are testing and determine the size of the test structure to make sure it is statistically significant and can truly forecast performance at scale. Determine the platforms/channels, such as email or online paid media, you are using for the test. Establish a test budget. Ensure that a database, such as a DMP, is set up to capture performance data and read results. Incorporate test results in the next round of owned or paid media. There is an art to testing and we need to make sure that it is not lost in the flood of available data. Technology is enabling us to put a modern-day twist on marketing and work at a much faster pace, but the truth is that nothing we do today is entirely new. We can learn a lot by looking backward and studying the past. And, while I’m not suggesting marketers set up a Reader’s Digest-style war room, I do think there is a lot to learn from the direct mail experts of the past. In a nutshell: Test, learn and repeat.

Opinion: What today’s marketers can learn from the direct mail era

Featured Stories