In the past, having a conversion rate when using direct mail, one percent was acceptable. A response rate is an important metric for analyzing a mailing or any other communication channel your customers may prefer. But a high response rate is not always the best goal. If you’re trying to generate sales leads for a high-dollar service where the contract might be over one million dollars, a single reply that results in a sale might give you a low response rate, but it would likely represent a significant return on investment.

Therefore, your goal is not to maximize response but to maximize profit. Direct mailers in the past century would continually buy more lists to increase their mailing number hoping to get more responses. Hence, the name, junk mail.

Profit is a good thing. So, how do we raise our profit? One way is a mindset of delivering an order, direct to the customer, and add another channel, such email or social media channel, and test to verify your outcome. Testing allows adjustments which can create a nice increase to maximize your profit. While there is a lot of creativity that goes into writing and designing communications, testing should be a careful and disciplined process. This is another example of using science in your marketing efforts within our data driven era.

Test one item at a time. It may be tempting to test a variety of ideas in every message. If so, it’s impossible to know what element is responsible for changing your results.  For example, if you use a new subject line at the same time trying a new segment, which change will affect your results? By testing only one change per message, you can immediately see what causes your positive or negative results.

If you want to improve your landing page conversions, then use split testing, better known as A/B testing. For example, use A/B testing with two versions of your landing page that are almost entirely the same but have one specific difference you want to test. For instance, you could A/B test which headline or offer converts more by creating one page with a headline or offer A and the other headline with an offer B. Half of your visitors will see version A and the other half will see version B.

Test against your “control.” A/B testing can work with any communication channel you want. Even your control can be an email that has proven to be a winner. Once you have determined a winner, you can test other email messages or formats against it. This type of testing works like a contest, with the old and new competing against each other. If your control wins, you know you should continue using it. If the challenger wins, you know you might have a new control and should consider emailing the new message or format instead. While there is a lot of creativity that goes into writing and designing your marketing communications, testing should be a careful and disciplined process.  The key takeaway is to test one marketing or advertisement message at a time. Plus, check out your analytics for additional campaign insights for maximizing your profit.

So, by now we can assume, quality pays?