Real-Life Example of Marketing Campaign Testing

My Financial Services client had a customer list of 30,000 names for a back-end (selling to existing customers) promotion.

This particular promotion was loans for homeowners. The average size loan was £10,000.

Up to that point they had been sending a similar email with no personalisation or compelling appeal that a good direct response copywriter revels in. So I saw an opportunity for a big increase in ROI on this campaign.

Here's how it turned out…

• list 30k
• average order 10k
• expected response 0.05% = 15
• expected conversion of that 3% = 0 new customers
• Marketing costs = £2,000

They got a customer once every several months from that particular promotion. Remember, these are people that had taken a substantial loan in the past few years already.

For our test with my long copy against the agencies creative we split the list.

15k names at 0.05% is 8 projected leads from their creative.

How much better could I do?

15k names on my long copy produced a response of 61 leads, which was a 0.4% response off the list. The existing creative had a response of 10 leads (near enough their projected 8.

This meant a 610% increase in response (My 61 against there 10). That was huge for the client, who then wanted me to train their copywriters in some direct response copywriting principles (opens new window).

Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

And because of the personal nature, and genuine human appeal of my copy the client had 2 buyers, at approximately 10k each (a £20,000 return).

Marketing costs = £1,000 (half of the full cost of £2,000 given that we did a split test)

Return = £20,000

A huge ROMI of 1900%.

But this was still only the beginning as I saw it…

• I began work with the client on their loan information pack to increase actual conversion rates after the new lead generation.
• I also began to plan a follow-up series to the list of 15k that had received my email
• Plus another campaign to the 59 leads who responded to the first email but hadn't yet converted.
• And the email would also (ofcourse!) be sent to the other half of the list that hadn't yet received it.

Through integrated marketing, opportunities to increase ROI are endless.

You can read the copy I wrote for that initial split test on the Email Marketing page (link opens new window). Or read more about Tracking and Testing here.

Originally posted 2008-08-07 10:02:37.

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