If you aren't split testing your direct mail and other marketing campaigns you are wasting money and missing out on opportunities for more sales! How can I say this with such certainty? Easy because people rarely react exactly how we think they will, so if you are not testing your message chances are you have not hit on the optimum message for your target audience and so your sales are suffering.

Sure you might be getting some sales doing the same old mail out as you have in the past but what if you could double or triple your sales results.

If you use Google's adwords you are probably already aware of what Split Testing is about but for those not as familiar with this term here is a simple explanation.

"Split Testing is a process where you compare the results from two or more different messages to see which message produces the best results. By continually removing the poorer performing message and replacing it with a new message, over time you will arrive at a message that has the most appeal to your audience."

The real beauty of split testing though, is that small incremental improvements compound over time, often resulting in 100%, 200% or more increases in sales.

Split testing has been used by expert direct marketers for probably as long as people have been sending mail, however split testing as a marketing strategy has only recently come back into vogue for most marketers since Google developed adwords.

Unfortunately it is not quite as easy to split test direct mail as in adwords but that is no reason why you shouldn't try.

Split Testing Plan

Here is a simple plan you could follow to split test your direct mail campaign.

1) Firstly you need to only make slight changes. Sending out 2 completely different mail outs will only confuse the issue.

2) Secondly you need a large enough sample size to make differences in response statistically accurate, at least 1000 is probably needed.

3) Thirdly start with big factors first.

Often the biggest obstacle in getting sales from direct mail is just getting them to open the mail or read pass the heading. So a great starting point for split testing is to test the envelope and the heading. If you use a mail house you can easily get them to print two different messages on the front of the envelope. Or to really speed the testing process up, why not test two changes at the same time?

So I would also print 2 letters or flyers with a different heading on the top. So now you have 2 different envelopes and 2 different headings.

So if you have a mailing list of 4000 you could send 1000 each as per the following;

Envelope 1 Heading 1

Envelope 1 Heading 2

Envelope 2 Heading 1

Envelope 2 Heading 2

Now to track you results you might have a different promotion code that the client needs to quote to get the offer say E1H1, E2H1 etc. Or alternatively send 1000 each a week or two apart. (Not quite as accurate but maybe easier to manage and less printing changes)

Now by analysing the results you can see which envelope and which heading performs the best; For example say results were as follows.

Envelope 1 Heading 1 - 2.5%

Envelope 1 Heading 2 - 4.0%

Envelope 2 Heading 1 - 3.5%

Envelope 2 Heading 2 - 4.5%

From this example you can see that Heading 2 out performed heading 1 and also envelope 2 outperformed envelope 1.

Ok now the next time you do a mail out use heading 2 and envelope 2 and test this against a new heading and envelope or use the same procedure to test two different offers, or changes to your sales copy.

By continually improving your message you can literally increase your sales by 100% or more but how is this possible? The answer is in the effect of factors which works much like compound interest. A 15% improvement can equate to 100% in sales.

The compounding power of factors is explained further in my blog link below

Thank you for reading this far, I hope you found this article helpful.