EBSCO Media Learning Center

Last month, we chose to write a story that was decidedly off-topic covering automobile tune-up stuff you could do to reduce gas costs. It was an OK story, but it was also part of this story on the subject of gender and direct response.

OK, let's take a step back.

What Is a Gender Response Gap?

A number of researchers from a variety of disciplines have concluded that in aggregate, men and women react differently to colors, images, topic matter and even the style of copy. Empowered with that knowledge, should direct response marketers take into consideration these differences when designing direct mail and broadcast email campaigns? Will doing so improve overall campaign response rates? That's the topic we are going to explore.

When we talk about response rates, we are referring to readers who respond to your piece's call to action, which is typically the one action you are looking to get the reader to take. Broadcast email is akin to the direct mail envelope. The call-to-action in for both is: Open Me!

Versioning to Close a Gender Response Gap

Gender versioning attempts to identify design and/or copy components of a direct response campaign that can be modified to reflect general differences in visual preferences among the sexes with the specific purpose of closing a gender gap. To take a simple example, several researchers have concluded that men as a whole respond better to simpler and darker color schemes, in contrast to women who, in aggregate, favor brighter and more complex color schemes. So, if you produce two versions of a mailer with color selections made to reflect these preferences, will it do better than one version with one color scheme sent to your entire list?

To use our immediate example of last month, common sense (or just our pre-conceived notion) suggested to us that men would be more likely to read about gas mileage repair tweaks than would women. We crafted an email on this topic specifically to test whether there would be a difference in open rates based on the gender of the customers who received the email.

There was: A whopping 15.34% gender response gap.

Gas Story Results	Female	Male	All
TABLE 1

Open Rate	16.26%	31.60%	25.17%

2nd Action (forward, re-open)	4.42%	8.57%	6.84%

Ratio: Open Rate/2nd Action	27.18%	27.13%	27.17%

As Table 1 demonstrates, among the contacts identified as women, 16.26% of the recipients opened the email. The open rate for men was 31.60%, resulting in a gender response gap of 15.34%. In other words, men were just about twice as likely to open the email overall as women.

While the actual email content did not contain a call to action, we found it interesting that of the recipients who opened the email, the percentage who forwarded it and/or went back for an additional look was statistically exactly the same among women and men: 27.1%.

That second observation is actually really interesting, since it suggests that while men were twice as likely as women to be motivated by the subject to open the email, there was no difference in the likelihood of taking a next step among the men and women who did open it. In this case, 1 in 4 of the men and 1 in 4 of the women who opened the email, read it again or forwarded it to a friend.

To determine gender, we used the Gender Finder Web application you can find at ebscomedia.listwist.com (while you're there, check out the awesome other list tools available to you as well). To determine readership/open rates, the email contained a contact-specific image file that, when loaded from our server, logs as a "view" by that contact for that email. Note that folks must load email images to be counted.

Of course, the product or service you are selling, or the topic matter you select, may have absolutely no gender response gap. Our guess is that there are many factors, including the nature of the subject matter, that influence response rates for women vs. men. This provides a nice segue into the four questions you should probably answer:

• Is this relevant?
• Is this important?
• If so, what should I test?
• How do I evaluate the results?

Is this relevant?

Figuring out if this is relevant is actually quite easy. For a prior mailing with quantifiable results, do the following:

1. Run the original list through our Gender Finder tool.

2. take the list of the people who answered the call to action and run it through Gender Finder again. Note that you only need to upload the first name field to our Gender Finder to do this test; you can just upload the first name field to get the results needed. If you want to genderize your list and reimport information, you can include any number of additional fields, which are maintained in the text file you can download upon completion.

If the percentages of men vs. women on the original list match the percentages of men vs. women on the results list, there was no gender gap to worry about. However, if the two sets of percentages are very different, then you may have an opportunity to significantly improve results by determining what steps you can take with the creative to increase the interest men to the women's level or vice versa.

Importance: The Cost of a Gender Gap

Sometimes it takes convincing of the powers that be that the return on investment for a new approach is worth the added time, effort and expense. Here's a sample ROI that demonstrates the impact. Just substitute your own numbers and stages.

ROI/Business Case	Female	Male	Gender Gap
TABLE 2

Mailed (pieces)	500,000	500,000

Responses (visits)	50,000	30,000	20,000

Response Rate (percent)	10%	6%	4%

Conversion (purchases)	5,000	3,000	2,000

Revenue ($300 average)	$1,500,000	$900,000	$600,000

Table 2 provides an example: Let's say your company sells furniture and is planning its annual clearance sale. Let's assume you drop 25,000 pieces in the mail for each store and you have 40 stores. You would mail 1,000,000 pieces across the local markets you serve. To keep it simple, we'll assume half your list is comprised of women and half of men.

Over the three-day sale, let's assume that 10% of the women visit the store yet only 6% of the men. To keep the example consistent with our experience, let's assume that 10% of the recipients who responded to the mailer with a visit actually make a purchase, with an average purchase price of $300.

In this experience, the gender response gap between women and men is 4%. 50,000 women visit your 40 stores, but only 30,000 men. Of those 80,000 visitors, 8,000 make a purchase averaging $300 for total chain revenue resulting from the mailing of $2,400,000.

Not bad, but consider the cost of that gender response gap: The 20,000 fewer men who responded resulted in 2,000 fewer sales worth a whopping $600,000! The relatively low cost of creating and producing a second version pales in comparison to the upside of closing the gender response gap.

Creative and Copy to Close the Gap

There's a number of Web sites you can find that make claims regarding the visual style and message content approaches that work for men vs. women, and they can be summarized as follows:

Design/Copy	Female	Male
TABLE 3

shapes, lines	rounder, softer edges	harder, more defined lines/edges

color schemes	brighter, more complex	simpler, darker

voice	casual language and tone	formal, expert, minimize abbreviations

visuals	informal photographs	images featuring motion

tap into	desire for value over time, inclination to share information	impulsiveness, immediacy of need, inclination to brag

make your case	tell a story, focus on value, provide stories to share	prove it with numbers & testimonials, focus on problems solved, provide the little details and talking points

Next: Testing and Versioning

With our next issue, we will cover the basic concepts behind testing and versioning, and provide you with practical, step-by-step suggestions for determining whether to test, what to version, and whether it worked. Thanks for reading.