Winning a “control” is a holy grail for direct mail copywriters (this old-school term has not morphed to the web and email as far as I know). The control is the standard mailing that others are tested against; it’s the one that has consistently performed best over time. Win a few controls and you can start raising your hourly or project rate.
But here’s the problem. Apart from publishers who mail millions, clients can be a bit flakey about “awarding” the control. One client in financial services told me a package could not become the control unless it beat the old control by 20%. That’s a huge edge in a regulated industry. But he was limited by his tight operating budget: a 15% lift in response might produce profits, but changing over all the forms at the printer and tracking cost money and he had to draw the line somewhere.
This month I’ve “won” two controls win a way that shows how quirky this process is. The first was a #10 envelope package for a Long Term Care insurance company that beat the old control by 100%. But what I did was to take the existing control, a self mailer that was also written by me, and change the copy slightly and put it in an envelope for better stage management. I’d been advising my client we should do this for years so my win is nice, but not a creative breakthrough.
The second win was for a company selling education in how to be a financial success. I’d written a package and they tested it and the results didn’t reach their threshold. A year later they discovered 10,000 unmailed copies of my package at their printer and decided to test it again. It beat everything. Voila, new control.