Old online marketing tricks still work offline.

One problem marketeers face every day I can only describe as user evolution. People learn quickly and consequently stop falling for the common marketing tricks webmasters have in place for them. Take popups for example. Believe it or not back in the days they were used not only to annoy the crap out of your visitors but also to make money. How many of you even look at the popups these day when you are unfortunate enough to come across one? A quick hand reflex sends the mouse pointer flying to the little red x before you even get the chance to move your eyes.

Let me tell you a little story about a classic marketing technique. Lets say you have a mailing list of people interested in some rather interesting new software you have developed. You shoot them an email on the day you launch offering this marvelous piece of software for $100. Some of them will buy it but what about those who don’t? You wait for a week and ask them again but this time lower the price to lets say $50. This method is very effective… in the short run. In the long run however people will realize what you are doing and in their turn refrain from buying your product until you send them a second chance offer with 50% discount.

So when are you more likely to bump into a not so evolved user? Offline! You will be surprised how many old online marketing tricks will work a treat offline. Internet is flooded with free this and free that offers. In real world on the other hand things are much less saturated. Lets generate some leads! First of all we need to find a suitable CPA offer. I logged into affiliate.com and found a £150 free Tesco gift card offer which pays $1.15 per email submit (Because I am in UK). I then bought an easy to remember domain name similar to freetescovoucher.com and redirected it to my affiliate link. Finally I went and through some local magazines and newspapers and contacted them asking for a quote. A few days later my ad was up. It was a small square similar to this one

that people could cut out. (Please note that I am using an example from the top of my head which was similar to my campaign. I really don’t want hundreds of  people going out there and doing exactly the same thing. Think everything through before you do something similar. Make sure you can legally print tokens containing brand names or logos. Also, the last thing you want is people cutting out your tokens and going to the actual company, asking to redeem them.) My ad was running for a week. The conversion rate has been phenominal! I can’t post the exact figures but I can say that this campaign worked out at around 5 to 1 ROI. Are there any more tricks you can use? There certainly are!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.