Four (Fun) Ways to Improve Marketing Performance

Data-driven marketing is about a lot more than just clean, complete lists with accurate phone, email, and address data. To get the best results for your outbound campaigns to reach and convert your prospective customers, it’s important to continually test and improve your campaigns. And we mean a lot more than simple A/B tests.

With our campaign advertising thinking caps on, we’ve put together four ways that you can test and improve your campaign performance to grow revenue faster:

Creative Test Design. The most common type of test is “A/B,” simply splitting an audience into two random samples—with different headlines for example—and then extending the more popular campaign to the remainder of your audience. A little boring…

Creative marketers are constantly looking at comparative performance data to improve the next campaign, and creating meaningful variations that help you understand the bigger picture. Can we segment our audience by meaningful differences such as housing status, household income, interest in environmentally friendly products, age, and more? Are we comparing results between like groups such as past customers vs. leads? Audience segmentation is one of the best ways to start measuring and improving your campaigns. (Use this resource to determine whether you have a meaningful sample size.)

Social Ads. With a platform like Meta (Instagram and Facebook ads), it’s simple and inexpensive to set up dynamic ad variants or several different campaigns with different creative and a custom or native audience. In many of our experiments, we’ve found that images often account for a 500% difference between winners and losers, and that the best image in a test of eight to 12 will be 30-100% better than the campaign average. You can do the same type of testing with text on images or on-ad descriptions. While Meta ads can automatically favor a winner, deliberate campaign design can help you tease out insights that will help all of your campaigns – even direct mail. You can also improve your website and other marketing materials based on what social media users tell you about your campaigns.

Layering Your Campaigns. Customers are more likely to buy if they see your campaigns all over the place. That could mean using Meta and Google’s ad platforms, but things get really exciting when you start using customer data to create custom digital audiences that match your offline marketing. What if everyone who got your calls, texts, or direct mail was also seeing your winning creative at their desktop and on their cell throughout the week? How about visitors to your site getting direct mail a week or two later?

Free Data Test. AHG client Accurate Append specializes in consumer data and can help improve your contact rate and custom digital audience matches. Accurate Append routinely provides more phone append and email append matches than the competition, and is happy to demonstrate. Visit their site and ask for a free data test to learn how many more opportunities to reach your contacts this data provider can add to your list.. Data-driven marketing isn’t just testing, it’s also about starting with the best possible audience outreach.