Value of Lazy-Customer Mailings

[brad_randall]

Last month, I decided to perform an experiment with my 30/60/90 day mailings.

I wanted to see if these lazy-customer mailing were really worth doing or not. “How many people just order without redeeming the specific special on the card?” was my question. I know from my online sales (the offer was only redeemable online - 100% trackable) that I was spending about $1 for every $1 in direct response sales. Clearly not worth doing from a short-term perspective if no one else was ordering because of the mailing.

I had my mailing house intentionally not mail 10% of each group (30, 60, and 90-day inactive) in June and track how many were in the active list come the end of the month. The remaining amount were mailed normally and we compared how many of those addresses reactivated.

Here are the results: Of the group not mailed, just over 15% reactivated during the month “on their own.” Of those that were sent a 30/60/60 mailer, just over 21% reactivated. That 6% difference means that I more likely am spending about 24 cents to generate $1 in sales with these postcards. That’s a bit more like it!

I plan to continue this experiment through the end of the year to see if the number hold up. I’m going to change up the offer to make it good over the phone as well to see if that helps redemption/reactivation.

 

[Jennifer]

Good idea. Was that 6% difference fairly consistent across all three (30/60/90) groups?

As a next step, you might want to experiment with the date ranges. For instance, could you get similar reactivation results if you were to scale back to just 45/90-day lazy mailings? If you were to move the 30-day mailing to 20 days, would it drive frequency?

 

[royster13]

Trial and error and recording results is very important in any marketing…In the past I have tested different size menus in mailings to different areas of town…I no longer have any of the data, but I do recall that 11 x 17 tri-folded menus gave me enough of a sales bump over an 8 1/2 x 11 to make the extra cost worthwhile…

 

[Pizzamancer]

Yep. Recording your results is key. Each delivery area has its idiosyncrasies, so it is a challenge to refine your marketing to target exactly what gives you the best response.

My guess is that that big difference is only coming from your 30-59 day no orders. Those guys are the ones who order pizza on a regular basis, but might be ordering elsewhere when they don’t order from you. Is that the case?

 

[brad_randall]

In the non-mailed control group the reactivation percentages were:

30 day = 20%
60 day = 16%
90 day = 10%

The numbers he sent me for the mailings were all lumped together. I just sent him an e-mail asking if he could separate out the response rates for each group. I’m interested to see if those ratios stay consistent with the mailings since the offer on the mailings are increasingly more aggressive the older the group.

I’ll keep everyone posted.

 

[brad_randall]

The mailed group percentages were:

30 day = 25%
60 day = 20%
90 day = 15%

That’s around a 5% bump for each grouping. I’m interested to see if that holds up over time.

 

[boston09]

Brad,
i ve been thinking for a while about you saying “That 6% difference means that I more likely am spending about 24 cents to generate $1 in sales with these postcards”. ARe you sure about that? Honestly, i think u going in wrong direction by triing to figure out what percentage of 30lazy, 60 lazy give what response. whats the difference? the real difference is in how much those 15% that came back on their own spent with you and did they use any discount coupons or paid sweet full price. now on the other hand i am preatty sure those 21% forced in fact did use the coupon you mailed them out, therefore these sales could have been not as profitable than above mentioned 15%. plus are you including your time and money you spent on mailing those postcards? sorry to wipe the smile of your face, but i wiped my own smile few months ago when i mailed a coupon (buy lg get sm free) to all my 90-180 days lazy customers to get lauzy 7% redemption rate. and that was nice envelope with their first name on it! 1 dollar spent on that campaign brought 1.25 in sales Please put a smile back on my face in i misunderstand smth. Just a thought - if they dont react much to coupons, they must need a magnet instead or a magnet included in mailing. thought 2 - if after 2 mailings with no reaction - take them off future mailings and save some trees

 

[26.2MilesforPizza]

brad randall:

The mailed group percentages were:

30 day = 25%
60 day = 20%
90 day = 15%

That’s around a 5% bump for each grouping. I’m interested to see if that holds up over time.

Hey Brad,

Its it been a few months since you started this trial. Have you continued with it and have the results stayed consistent with the first mailing/ non-mailing?

 

[brad_randall]

One of my stores crashed while collecting the records and it borked one of the groupings (didn’t assign the last order date correctly I’m guessing). That glitch is moving through the system and skewing my results as one of the data sets seems much too small.

July saw 23% of the mailed groups reactivate in total and 20% of the intentionally not-mailed group ordered again anyways. August was the same 23% reactivation for the mailed ones, but in a strange statistical anomaly 23% of the non-mailed group also ordered.

I’m assuming those results for the last two months are “garbage in, garbage out.” Maybe someone with a more reliable/accurate customer database module could generate some better numbers over time.

 

[26.2MilesforPizza]

Thanks for the reply. I was thinking of switching to a 45/90 day cycle for my lazy customers and came across this tread. I wanted to see if you had any new information from your tests.