When it comes to campaign performance, ROI is the key indicator that many marketers look for, creating an emphasis to keep things safe. However, in these difficult and unprecedented times it is still important to innovate with marketing to drive sustainable revenue growth. The world is in a completely different place now compared to 6 months ago due to COVID-19, so it is vital to understand how your customers and their requirements have changed and how they continue to evolve.
63% of UK consumers have developed new shopping behaviours since COVID-19
A recent study by McKinsey has show that 63% of UK consumers have developed new shopping behaviours since COVID-19, with 81-88% of these consumers intent on continuing with these changes in behaviour, emphasising the need for companies to adapt their messaging to prospect new audiences. At Address Intelligence we are always challenging our clients to explore alternative campaign strategies and to innovate both with their call to action and their targeting.
The 80:20 approach
One method we recommend is the 80:20 approach. The process is simple; use 80% of your marketing/campaign budget to target your core audience, with the other 20% exploring new audiences or utilising alternative artworks. It could be to test a new call to action, a new audience or overlay a bespoke dataset. This will open potential revenue channels from previously unexplored audiences giving you greater insight into the current trends of consumers. This approach provides a large enough sample size to be a statistically significant test, whilst not too large that if the test is not as successful as you like, it does not ruin the overall campaign performance. Furthermore, if you have a strong message and a highly targeted campaign driven by data-led insights, the 80% should deliver a successful ROI, mitigating any risk of the 20% underperforming.
Whilst this approach may not bring the immediate dividends that a safe campaign might, it provides a much greater insight into both your brand and your customer base. If the trial is successful it will lead to a larger second campaign that should further improve ROI, with the incremental gains gathered from the subsequent campaigns producing both greater revenues and a more holistic view of your customers.
With our clients at Address Intelligence, we try to hone down campaign strategies to improve performance, looking for new opportunities and niches that have previously not been targeted. Over the course of 18 months we worked with a leading mortgage broker, successfully dropping their CPA (cost per acquisition) from £258.49 to £68.51 through 5 successive campaigns by adapting our strategy through informed learning from each previous campaign.
We analysed the previous campaigns to assess both what went well and what did not to find pockets of prospective individuals from high performing segments. With further research we went the extra mile, acquiring bespoke datasets to overlay onto the original strategy, providing a unique insight into when individuals were approaching the end of their fixed-rate mortgage term. This gave the client a competitive edge knowing when to target individuals, not wasting resources hitting look-a-like consumers who were not looking to remortgage.
