About this bench

What this bench is

The Response Bench is an independent working reference on direct-response campaigns for the travel trade. It is written for the people who build and run those campaigns: resort and club marketers, tour and owner-presentation managers, list brokers and the agencies that serve them, and for owners who want to know what a promotion costs before they sit through one. The bench holds four stations. Offers and premiums covers the certificate, the premium, the expiry date and the terms that decide whether an offer still pays at the back end. Mail and lists covers the mailer, the list, the segment and the follow-up. The phone line covers the script, the qualifying questions and the transfer. Numbers and tests covers response rate, cost per booking, break-even and how a test is sized.

How a sheet is made

A sheet starts from one question a campaign manager has to answer on a real project. The desk states its protocol first: the measures that will decide the question, the period they cover and the record they were read from. Then it answers, shows the figures, names the objection that comes up in the room, and lists the sources consulted. A sheet is re-run when a term, a price, a list or a rate changes, and the date on the sheet says when it was last run. Photographs are generated for each sheet and captioned as views of the sheet.

Who answers

The desk of The Response Bench writes every sheet and signs the replies. Campaign records, supplier terms, postal and telephone regulations quoted by the sheet, and the arithmetic itself are named so that a reader can redo the numbers. Where a rule reads differently by state or country, the sheet names the jurisdiction its record came from.