Knowing how your marketing campaigns are performing is key to creating successful strategies and marketing plans. Results can impact the next campaign’s budget, message, design, call to action, and even the audience. Early indicators can include website visitors, social media post interactions, clicks on links, video views, etc. But, how your campaign really did will be reflected in the number of transactions and total sales. The best way to find out how your campaign is performing is to run a response analysis.
What is a Response Analysis?
A response analysis, also called a matchback, takes your list of targeted households and matches it up to the final transaction list. Basically, you are looking for the people you sent advertisements to who made a purchase. A response analysis not only identifies how many households responded to your campaign, but it can also highlight how many sales dollars can be attributed to your advertisements. Some people will go a step further and see which products and services people purchased from the campaign efforts.
Are you missing responses?
If you do not run a response analysis, there’s a high probability you are missing responses to your campaign. Without a matchback, marketers rely on advertisement interactions to identify leads. The problem with this approach is people do not always respond to your campaign the way you intended them to. They may not scan the QR code or use the PURL. If they see a display or social media ad, they might open a new browser tab and enter the website directly instead of clicking on the ad. Some audience members might receive your mailer with a coupon code, make an in-store purchase, and forget to use the coupon.
Consumers have many avenues to respond to marketing campaigns, and it’s nearly impossible to track all the ways they respond and accurately attribute credit. However, you can see clear results if you know who you targeted and who made a purchase.
What are the benefits to a Response Analysis?
The biggest benefit of running a response analysis is being able to capture more accurate response results. Regardless of what ad a person saw or how they made their purchase, you can identify customers who were on your original marketing list.
Next, if you are collecting transaction data, you can see what the customers purchased. Did they purchase what you advertised? Did they choose a different product or service? Were any additional services added? If you are running A/B tests with different offers, you can see which offer people responded to more as well as which offer brought in more revenue.
A third benefit to running a response analysis is gaining an in-depth view of your responders. You can analyze the responders to see what demographics, behavioral and lifestyle characteristics they have in common. Did your intended target audience complete a transaction, or did you have a higher response rate from a different customer segment?
How can you use the results?
Once you have your response analysis results, it’s time to incorporate them. What did you learn from the campaign? Are you targeting the right audience? Was your call to action effective? Did you use the right channels to reach your desired audience? Feed your results into your data model, so you can refine your customer profile and hone your prospect selections for the next campaign.
What if it didn’t do well?
If your campaign isn’t performing as well as you would like, start looking into the details. A bad response rate does not mean you need to scrap everything. Take time to analyze and evaluate each aspect of the campaign, so you can keep the elements that are working and replace the elements that are not. Marketing is a process that you should always be testing and improving. By incorporating data analytics into your strategy, you can make informed decisions about how to adjust your plan.
Next Steps
If you want to see how well your campaign is performing, give us a call. Our response analysis AMP Ultra-Match is an 18-step matching algorithm with a 90% confidence score. We would love to help you identify all of your campaign responses and give you the information you need to create successful marketing plans.