In today’s era of marketing message onslaught, marketers are searching for ways to get through the clutter. Using messages that are relevant to the prospect is not a new, secret love potion. However, few marketers have mastered offer testing and personalization strategies as part of their effort to initiate more responses and grow their prospect funnel. In this relationship, it is all about being right

It has been said that delivering the right offer to the right customer in the right channel at the right time gives you the best probability for marketing success. For some of us, the thought of trying to determine all the appropriate variables can seem overwhelming.

Yes, there are also costs associated with testing and it takes more time before you can roll out your campaign. But, there are even greater costs associated with not testing at all.

And with a strong opportunity to significantly increase your return on marketing investment (ROMI), it’s no wonder that, according to an Offer Optimization report by Aberdeen Group in October 2009, offer testing is now playing a key role in campaign optimization.

How can technology help me test?

Technology today makes it easier than ever to test and measure offer effectiveness. With the adoption of marketing automation tools on the rise and programs like Omniture’s Test&Target available to do a lot of the heavy lifting, the opportunity to display multiple offers to a specific percentage of your prospects is built right into the work flows.

There are also landing page platforms that are more much inexpensive and make it easy to roll out more than one landing page with different offers. You can then send a sample of your prospects to each page and the platform measures & displays in real time the conversions of each.

Take the time to listen

Few men would argue that we aren’t always the most stellar listeners (especially when sitting in front of the TV). As a result, we miss details that provide insights into our partners that would enhance our communication and ultimately, our relationships.

In the same way, there is lots of data available that can provide key insights into your prospects & customers, but only if you take the time to listen. The more you can individually understand about each target, the better you can cater your offer to something that they care enough about to respond.

According to the Offer Optimization report by Aberdeen Group, the following are some common marketplace “triggers” being gathered by organizations today to cater their offers:

• Customer life events: birthday, new baby, new car purchase
• Transaction behavioral changes: purchase patterns, account deposits
• Online behavior: browsing patterns, requests for information, landing page interactions
• Expiration dates of products and promotions: used to trigger an appropriate marketing action
• Credit bureau: information about credit cards, mortgage accounts, car loans or if a customer/institution makes a credit score inquiry.

Don’t make things too complicated

If you are new to testing, start slow. You don’t have to execute an advanced multivariate offer test the first time. Focusing on trying an a/b split to test two offers is a good place to start.

With the convergence of easy to use analytics and new technology, the opportunity for marketing performance improvement through offer optimization is now a reality for companies of any size. After you begin to see the increased results, you can look to take a more advance approach to testing offers, as well as other aspects of your campaigns, across all your channels.