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 Successful
promotions on the Internet
Published
in the January edition of Computer
Link Magazine
A few
year's ago, every other banner ad you came across on the Internet
offered a chance to "WIN $100,000" or "WIN A NEW CAR!" These promotions
worked very well at the time, but as the Internet audience has grown,
the response rates to online marketing have reduced. Creating a
promotion online can be one of the best ways to attract new customers,
but it's important to remember that today online promotions require
careful planning and close attention to your audience in order to
be successful.
Looking
back at the banner ads from the past, imagine what kind of person
would click on one of these banners. I can't think of anyone who
wouldn't be interested in receiving $100,000 or a new car. However,
for most businesses, your customers are not made up of a broad spectrum
of everyone, but rather tend to be a group of people that have a
common interest or profession. A widespread promotion like this
might attract a large response, but is not necessarily going to
attract potential customers. A better way to attract customers would
be to target your offer to something your targets are interested
in. Here is just a quick side note: never give away what you are
trying to sell. You'll always do better to offer something associated
with your product rather than giving away the product itself because
people won't buy a product if they think they have a chance to win
it. For example, if you ran a company that sells backpacks, you
might want to make an offer such as "Win a camping trip to the Grand
Canyon." People that respond to this type of message are more likely
to be interested in your product, whereas those who aren't interested
in camping won't respond to your offer.
You
may ask why would I risk lowering my response rate this way? One
of the unique benefits of online marketing is that you can actually
have your prospects pre-qualify themselves. No longer do you need
to follow-up with every prospect. Now your contact list is made
up only of customers that are specifically interested in camping.
So far, we've been looking at this promotion as a broad-based Internet
campaign, running banners on an ad network where your banners could
appear on thousands of sites. In other words, letting the ads find
the customer, but there is another important aspect of targeting
that needs to be considered when buying your online media space.
The wide variety of sites available on the web today give you the
ability to truly target customers based on their interests. Using
our backpack example again, you could run a much more successful
program using web sites and email lists geared towards camping and
outdoors. As always, there is a trade-off with targeting. Sites
that offer highly targeted audiences tend to cost more than those
that offer a wider audience. Usually though, the cost for targeting
will provide a much higher response rate and thus, lower the cost
of each actual response. Ok, so now you have your web audience identified
and an offer that will bring in qualified customers.
What
happens next will make all the difference in the success of your
online program. But first, it's important to define what we mean by
"success." The measurements for success in online
marketing are usually based on: impressions, click-throughs, form
completion and direct sales. Impressions are the number of banner
ads actually shown, or the number of email messages sent out. Click-throughs
are the number of visitors that actually respond to the offer in the
banner or email (they click-through to your site). Form completion
is the number of people that actually submit information to you, and
direct sales are the actual completions of sales transactions on
your site.
Form
completion is usually the most important number for online marketing
programs, due to the fact that many companies are not directly
selling on the web yet. Form completion rates vary dramatically
based on the offer and the number of questions, but as a rule of
thumb you can usually expect somewhere between 10 and 20% of your
click-throughs to complete a form. Higher completion rates are
possible, in fact I worked on one promotion with a nearly 50%
completion rate, but in that case we had an extremely attractive
offer and provided immediate value to every visitor that completed
the form.
One
of the biggest mistakes in online marketing is asking your site
visitors for too much information. The longer the form, the lower
the number of completed forms you'll receive. Assuming
this promotion was geared towards building a list of prospective
customers for backpacks, the primary thing you want to do is make
sure that you get a way to contact the customer in the future. Sweepstakes
are a wonderful way to get this information. People know that in
order to receive their prize, they need to let you know how to contact
them. Yet, at the same time, you can also ask a few simple questions
that will let you understand your audience better. For example:
How many times a year do you go camping? By asking this question,
not only will you be collecting the information on how to contact
them, but also prioritizing the customer list based on their level
of interest in camping.
To
ensure the success of your online promotion, remember these key
steps: define your objective, target your offer and your audience,
and make sure they don't leave without giving you the information
you want to know.
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