In any marketing program, testing the collateral you are putting out is essential for email and direct mail success. If you are not testing and analysing your results, you may continue making the same mistakes and lowering the ROI. A/B testing is one the best ways that a professional direct mail marketing company does to figure out what’s working for their target audience and what could be done to work better.
But, what exactly A/B testing is?
While A/B testing in direct mail and email marketing, you send one variation to set A of the mailing list and a second mailing to group B to see which version is performing better and bringing desired results. The results provide all sorts of information that marketers can use to make improvements in future mailings.
4 Ways to Perform A/B testing of Direct Mail & Email Marketing Strategies
1. Maximise your mail success
Before you begin your A/B testing, set a goal that you want to accomplish. It can include how many website visits you wish to generate, how many sales you want to make,or how many responses you want to receive. From there, you can determine if one of your tests is successful enough to proceed.
The more pieces of mail you send as part of the test via direct mail printing companies, the more reliable test results you will see. For example, when you test over 10,000 mailings, the results will be more reliable than if you test 2,000.
Remember to also include a method of tracking your results. Trace your results through QR codes, coupon offers, or phone calls to ensure that you have valid information after mailings.
2. Analyse the effectiveness of different offers
The offers that you present to your audience will help identify their efficiency. You may have the perfect copywriting and presentation, but if the offer isn’t attractive to the recipient, your chances of success are less.
Follow the method that direct mail campaign companies follow. Start by sending each segment of your audience a different offer to see what’s engaging the readers more. The difference could be subtle such as free shipping vs fast shipping or a dollar-based discount versus a percentage-based discount, but you may see a different response rate based on these small changes.
Remember that you don’t want to test too many variables at once because it becomes too difficult to attribute lift to a certain change. Instead, change the primary purpose of sending the mail in the first place to see which offer us performing better.
3. Test your Presentation
If you are set on a particular type of offer, you can also try phrasing the offer in different ways to give your information on how to best present it. The direct mail campaign companies suggest the elements that you can change during your tests including headlines, font sizes, imagery, the solution your product provides, and the expressions that you will use to make an offer.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to change the presentation too much each time because you will want to analyse which elements work, and which don’t. Start by changing one aspect and then notice a difference in your response rates.
When testing your presentation, it isn’t necessary that you make small changes to the font or headlines, either. You can test by implementing different marketing concepts. Testing concepts is essential when you’re just starting because it helps develop a starting point that you can tweak later through future A/B testing.
By tweaking your presentation with the help of direct mail campaign services, over time, you can provide your audience with advertising that closely matches their values.
4. Improve existing direct mail collateral
Just because a previous campaign performed well for you doesn’t mean that you will get a good response every time you send that collateral. The geographical area, time of year, any festive/social event, and other variables could also limit the effectiveness of a particular mailing.
Even top-performing mailpieces should be tested against new designs just to identify if it can be improved later. Many marketers refer to their standing best direct mail designs as the “control”, meaning it is the control group they use to benchmark effectiveness when experimenting with other designs.
By sending out completely different advertising to test against your existing mail collateral, you can expand your offering and reach a new audience who didn’t respond to previous marketing efforts. It allows you to send updates offers and the latest information, giving you a second chance to make a first impression. And if you find it overwhelming to do all on your own, take advantage of direct mail marketing companies in the USA.
Keep improving, keep testing
Continue to optimise your direct mail and email marketing using A/B testing at all times because your audience’s wants and needs will change over the years. Just because a particular style of advertising or offer worked in 2022 doesn’t mean it will continue to do so in the future, so you should always optimise it well, and keep implementing, testing, and bringing new ideas to market.
Final Words
As you plan A/B testing experiments, be mindful of the benefits of customization and personalization as part of your strategy. Also, consider retargeting opportunities from multiple digital marketing channels.
The ideas from this list of A/B testing to optimise your marketing strategies are only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other ways you can experiment with mailing. But once implemented and measured, you will be on your way to improving the effectiveness of your direct mail and email marketing campaigns. If you are not already leveraging technology for your direct mail campaigns, there is a direct mail marketing company in the USA that offers the ability to split the test into almost all elements using automated mail services.
