Here's an example of that analysis in action. It's a direct mail campaign. The organization's control package was a freemium notepad package. The test package removed the freemium. The thinking was that the freemium was an old folks gimmick and that it was a turn-off for more "mission minded" younger prospects.
Hypothesis: the freemium package would win over the mission package among older prospects and the opposite would be true among younger prospects.
The packages were tested with randomly selected panels from the client's continuation lists. We appended age information after the fact.
The age split that yielded the largest mail quantities for test reliability was at the 70 year mark. The 70+ year olds were mailed 21,000 of each package and the under 70 year olds got 15,000. This first point is that their DM continuation lists were weighted heavily toward the older end.
The graph below shows the response rates of the two packages by age:
As we expected, the Notepad package had a nice lift in response among the 70+ prospects (mostly Silent Generation). Contrary to our hypothesis, the Notepad also won among younger prospects (mostly Boomers).
The mind-blower is that the freemium had a higher lift with the under 70 crowd -- a 55% lift versus the 30% lift for their older counterparts.
The good news is that the control optimized performance from both age groups. But this finding also gives rise to developing freemiums that are specifically tailored to younger prospects.
I'll keep you posted.
