Example: Event marketing

Association XYZ is preparing to market its annual conference. The venue is booked and sponsors and expo sales are under way. It's time to start raising awareness for the event and getting event registrations through the door.

In this example,there are two different marketing efforts that the association runs to meet these goals. The first is one tests a creative concept for the event. They want to understand which creative concept is more likely to get people to register.

After the creative concept is finalized and 80% of the speakers have been set, the organization is ready to recruit attendees by mailing the event brochure. 

Marketing Goal

To recruit attendees for the annual conference.

Marketing Objective

To recruit 500 full conference attendees, 200 partial attendees.

The goals and objectives for this campaign are fairly straight forward.  But accomplishing these goals is more complex.

First Mailing: Post Cards

First, XYZ does an A/B Split of the file to understand which creative concept is the better one to use for the rest of the conference marketing series.

Second Mailing: Full Brochure

The second mailing is where we apply some value ranks to our mailing. Full conference brochures are expensive and our goal is to cut numbers to save costs from groups who are least likely to respond.

Planning the campaign

Segmentation will be used in two different ways:

■    Mailing 1 = Simple Split

■    Mailing 2 = Ordered from most to least likely to respond

Business Goals

The process to accomplish this scenario is:

1.  Create a segmentation job with an A/B split.

2.  Build the campaign structure for the event.

3.  Generate output and pickup file for the solicitation.

4.  Review responses to choose most successful concept.

5.  Create a segmentation job with all segment definitions.

6.  Mail brochure to list.