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Winning Marketing Offers A case study on four direct mail pieces

SurveyMonkey Audience - Direct Mail Offer Test

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WinningMarketing OffersA case study on four direct mail pieces

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Summary

What you’ll learn in this guideWe’ll show you how to use surveys to determine which of your marketing mailers will win before you go to print.

Our guide includes:

• Tips for getting key performance metrics.

• Best practices on writing marketing offer testing surveys.

• A real-world example of how our direct mail offer testing framework can be applied to your brand.

Case study key findings • We compared four direct mail pieces against each

other and found:

o The target market for these mailers can be segmented into two distinct groups: early adopters and those who wait to purchase new products.

o The differences in attitude and behavior between early adopters and later-stage adopters are significant.

o The data suggest that later-stage adopters may need an incentive to act and a reminder that a deadline looms.

o Wells Fargo®’s offer with a clear deadline and “It’s time to switch” messaging scored higher overall.

Created by and for the use of SurveyMonkey Audience for marketing purposes only. This study was not commissioned by American Express®, Citi®, Discover®, Wells Fargo®, Visa®, MasterCard®, or any other companies mentioned in the study.

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Table of contents

Market Segmentation

13

Real-World Direct Mail Offer Testing Examples

9

Marketing Offer Testing Overview

5

44

Methodology

What?SurveyMonkey Audience fielded a Direct Mail Offer Test study on four direct mail pieces to demonstrate how to successfully test marketing offers.

How?The survey was fielded using SurveyMonkey Audience. Respondents represented the general U.S. population. A total sample size of 441 was surveyed.

When?We fielded the survey from 5/11/15–5/12/15.

5

Marketing Offer Testing Overview

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5 benefits of testing offers with surveys

Test various offers quickly and easilyA survey allows you to present a wide range of offers to your target market and get qualitative feedback fast.

Filter out the ineffective offersInvestigate which offers work and which fall flat by asking your target market directly.

Refine your good ideasIf you test a bunch of offers through a survey, you can quickly see which ones are rising to the top.

Test with diverse audiencesUse surveys, rather than focus groups, for a scalable way to get responses from different segments in your target market.

Save moneyTraditional testing methods like focus groups cost a lot of time and money. Surveys are a faster, easier way to choose a winning offer.

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How to determine marketing offer successThe quickest way to determine a winning offer is to use a standard scoring model. This is an example scorecard that incorporates several key success metrics depending on the type of offer you’re testing and how you define a successful offer.

A B

Attributes Tested

Purchase Intent Statistical Significance

% %

Appeal Statistical Significance

% % (A)

Uniqueness Statistical Significance

% %

Relevance Statistical Significance

% %

Average Score % %

*Statistical Significance at 95% confidence interval

Created by SurveyMonkey Audience

Top 2 Box: The percentage of respondents who answered the two most positive answer options

Define your key success metrics.

Determine which offers performed better by using stat testing, a calculation that shows if two numbers or scores have a significant, or big enough, difference. This shows if one offer truly resonates with consumers more than the others. An (A) in the (B) column here signifies that Concept B is both statistically significant and scored higher than Concept A.

Use the top 2 answer choices for each question to more easily compare how each offer performed.

Set the number of metrics depending on the offer you’re

testing and how you define success.

Compare the average scores of each offer to determine which one performed best based on the success metrics you chose.

1

2

3

4

5

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Key success metrics

Here are several key metrics you can incorporate into an offer test:

Whether your offer motivates respondents to open the envelope

If your offer is perceived to represent a high quality brand/product

The overall appeal of your offer is a strong indicator of Willingness to Open

How clearly your offer messaging is understood by respondents

How different one offer is from the others

Willingness to Open

Perception of Quality

Appeal

Message Clarity

Uniqueness

How trustworthy your offer is perceived to be

Believability

9

Direct Mail Offer Test

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Marketing offer test summary

BackgroundWe used SurveyMonkey Audience to test the effectiveness of four direct mail offerings. The direct mail pieces appear on the following page.

GoalPut four current direct mail pieces head to head to see which one performs better.

Key insights • We found that Wells Fargo’s offer with a clear deadline and “It’s time to switch”

messaging scored higher overall.

• When we segmented the market into two distinct groups to see which offer resonated best with the target market, we found that later-stage adopters may need more of an incentive to act and a reminder that a deadline looms.

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The 4 offers

Offer 1: American Express®Invitation with membership points and $0 annual fee

Offer 2: Citi®Pre-selected 0% APR and savings

Offer 3: Discover®No annual fee, cash back, and 0% APR

Offer 4: Wells Fargo®“It’s time to act,” 0% APR, and $0 annual fee

Front

Front

Front

Front

Back

Back

Back

Back

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Direct mail offer testing scorecardWe found that the Wells Fargo offer with a combination of “It’s time to act” messaging, 0% APR, and $0 annual fee focus scored the highest in most key metrics:

Wells Fargo received the highest overall average score and scored significantly higher than the three other offers in Clarity and better than the Citi offer in Quality, Uniqueness, and Believability. For Willingness to Open, it got the highest score, clearly beating out both American Express and Citi.

Offer Test Scorecard (Top 2 Box Scores)

American Express (A)

Citi (B)

Discover (C)

Wells Fargo (D)

Attributes Tested n=441 n=441 n=441 n=441

Willingness to Open Statistical Significance

Top 2 Box = Definitely would open + Probably would open 17% 14% 22% (B)

24% (ABD)

Quality Statistical Significance

Top 2 Box = Extremely high quality + High quality 12% 10% 14% 15% (B)

Uniqueness Statistical Significance

Top 2 Box = Extremely unique + Very unique 7% 5% 14% (ABD)

10% (B)

Clarity Statistical Significance

Top 2 Box = Extremely clearly + Clearly 31% 31% 38% (B)

47% (ABC)

Believability Statistical Significance

Top 2 Box = Extremely believable + Very believable 26% (B)

17% 29% (B)

29% (B)

Average Score 19% 15% 23% 25%

*Z-test scores at 0.95 confidence interval

Survey Results as of: June 12, 2015

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Market Segmentation

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Identifying what resonates with the target marketVisa is the brand name that appears on Wells Fargo cards. We wanted to see if there were any differences of opinions in the Wells Fargo offer for Visa and MasterCard cardholders. The differences for current Visa cardholders were significant:

Among the attributes tested, they found Wells Fargo’s offers less convincing, valuable, and memorable.

Getting MasterCard holders to act and switch over to Visa could be the key to Wells Fargo’s success as they found the offers more convincing, valuable, and memorable.

0%Convincing Valuable Memorable

10%

10%

25%

20%

15%

30%

35%

40%

31%

34%

32%

Visa MasterCard

36%

39%

36%

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Segmenting responses reveals additional data

Taking a further look, we segmented the market into two distinct groups: early adopters and those who wait to purchase new products.

Identifying what resonates with the target market allows for more targeted advertising and higher likeability and purchase intent.

“I usually try new products before other people do.”

Strongly agree/Agree Early adopters

Strongly disagree/Disagree Later-stage adopters

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Identifying what resonates with the target marketThe differences in offer likeability for later-stage adopters (Wells Fargo’s likely target market because of their “It’s time to switch” messaging) were significant:

Later-stage adopters liked the offers more than (38% Early vs 63% Later) their early stage counterparts:

Taking into account that all four offers included some sort of $0 annual fee or 0% APR, later-stage adopters may need an incentive to act and a reminder that a deadline looms.

0%Offer likeability

10%

20%

50%

40%

30%

60%

70%

80%

38%Early

Later

63%

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Taking It to the Next Level

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Going beyond your first testOffer testing goes beyond asking respondents to rank and rate offers against one another.

Take it a step further:

• Ask respondents open-ended questions to get the "Why?" behind their answers.

• Track your performance over time by setting up recurring surveys.

Need some help selecting metrics? We’ve got you covered.

• SurveyMonkey provides you with a list of all the available key metrics you can test.

The possibilities are endless:

• Package testing, logo testing, name testing, claims testing...the list goes on.

• Our concept testing framework spans a variety of categories—all you have to do is provide us the materials to test, and we can make that concept assessment happen. Contact us.

Bring Your Best Ideas to Market with Offer Testing

Learn more about testing your marketing content and messaging by contacting

SurveyMonkey Audience today:

Contact us to get started

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