Testing will save and/or make you money

Over the next couple of months we’ll be implementing a UDS (Unaddressed Delivery Service) campaign – which is just a fancy term for saying we’ll be having our promotional literature place in business PO Boxes within our target areas.
Here’s the plan:
Day 1: DL promotional card with handwritten message delivered to the PO Box
Day 12: Same DL card delivered to PO with a different handwritten message
Day 30: Same DL card delivered to PO Box with different message
The DL cards cost us about 25 cents a piece.
In our initial assessment we had to review which area we would have our cards delivered to. We narrowed it down to 2 places:
1. Broadbeach – close to us and contains much of the market we target
2. Gold Coast Mail Centre – close to Broadbeach with a very similar market
Broadbeach has 471 PO Boxes, the Gold Coast Mail Centre has 1,478 Boxes.
Which one should we pick for the biggest impact? No idea!
So this is what I did.
I pulled out my calculator and figured out the cards alone would cost me $1,108.50 if I sent them to the Gold Coast Mail Centre. The cost for Broadbeach was $353.25.
The cost per delivery is 11 cents. That’s $487.74 for the Mail Centre and $155.43 for Broadbeach.
By looking at the numbers we can see that sending the cards to the Gold Coast Mail Centre would cost $1,000 more than if I sent them to Broadbeach.
Getting back to “Which one should we pick for the biggest impact? – I still have no idea.
And because I have no idea I’ll be smart (as smart as I can be!) and do a simple test.
1. I’ll run the campaign through Broadbeach PO Boxes.
2. I’ll measure the results.
3. If it is profitable I’ll run the same campaign into the large Gold Coast Mail Centre PO Boxes.
Because then I’d have some decent data to justify and back up the decsion to spend $1,500 on a marketing strategy.
Testing what you do when you market can save you money and heartache.
Measuring the results of any campaign is a gimme. Measuring provides the information you need to make a well-informed and logical decsion on all of your marketing strategies.
Good luck!
Regards
Brendon