Why Direct Marketing Is Like Baseball

Another great article on Early to Rise , by Bob Bly. If you’ve ever used direct marketing in your business - you’ve got to read this!

Please leave a comment about how you test your marketing campaigns.

I heard on the radio a few weeks ago that the Florida Marlins, with 23 wins and 14 losses, has the best record in Major League baseball today.
But that means the best-performing team in professional baseball loses six out of every 10 games it plays.
And remember: That’s the best record in baseball.
What’s ironic is that businesspeople who accept this statistical truth about baseball without a second thought… go bonkers when even one of their marketing programs fails .
Experienced direct marketers know - and expect - a percentage of their test campaigns to under-perform the current control, or even lose money. They accept this fact without despair, because they know that if one test mailing in every two… or every three… or even every five is a winner, they can make a lot of money.
Inexperienced direct marketers don’t get this.
As a result, countless small businesses test direct marketing once every few years. And if they don’t hit a home run the first time at bat, loudly proclaim "Direct mail doesn’t work "… and abandon it.
If you’re a business owner or marketing professional, is there a better way to get direct marketing to work for you? Yes. And it’s nothing more than doing more testing than you do right now.
Let’s say you are planning to mail 5,000 postcards to drive people to a Web page.
You just can’t decide which of two headlines you like: "Tastes Great" or "Less Filling." If you randomly pick just one, your risk of going with the wrong sales appeal - and, therefore, having your postcard mailing bomb - is 50 percent.
A much better approach is to split the postcard mailing into two batches, half with the headline "Tastes Great" and the other half with "Less Filling." Each drives traffic to a different URL so you can measure the click-through and conversion rates. Then you see which one generates the most leads.
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