Uh oh. Are you feeling a little tug at your belt loop? It’s only me. I’m tryin’ to get ya down as you fly by the seat of your pants again. C’mon down and let’s have a little chit chat.
Recently, I’ve had to put together a series of marketing guides for new clients. One of the big preaching elements I’ve focused on is the concept of setting goals and devising a method of achieving them. If you don’t know where you want to end up, it’s kinda hard to get there. You also need to know what segment of your customer database (and your prospect universe) is going to help you get to the finish line.
When you are continually reactive rather than proactive, it’s hard to stay on the path to success. Continually flying by the seat of your pants on every project confuses objectives and blurs any valuable information you may actually get about customer behavior. When you continually go after different audiences how do you know where to turn?
We all know that in order to do a valid A/B split and test you need to have a proven element to go up against your trial. In essence you can’t test a test. When you continually fly by the seat of your pants you don’t get enough data to develop a proven group to test against.
I know the concept of the economy and the buyer environment changing has been over stressed by just about everyone, including me. But honestly, people are reacting differently. And, if you are using an old segment to test against you could be doing yourself a tremendous injustice. Today you need to come up with new proven groups from the last six months and then test against that group.
Take a good hard look at your sales statistics. What is really selling now. What do your top spending customers want now? Come up with an offer or promo you know will be attractive.
Now hang on, because I’m about to contradict myself here. In this case—where you may not have a good proven segment that you know are your spenders from the last six months —you may have to go and find them. Designate one audience—let’s say it’s your top 20%. Segment that audience in a way that makes sense for your business—let’s say it’s by region. So you may have four groups of top 20 spenders. Send your offer to groups one and two. Then test group three against four.
Now, get your two top groups and have a playoff. When all is said and done you can go back and get your top performers and now you can even segment out for even more targeted campaigns! Make sure that you have one offer that makes sense to all groups. If you are not testing the exact same offer to the entire group you’re not going to get a clear vision of your top performers.
You can use this same method to identify your top performers in other customer groups as well.
Now go ahead and test. Flying by the seat of your pants in a controlled and directional manner gives you the freedom to be reactionary while also gaining the vital performance data that you absolutely need to make important marketing decisions down the road. This economy is not going to last forever. Eventually the dust will settle and we can all go back to “normal” marketing. If you don’t have the data you need to that you will be at a significant disadvantage.
When the world was spend-happy it was okay to take the chance and throw that plate of spaghetti up against the wall to see what stuck. Today, that’s just too costly to justify. It is very true that you need to turn on a dime to capitalize on certain trends or events. However, even reactionary marketing needs to be in some ways planned for by being somewhat proactive.
Know that the reactionary campaigns don’t pre-empt your regular programs—unless your planned campaign just doesn’t make sense in the current market.
We may all be living in one of the most confounding and confusing times a marketer can face. But smart marketers know that our best friend can be a well engineered list and a well thought out offer to that list.
What worked even a year ago might not work today. But, continually drifting along up there in the clouds flying is not going to supply you with the information that you can get with some tried and true techniques that even in this environment can still work.
Carol Lustig is marketing director for Sonny’s Enterprises, a direct marketer of automotive aftermarket products.
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