Prevent Costly Direct Mail Donor Acquisition Blunders With Test Mailings
I know a non-profit that mailed a direct mail donor acquisition package to thousands of potential donors and generated a response rate of exactly zero.
That's not a typo.
Not a single person responded to the mailing.
This mistake wasted plenty of money because the non-profit didn't test the mailing list first.
If the organization had first mailed the package to 10% of the names on the list instead of mailing to everybody at once, they would have discovered that the list was a dud.
They wouldn't have rolled out the campaign to the whole list, and they wouldn't lost their shirt, or their blouse, as the case may be.
Acquiring donors through direct mail is risky.
So you should reduce your risks as much as possible by testing.
There are two primary tests: lists and creative.
You test who you mail to (lists) and you test what you say to those people (creative).
TEST YOUR LISTS Direct mail donor acquisition is the process of finding friends among strangers, using paper and postage.
These friends are on lists that you rent from list brokers.
Since no single list has every donor you want to reach, you must rent several lists and take your chances.
But there are tens of thousands of lists.
So you must decide which lists to rent and which ones to avoid.
You do this by testing the most promising lists.
You select as many lists as you can afford, and mail your direct mail donor acquisition package to a small but statistically valid number of people on each list.
Then you count the number of responses you receive from each list, compare lists, and choose the lists that deliver the highest response rate or the largest average gift, or both.
TEST YOUR CREATIVE What should you say to potential donors to persuade them to mail you a gift? Test and find out.
Create two or more complete packages (mailing envelope, letter, reply device and return envelope at a minimum).
Make sure the packages are very different from each other, otherwise you won't trust your test results.
Then mail these packages in equal numbers to your lists.
Measure the response you receive for each package.
One will likely outperform the others in response rate or average gift.
One package will likely be more expensive to produce than the others, too, which means your cost to raise a dollar (and cost to raise a donor) will likely be higher for that package.
You must decide if the added cost is offset by the increased effectiveness of that package compared with the others.
Remember this: you can mail a perfectly respectable donor acquisition package to the wrong list and lose everything, including your job.
But you can also mail a mediocre (or even bad) package to a good list and lose money.
Testing reduces your risk.
That's not a typo.
Not a single person responded to the mailing.
This mistake wasted plenty of money because the non-profit didn't test the mailing list first.
If the organization had first mailed the package to 10% of the names on the list instead of mailing to everybody at once, they would have discovered that the list was a dud.
They wouldn't have rolled out the campaign to the whole list, and they wouldn't lost their shirt, or their blouse, as the case may be.
Acquiring donors through direct mail is risky.
So you should reduce your risks as much as possible by testing.
There are two primary tests: lists and creative.
You test who you mail to (lists) and you test what you say to those people (creative).
TEST YOUR LISTS Direct mail donor acquisition is the process of finding friends among strangers, using paper and postage.
These friends are on lists that you rent from list brokers.
Since no single list has every donor you want to reach, you must rent several lists and take your chances.
But there are tens of thousands of lists.
So you must decide which lists to rent and which ones to avoid.
You do this by testing the most promising lists.
You select as many lists as you can afford, and mail your direct mail donor acquisition package to a small but statistically valid number of people on each list.
Then you count the number of responses you receive from each list, compare lists, and choose the lists that deliver the highest response rate or the largest average gift, or both.
TEST YOUR CREATIVE What should you say to potential donors to persuade them to mail you a gift? Test and find out.
Create two or more complete packages (mailing envelope, letter, reply device and return envelope at a minimum).
Make sure the packages are very different from each other, otherwise you won't trust your test results.
Then mail these packages in equal numbers to your lists.
Measure the response you receive for each package.
One will likely outperform the others in response rate or average gift.
One package will likely be more expensive to produce than the others, too, which means your cost to raise a dollar (and cost to raise a donor) will likely be higher for that package.
You must decide if the added cost is offset by the increased effectiveness of that package compared with the others.
Remember this: you can mail a perfectly respectable donor acquisition package to the wrong list and lose everything, including your job.
But you can also mail a mediocre (or even bad) package to a good list and lose money.
Testing reduces your risk.