Put Your Marketing to the Test

In 1961 Dick Benson founded the first advertising agency specializing in direct mail. Eight years later he turned it into a consulting organization and worked with companies across the U.S.

Copywriter Chris Stagg said of Dick Benson, “They risked his bark and his bite because the rewards were so great. They listened, they learned and they followed all the way to the top.”

My path crossed with Dick Benson in the 1970s when the company I worked for hired him as a consultant. Of the many lessons I learned from him, the most important is the value of testing. He preached it relentlessly, and he practiced what he preached.

Testing can increase your advertising effectiveness 400%. Testing can open a new market that delivers an 80% return on your investment. Testing can let you raise your price and increase sales at the same time.

In his powerful little book Benson on Testing (© 1991) Dick Benson states, “The ultimate criteria for testing are risk and reward. I’ve very, very seldom had a client who did enough testing… certainly not enough of the kind that matters.”

Because of Dick’s advice to the company I worked for in the 1970s, I was given budgets to do testing. I was responsible for new customer acquisition. And I saw at an early stage in my career that the monetary rewards from testing were much greater than the higher budgets required to test.

Today, however, it is more difficult than ever to convince companies that the cost of testing will pay off many times over in better results. But it’s a fact. Testing is one of the best investments you can make in your business.

Here are some of the most significant things I’ve learned from testing, and the strategies you can employ to use testing to improve your marketing results.

Ad Creatives. The biggest difference I’ve seen from ad testing is an increase of over 400% in response, which I mentioned earlier. Many magazines will accept A/B split ads so you can test one ad creative vs. another in an exact control.

Here is how an A/B split works (for those of you who might be unfamiliar with this): You run two different ads for the same product, service or destination. One ad is the A ad, the other the B ad. The magazine puts the A ad into half of the circulation and the B ad into the other half. They do this on an every-other-name basis so that your ads have the same distribution pattern.

Code the ads so you can measure the response. Then track which ad creative gets the most people to call, visit, go online, or clip your coupon. In order to validate my testing, I did the same A/B split in two different magazines at the same time. I had the same 400% increase from both magazines.

In planning your advertising strategy, produce multiple ads and test them. When you find the ad that works the best, that is the ad you want to run in a full media schedule.

Offers. I have done a lot of offer testing. Most people use price discounts as offers. In my experience I have found that free merchandise/gifts, with a perceived value, are more motivational than discounts. The closer the match of the gift to the purchase being considered, the better the offer will work.

An example of this is jewelry. An offer to give matching earrings as a gift when the person buys a necklace will sell more necklaces than a discount price offered on the necklace. When the free gift increases the value of the purchase, it is more important than saving dollars on the purchase.

Testing offers will show you which offers produce the biggest response. If you are set on using price discounts as your offers, then test the different ways to show the discount. 50% off is the same to you as 2 for the price of one. The wording makes a big difference as well. Buy one get one free is the same as 2 for the price of one, yet buy one get one free is the stronger offer. The reason is the use of the word free.

The psychology of 2 for the price of one is more complex because it requires the customer to think about whether he/she really wants 2. With buy one get one free, the psychology requires the person to only think about buying 1. The second one is free.

Price. One of the most amazing results I’ve had from testing was to learn that I could raise the price of a product and actually get more people to buy it than when it was at a cheaper price.

This demonstrates that value can trump price in the mind of the consumer. In actuality, a higher price is often perceived as a better value. If it’s too cheap, there must be a reason.

Price testing can be done cleanly in direct mail. It is best to keep the price increments small. For example, if you are selling an item for $29.95 test raising it to $34.95. If you make more money at $34.95 by maintaining your sales volume or, even better by increasing it, then test selling at $37.95 vs. $34.95. Continue to test increases in small increments until you discover the threshold at which the buyer no longer feels the value relates to the price.

Mailing Lists. Most companies doing direct mail get a mailing list and send out their package. If you want direct mail to be an important part of your marketing strategy, then you need to do list testing. A good direct mail campaign will use a minimum of four different lists.

Each list will be assigned a unique code that stays with each name on the list. Send the same package or mailer to each list and measure which list(s) generate the best response. It is likely that some names will appear on more than one list. When this happens, take those names, called duplicates, out of the original list source (maintaining the master records so you can do a back-match), and mail all the duplicates as a fifth list. This fifth list of duplicates should be your best group of names.

These are just a few of the ways you can improve your marketing results through testing. There are many more.

One of the most cost-effective new mediums for testing is e-mail. Outbound e-mail offers many opportunities to test, especially in subject lines and e-mail headlines. You may get a great response from an e-mail headline that says “Get Whiter Teeth in 30 days.” But you’ll greatly increase the response if the headline says “Free Trial Product Makes Your Teeth Whiter.” The reason is that the first headline makes a promise, the second headline makes an offer. Offers outpull promises.

Testing should be a vital part of your business strategy. You should have a testing budget allocated each year. Never stop. Even when a test provides you with a more profitable price, offer, or creative, continue to test against it. This is just the tip of testing. You can test media sources, seasonality, designs, copy points, frequencies, personalization, use of color and much more.

Dick Benson’s testing strategies were proven successful time and again by companies such as American Express, the Wall Street Journal, the Children’s Television Workshop, McGraw Hill and many others much too numerous to mention. As Dick Benson, the master of testing said, “It is only by testing that your business is going to move ahead.”

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