The marginal cost of processing extra telephone calls is for BT is small, and for onnet calls, outside peak hours is negligible. BT’s marketing plan had an objective to use direct marketing plans to ‘stimulate’ calls from its customer base. David was responsible for delivering a project to test its effectiveness, saving BT and the public from the widespread use of direct marketing to stimulate calls.
There were two key dimensions to the project. The first was to design and develop an effective campaign to test. David prepared and obtained approval for a ‘brief’, and used it to generate proposals from three direct marketing specialist, leading the selection process. The campaign aimed to use ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ benefits to stimulate calls, and had a duration of eight weeks. As some the rational benefits needed to be fulfilled by local business, an element of the campaign was addressed to engage these key stakeholders.
The second element was measurement. Two 40,000 populations that were matched in socio economic, ACORN and call usage profiles were selected as Test and Control. As normal billing process were too infrequent to use, David set up special local arrangements so that hourly call data was available on each each customer. Data was gathered in test and control for eight weeks prior to the campaign, and for the eight weeks of the campaign.
David ran 16 week trial, analysed data and showed DM approach was an ineffective call stimulation tool. Specifically there was no measurable effect from a high end, high quality campaign. This saved BT expenditures that would have otherwise been made in ‘hope’ that such campaigns would work, and the public from a new addition to the direct marketing waterfall.