Direct Marketing: The Art of Campaign Analysis

Here at Babcock & Jenkins we are dedicated to the art of applying strategy, analysis and data management to direct marketing campaigns for our clients. Foremost, we strongly believe that good marketing starts with good data.

Direct marketing requires far more thought than dropping 10,000 pieces of mail to your crusty prospect list and waiting for somebody to respond. It’s critical that your marketing efforts are based on a strong, empirical, well thought out strategy.

If you’re in the middle of a direct marketing effort, or just beginning one, there’s no better investment that you can make than taking the time to really look at what you’re doing and where you’re going—get it down on paper, share it, discuss it. Here are some key points to keep in mind:

Phase 1: Planning – start strong

ROI Financial Modeling. Start at the point-of-sale and then take the necessary time to fully understand the sales process. By understanding the back-end sales process and the numbers that drive success, you can build the most cost-effective front-end lead generation campaign. Every lead generation program should begin with a thorough assessment of the numbers and success metrics for the marketing campaign.

Target Audience. Once you understand the success criteria, you should begin analysis of who you are trying to reach and where you might find them. That includes demographic profiling of both customers and desired customers to characterize what types of prospects buy, and why. This step typically also includes competitive analysis, total audience sizing and pre-campaign surveying.

Test/Messaging Matrix. Who, what and when. Once you understand the best targets and how many of them there are, you can combine that analysis with your creative process to create a test matrix of targets and potential messages. Over the course of your campaigns you’ll fill in this matrix with real-world results, helping to tune strategies moving forward. Testing allows you to identify the most profitable strategies before you commit your entire budget to a single campaign.

Phase 2: Execution – react

Results Analysis. Nearly 100% of direct marketing campaigns we execute here at Babcock & Jenkins are built on our platform that provides real-time results. You may not have access to the same kind of technology, but however you manage responses, you should strive to get data as quickly as possible. The more you know about your campaigns quickly, the better you can react to unexpected problems or opportunities.

Beat the Control. At the heart of a truly disciplined marketing process is a commitment to strategies that are proven to work. Once workhorse formats, messages and audiences are identified, you should continue with those proven campaigns until they are beaten, head to head, with a test of a new approach. Too often companies wish to “reinvent the wheel” for every campaign, ultimately damaging long term results.

Phase 3: Post Op – 20/20 hindsight

Ongoing Review. No marketing program is ever perfect. In addition to ongoing analysis, each quarter you should measure results against annual goals (you have annual goals, right?), discuss changes to ongoing campaigns and incorporate new data into long term strategic planning. The end result is that your marketing activities remain in sync with your goals and are highly sensitive to issues that might derail your success.

It takes a village.

Babcock & Jenkins was founded on the idea of superior data leading to superior marketing. 30% of our employees are programmers and database experts, enabling this overall process to execute smoothly and automatically with every campaign. That said, you’ll find you’ll need to assemble your own team of partners, experts and vendors to accomplish everything that needs to be done. Great analysis and a disciplined approach can improve the impact of your marketing literally ten fold—it’s not something that you can afford to ignore.