41 Timeless Ways to Screw Up Direct Marketing

21 May, 2022

on NJR's Lists

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Screw Up the Control Groups

• 1. Don't keep a control group
• 2. Make the control group so small as to be useless
• 3. Raid the controls to make up campaign numbers
• 4. Use deadbeats as controls
• 5. Don't make the controls random
• 6. Use Treatment Controls but not Targeting Controls

Alienate or Annoy the Customer

• 7. Trigger defection with retention activity
• 8. Use intrusive contact mechanisms
• 9. Use inappropriate or niche creative content
• 10. Insult or patronize the Customer
• 11. Mislead or disappint the Customer
• 12. Fail to Listen to the Customer
• – bonus marks for refusing to take "no" for an answer
• – double bonus marks for calling the customer back after she's said "No thanks, I'm not interested" and hung up.
• 13. Overcommunicate
• 14. Make it hard for the Customer to do what you want.
• – (Overloaded websites, uncooperative web forms, understaffed call centres, uninformed staff and failure to carry stock to meet demand are but a few of the ways to achieve this).
• 15. Intrude on the Customer's Privacy
• (Over)exploit the customer

Misinterpret the Data

• 17. Confuse "responses" with "incremental responses" (uplift)
• 18. Confuse revenue with net revenue
• 19. Take Credit for That Which Would have Happened Anyway
• 20 Double Count
• 21. Believe the name of a cluster means something
• 22. Believe the data
• – The fact that the computer says it's true and prints it prettily, doesn't mean it is.
• 23. Disbelieve the data:
• – the fact that the data doesn't show what you hoped, thought or expected doesn't mean it isn't so.

Screw Up Campaign Execution

• 24. Discard response information.
• 25. Revel in unintended discounts and incentives
• 26. Use dangerous, insulting or disrespectful labels
• – Yes, I really have known an airline label its bottom-tier frequent fliers "scum class", and a retailer label a segment of its customer "vindaloonies".
• 27. Ship mailings with the internal fields filled in instead of external ones (see also 26)
• – Dear ScumClass, . . .
• 28. Direct people to slow, hard-to-navigate websites, IVR Systems or overloaded or poorly designed call centres
• 29. Fail to inform your front-line staff about offers you're sending to customers
• 30. Fail to ensure your company can fulfill what the marketing promises
• 31. Use a name that's very visually similar to a better known name that has negative connotations for many people.
• – I frequently get mail from Communisis, but I never read their name correctly.

Mismodel or Misplan the Campaign:

• 32. Confuse statistical accuracy/excellence with ability to make money
• 33. Model the wrong thing
• 34. Use undirected modelling instead of directed modelling
• 35. Assume equivalence of campaigns when important things have changed.
• 36. Ignore external factors (seasonality, competitor behaviour etc.)
• 37. Fail to make dates relative
• 38. Contaminate the training data with validation data
• 39. Screw up the Observation Window (Predict the Past, not the Future)
• 40. Ignore changes in the meaning of data
• 41. Fail to sanity check anything and everything

Source

The Scientific Marketer, 2007-09-07

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