What to Focus on

Here's a gem from Drayton Bird's "Commonsense Direct Marketing". He did a test with panels covering a myriad of combinations of list, price, mail date, ways of responding and creative approaches. His goal was to quantify the relative importance of each. The graph below shows his findings: the response difference between the worst and the best performance of each factor.

Reading the Chart. The difference between the best list and the worst list was 6 times. For example, if the worst list got a 0.20% response rate, the best list got a 1.20% response.

This graph rings true for me from my 25 years of direct marketing testing. Audience is the most important factor in strategy, followed by offer. This is often expressed as the "40-40-20 Rule" Audience drives 40% of the response, as does offer. Creative is 20%. This is different from Drayton's findings, but I take both as illustrative rather than definitive.

I'll take it a step further. In planning you should start with a selection and understanding of audience, then move to offer and finish with creative. They all need to work together.