Rinse and repeat. It’s a great approach to washing your hair, not so great for your marketing. It’s all too tempting to just keep things ticking over, especially if you’re already seeing positive results. But good marketing is about constant optimisation, there’s pretty much always something that could be improved.
It’s not just about using data from the last campaign to tweak the next one, it’s about using every campaign you’ve ever done, in fact, everything you’ve ever done, and using that experience and expertise to guide decisions. Constantly re-evaluating your activity and coming up with ideas to test and optimise. It’s about putting robust reporting in place so that you have the information you need to know what’s working and what’s not.
For example, you might be sending out mailers to audiences that simply aren’t responding, a quick look at the tracked response rates could give you an indication of which of your audiences isn’t responding to the marketing. It could be that you tailor a new message to specifically try and target that audience, or it could be that you simply don’t send anything to those audiences, and you achieve the same response to your campaign but with a much lower cost.
If you’re sitting there feeling a bit daunted by this and don’t know where to start when it comes to putting more thought into your direct mail activity, then don’t worry because we have packaged up our brains for you to use. We call it PSE Wisdom.
Our experience and expertise is no longer something in the back of our minds or simply instinct. It’s a giant shared brain that is packed full of data to draw insights from that will shape future campaign planning and execution.
It’s been a mammoth task collating our records, but now it’s super easy to extract what we need to know what works.
Databasing our historical data gives us powerful insights into what works and what doesn’t, and we can use this to create really accurate benchmarks for future campaigns. We can filter our results to create customised benchmarks such as only including data for clients that are in the same sector as another client for example, or campaigns that are using the same format, or both.
This means we can help our clients to better budget for campaigns, and to know what ROI to expect before a penny has even been spent. It is basically us being able to optimise campaigns before the campaign has even started.
We’ve even gone and created a free online ROI calculator to help you discover how effective your offline marketing can be. Try our free online ROI calculator here.
If you’re struggling to put more thought into your marketing, and you’re finding yourself doing the same thing over and over, even if it’s working – it could be working better, so get in touch with our team today to kick-start your test, learn, optimise culture.
