Steve's blog :
random musings of a professional scribbler

Test obsessed

Is your business suffering from analysis paralysis?

I recently met with the Managing Director of a – modestly successful, it has to be said – SME, whose marketing is so ‘steeped in stats’ that the company seems to have forgotten the reason it began acquiring such detailed data in the first place.

Indeed, for each direct mail and press advertising campaign the firm runs (interestingly, it never evaluates its email programmes), the marketing team religiously split–tests innumerable variables: envelope copy, graphics, headlines, offers, response mechanisms, formats…

And as a consequence intuits: precisely nothing.

Direct mail consultant and founder of American Heritage magazine Richard V Benson said, “There are two answers to every problem….


• “Answer #1: test everything.
• “Answer #2: Refer to answer #1.”

Quite right too. But… in order to draw practical usable conclusions from those tests, you should analyse no more than two variables each time.

Only then can you truly tell which half of your advertising is really wasted.

Comments >>

Leave a comment