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Testing is a direct mail marketer’s secret weapon. No other means of advertising can be tested, refined, and tested again with the same mathematical precision as creative direct mail. Once you have detailed, up-to-date customer and prospect data, you can test the various components of a direct mail offer (such as the offer, copy, design, and list) as well as the various delivery and response methods (direct mail, email, personalized landing pages, phone).

What should you test? Crystal Uppercue, marketing manager at EU Services, recommends focusing on these three components:

• List(s). Experts agree that the mailing lists you use are the single most important component of a direct marketing campaign, accounting for about 40 percent of the impact on your results. You can test compiled lists, exchanged lists, or subsets of your house list.

• Offer. The offer accounts for about 30 percent of the impact on your results. Test only one element of the offer at a time — the “ask” amount, the price or interest rate, the discount, the premium, etc.

• Creative. Together, the copy you write and the design in which you package the offer account for about 30 percent of a campaign’s impact. Creative comprises a number of subcomponents: package design, personalization, type of postage, testimonials, length of letter, use of color, whether to include any additional inserts, email subject line, etc.

Answering the Quantity Question

Now that you’ve identified the packages and direct mail campaigns you want to test, your next question is likely to be: How many pieces should I mail? When you need a quick answer, follow the Rule of 100: test-mail enough pieces to generate a minimum of 100 responses. To determine the number, you will need to work backwards from the response rate you anticipate (or have obtained with a control). For example, if you expect a 2.5 percent response rate, you will need an audience of 4,000 for a test mailing (4,000 x .025 = 100 responses).

Compare Apples to Apples

The way to tell which test performs better is through a cost-versus-revenue analysis. For example, let’s assume you are testing 5,000 pieces featuring new creative against your normal 100,000-piece mailing (the control). To accurately evaluate the results of the test versus the control, you have to calculate the price of mailing the test on the basis of a 100,000-piece mailing, even if in the actual test you’re only mailing 5,000 pieces.

• The cost of putting 100,000 control packages in the mail = 67 cents each

• The cost of putting 5,000 test packages in the mail = $1.34 apiece

• The cost of putting 100,000 test packages in the mail = 72 cents each

In short, you have to compare the rate of return and the $.67 versus $.72 price in order to judge which package really performs better. The bottom line: Testing is an essential activity in direct marketing.