A promising study by Marketing Sherpa shows online campaign increases ROI by 30% as compared to direct mail.
Challenge: Recruit walkers to commit at least $95 to participate in a 3-day event to raise money to fight breast cancer. Keep your cost down and response rates high in order to maximize your ROI.
What do you do?
A recent study conducted by Marketing Sherpa on behalf of the National Philanthropic Trust's Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk reports that email is the way to go. The test took two cells of similar prospect groups and sent the control group their standard series of two self-mailers while soliciting the test group with a four-part email series.
In the end, Marketing Sherpa reports that nearly three times the number of walkers and donors were recruited via the email test series than the mail control – resulting in a 30% increase in ROI!
Like any fabulously interesting test, this one left me with a few burning questions:
- How were prospect names gathered for the test and control? Were they from comparable markets? Age groups? Geographic areas? How larger were the groups?
- Were other types of mailers used in the past ? Self-mailers have a notoriously lower response rate in several markets.
- How were people who signed up via the internet but did not receive the email counted?
- Did they test combining direct mail and email?
- What costs were assumed in the ROI calculations?
I am a big stats girl and would have loved for the Sherpa to show me the numbers – quantities, costs, return rates, etc.
Guess a girl can dream.
Read the study and let me know if I am just being picky.
Karen Taggart , aka DMDivaGirl, is a Director of Nonprofit Services at Care2.
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