The success of your campaign will depend mainly on how well you manage 3 things.

1) Your list
2) Your creative
3) Your offer

For most marketers, the list and creative would already have been taken care of: by their agency, list broker, previous investments with their CRM and the designers in the company. The offer is the one element that they’ll need to get spot on for a campaign to be successful.

And while the offer could sometimes be the difference between a 1-4% response and a 70% response. Marketers have to weigh the costs and benefits of getting either. While most would mark the campaign with 70% response as incredible, it may not always be the case.

Take the example of giving away cash, gift cards, a free oil change, a free nintendo Wii! People (excluding busy execs) generally will not say no to these. These are the campaigns that would generate great response and would be good for marketing campaigns where the main goal is to get brand awareness, promote a new product, build a wide diverse customer list or just waste money.

But if you are like most marketers feeling the pinch from a slowing US economy, then you’ll be looking at providing something of value only to those that are likely to buy from you. A whitepaper on how to profit in real estate, findings from an industry research, 50% off your product for 3 months, a personalized mad marketing poster.

These are the campaigns that would result in a 1-4% response rate, but the result of that is better leads to hand over to sales, a captive audience ready to buy and people that are more responsive to your message, no money wasted on leads that are both not likely to buy and who you won’t want to sell to.