Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Assess and Improve

The final post in our series on direct marketing campaign planning is dedicated to studying the ways to assess where your campaign has been successful and to develop processes which will improve future marketing activities.

The first element of this process is to assess which elements were successful and to learn from the campaign by identifying:

• The segments which were most successful in terms of responses and revenue generated. It is also important to find out the reasons behind this as this will instrumental in shaping future marketing strategies.
• Which channels were most preferred by recipients and why.
• If there are any trends within the data and if there are any conclusions which can be drawn from these trends.
• The successful calls to action. The importance of the call to action within your marketing messages should never be underestimated and any opportunity to gain data on which have been most popular should be taken.
• If there were particular combinations of communication channels which was most successful, for example a direct mail message followed by telemarketing or a website/email combination.
• If there was an ideal time period to follow up on the original marketing message in order to generate the largest revenue.

The second clement is to use this information to improve future campaigns. This can be done by...

• Collecting and managing the analytical data gained throughout the campaign with the aim of building propensity models.
• Using these propensity models to create specific audience segments which are statistically most likely to respond to marketing messages.
• Using data about calls to action to find and implement refined marketing messages on a segment by segment basis.
• Use all of the data to indentify where and how it is possible to build the relationship over time, encouraging purchasing behaviour in the long term.

Throughout this series we have studied:

• The benefits of setting the foundations of your campaigns early on in the process by understanding your business and the campaign objective
• The importance of effectively managing your campaign data,
• Developing marketing messages which are targeted towards your audience, and
• How to handle your responses most efficiently and also how to measure the success of the campaign.

This final stage in the process reinforces the cyclical nature of direct marketing. Where the lessons learnt from one campaign form a significant element in the next; helping to improve the return on investment for direct marketing campaigns and build long lasting, profitable customer relationships.