Retouch Efforts See Positive Results
Posted by Bill Leming on April 13th, 2009
Several weeks ago I wrote about specific retouch strategies and their potential effectiveness in driving revenues. Since that time we’ve had a real-world opportunity to test retouch efforts to recipients who neither opened nor clicked on the initial promotional offer. While the objective of the initial effort was to capture more information about potential buyers and generate actual, measurable sales, the focus of the message was to enter a sweepstakes for a large screen, high-definition LCDTV and test our ability to further generate form completions with a retouch effort four days prior to the sweepstakes conclusion.
What happened was that the “last chance” retouch produced render rates nearly equal to the initial offering and click through rates only slightly less than the initial effort. More important from the client’s perspective was the fact that form completions (which was a major goal of the campaign) were actually higher than the initial effort and unsubscribe rates were lower. Certainly the reasons “why” this occurred has much to do with the high level of engagement the recipients feel towards the client.
Another perhaps equally plausible reason may lie in the fact that recipients of high-value sweepstakes with a limited time entry deadline may actually welcome the “last chance” message and see it more as a friendly reminder, which they appreciate and embrace.
The second message was identical to the first and the only difference between it and the first effort was the “last chance to enter” subject line. While I think the recipient’s familiarity with the message as it appeared in the retouch had some positive impact on the retouch results, we as marketers tend to think that recipients who see our offers make a conscious decision to either participate or not and that there is not much in the way of a non-response grey area.
We forget that people who opened the initial offer may not have responded for a multitude of reasons none of which have to do with an outright decision on their part to decline the offer. They get interrupted, they defer the sweepstake entry until later and forget to come back to it, or perhaps they’re simply unsure if they want to participate or not. Inasmuch as this was an attractive sweepstakes offering, the fact that our “last chance” follow up met with such impressive results suggests that there is far more of this non-decision making going on than we like to admit. Likewise we forget that a much higher percentage of recipients may not have even seen the original offer which makes the case for the time-sensitive follow up that much more compelling.
Going forward I’d like to do an nth name test of two retouch messages; one that is identical to the first and one that is different, perhaps shorter and more specifically related to the offer expiration. While I’m inclined to think that the second, more direct version may actually outperform the first, I’m relatively confident that they both will be highly cost effective and absolutely confident that we’ll be using the retouch strategy far more often and across far more clients than we do today.
