Asking the right questions about your online direct marketing campaign can help manage risk, but not all questions can be answered without thorough testing.

There is a term around the Underscore Marketing office for those unanswerable questions that come from clients prior to the launch of direct marketing campaigns. You know what I'm talking about -- the questions that try to reduce direct response from a science based on variables to a "one size fits all" solution prior to any testing. "What's the industry average click rate?" is a good example. We call these "How long is a piece of string?" questions.

It's not that these questions are unanswerable, they're just irrelevant, or they put the cart in front of the horse by trying to answer the question before getting any meaningful data back from testing.

Testing is the key to any successful direct response initiative. We know this. The data we get back from testing overwrites any assumptions we make prior to the launch of a campaign.  But clients need to start somewhere, so answering some of these questions to the best of your ability becomes a necessary challenge.

"How many pieces of creative do we need at launch?"
This is a toughie. The answer is at least two, but less than infinity. One needs at least two pieces of creative promoting the same offer to make an attempt at isolating the effect of the creative execution on the overall success of the campaign. Obviously, the more creative one has ready at the outset of the campaign, the better lifts an agency can produce through optimization. But the minimum number is two per offer.

In a pinch, an online campaign can launch with a single piece of creative, as happens sometimes when production resources are overtaxed. Follow as quickly as possible on the heels of the launch with additional creative, as the longer one waits to add creative to the campaign, the later potentially beneficial optimization changes can be implemented.

The important thing here is that the advertiser realizes that there are several other variable levers to yank in order to improve campaign performance. Even if you launch with a single piece of creative, you're more likely to see a higher degree of variance between media environments than you are between different pieces of creative running in the same placement. I don't mean to imply that sites ought to be judged by the response to a single piece of creative, but advertisers can make some preliminary moves, including emphasizing placements and reallocating media weight.

"Which is better short form or long form landing pages?"
Much fuss has been made over short form versus long form with respect to landing pages over the years. Yes, advertisers can get tremendous lift in conversion by tinkering with campaign landing pages, but I've found that advertisers can start strong by avoiding thinking about online as a linear medium.

Here's what I mean. The short form versus long form argument boils down to balancing the concerns of two constituencies -- those who want to buy immediately and those who need more information to seal the deal. If you think in a linear fashion, this presents a huge conundrum, since you don't want to risk screwing up a sale with more sales language, but you don't want to abandon the folks on the borderline either. But the internet isn't a linear medium.

On landing pages, always present information in parallel. That is, a "Buy Now" mechanism must be placed in a high-profile position above the fold for the folks who are already convinced. Additional sales information (specs, benefits, FAQs, etc.) can be placed elsewhere on the page where interested parties can continue reading. In this way, a landing page can appeal to both groups of people.

"What sort of click rate should I expect?"
This question is a royal pain, owing to the fact that not only is it a question that nobody should want to know the answer to, but it's also dependent on so many variables as to be completely unpredictable. It's also a pain because it gets asked so infrequently.

My approach to this is to inform any client who asks it that unless their campaign has traffic-driving objectives, CTR isn't a KPI (key performance indicator). After all, CTR is little more than an indicator of initial interest and nothing more. Many studies have shown that optimizing a campaign solely on CTR will likely do more damage than good. So it's best to get CTR off the microscope slide as soon as possible.

That said, if someone were to force me at gunpoint to answer the question, I'd look to historical performance of similar products or services on similar sites. CTR ought not to be a benchmark, but some advertisers are simply curious and want to know how they compare.

Again, nothing is a substitute for structured testing. Assumptions are just that until they're tested in-market. Always err on the side of testing so that understanding which marketing levers and variables produce the highest lift is a priority.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.