It's important to measure your marketing efforts so you can ensure that each one is worth the investment but also so you can improve the effectiveness of each marketing tactic. Consumers and businesses no longer fit into one major medium so we're not trying to compare everything to find the one marketing tactic we should use. Integrated marketing has proven itself time and time again. We want to make sure we can make a positive return on a specific tactic but more important we want to enhance the return of each marketing tactic.
The best way to improve on a specific marketing tactic is to create various test segments. These test segments are small but they allow you to test different offer, copy and creative strategies prior to sending to the main customer file.
One of the test segments that is often overlooked is the control group segment. A control group is a segment that never receives marketing tactics. The control group provides a way of understanding what would have happened if we didn't do marketing at all.
All advertising agencies would love you to believe that if you don't advertise you won't see a single sale. Obviously, that's not true but how many sales would you make without marketing and advertising. Unless you know you can't accurately tell if the marketing tactic is worth the investment. Each marketing tactic not only has to pay for itself but it has to do so at a level higher than doing nothing.
One thing to keep in mind is that your test segments should be very small. You don't need 50% of your customer file to test various offer/copy/creative strategies. You just need enough that you'll be able to see some movement to compare the various test segments against each other.
The highest performing offer/copy/creative strategy is the one that is sent to the rest of the customer file. This testing process takes out some of the guess work and provides real data on which offer/copy/creative works best.
If you have any questions feel free to contact us by going to our web site www.ontargetinteractive.com.
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