Testing Creative for Higher Response

Direct mailers test creative in the mail, always trying to “beat” the control package. In our business, each new catalog needs to look sufficiently different from the last, while still adequately portraying brand image. You need to keep things fresh, but you also have to guard against pushing your brand too far. If you’re only in the mail once with a cover, how do you achieve this?

At Crutchfield, an home and car electronics catalog, we test our covers by showing them to panels of different customer segments before we test them in the mail. By doing this, Crutchfield gets timely “winner”/”loser” information on the best cover for each segment, thereby maximizing sales.

To recruit the panel, we send invitations to a random sample of customers who purchased at least $100 during the past year. We ask if they want to be part of a group that would help us answer questions from time to time. If they agree, we send them a $10 merchandise credit each time they participate. To keep opinions fresh, we limit participation by each panelist to one year.

Because the panel is made up of buyers, and we know from which category the customer bought, we can use the panel’s feedback to appropriately target the “correct” cover to the different segments. For the last five years, we’ve tested a variety of elements including copy, background colors, product density, product category and lifestyle.

Panelists are sent four to seven different printed cover options. We give them about a week to fill out the survey, and ask them to rank the covers for relational strength and rate them on a continuum. They can respond via an 800 number, fax or a special URL.

With these tests, our customers get to feel more involved, and in that spirit we also run the tests on the Web. The Web and print results are usually consistent, but we defer to those of the print panel when there is a discrepancy because of color control issues and the fact that Web visitors aren’t necessarily qualified buyers.

It is more efficient for Crutchfield to keep our two major product categories, home audio/video and car audio, in the same catalog rather than separate them. Through testing we’ve found that our home customers typically like our home covers best and our car customers like our car covers best. This was a revelation, since in the past we had sent only one catalog cover per mailing. Now, we send up to four different covers with each mailing—home, car, multi-product, and a fourth test cover (i.e., with a fake dot-whack or another offer)—and match them to the customer according to the panel’s feedback. We see an average 5-percent decrease in response when we mail the “wrong” cover to a customer, e.g., a car cover to a home buyer.

The panel can’t always pick the absolute winner among equally strong covers, but it can definitely tell a loser. One test showed that a lifestyle cover was strongly disliked. We mailed it to a small sliver of customers to validate the panel. This cover suppressed response 7 percent to home customers and 9 percent to car customers. That may not seem like a huge decrease, but if we had rolled that cover out we would have left over $1.25 million on the table compared with the next worse cover.

Michele Rick is director, customer acquisition at Crutchfield Corp. in Charlotteville, VA. She can be reached at mrick@crutchfield.com.