How to Pick Offers which Really Work
for you?
Jason McClain
For many of us in the online marketing
community, we’ve had our share of bumps and bruises in
picking out the right offers that work on our network.
Remember when credit repair was the hot ticket and every
customer knocked on your door to become a new debt
consolidation lead? And who can forget the wonderful joys
associated with the mortgage lead? In those days, if we
couldn’t generate leads internally, we had the bright idea
of going to someone who said they could, only to find that
the lead you purchased had been sold time and time again.
Then, your new battle became maintaining credibility with
your buyer.
This all comes back down to trying to decide
what type of offers really work. Think about it. If
everyone in the world refinanced their house, fixed their
credit and managed their debts, we’d all be out of
business. Unfortunately, since these types of offers have
stuck around for so many years, trying to run a fresh one is
not an easy task. It’s time to start thinking in a new
direction.
There is no need to say that avoiding the
offer that takes the credit card, Social Security and
drivers license numbers is a given. Although there are some
offers that we all know work very well. For example, not
many of us would turn down a cell phone offer that requires
a social and driver’s license number to replace it with a
$29 business opportunity “welcome” kit that takes a credit
card. Some of the excellent offers on the market range from
home security, diet, education, newsletters, biz op, travel
incentives, free books to real estate agents, cash advance,
and many more.
As you go down the list of determining how it
is you created your network of registrants in the first
place, you’ll have a lot more success in determining which
offers work best for you, regardless of whether you’re
mailing or developing additional co-reg programs. The right
offer is the key to success.
Another important key is data-mining. Ask
questions to your users. Whether you send out a survey
email or capture more information on the front end, you’ve
got to know who your users are. If asked, I can tell an
advertiser that our prize giveaway site caters to 61% women
who are 20-42 years of age and have an income of $29-48K a
year. Can you say this about your network? If not, you
need to find the answers. When you come across an offer,
you’ve got to know if the offer will do well on your
network. If not, you’re just wasting time and real estate
as well as losing money.
Mining the data correctly is very crucial.
There is value in growing your database from the ground up.
It will not only improve your open rate but keep the Spam
Cops away from you. We all know what happens when John Doe
from PooDuck Louisiana gets an email and wants to see how
much time he can spend giving you and your list a bad name.
Grow it and work it. It’s your lifeline.
I’ve been fortunate enough to see all sorts
of offers come across my desk. It seems to me that the
easiest ones to generate are not just the ones that
ask the fewest questions but also the ones that meet the
demographics of your users. As we all know, the formula for
making a deal in lead generation is fewer questions, higher
bounty, low scrub, no caps.
If you really want to make an impact, then
find an industry that works with your network. Start by
rediscovering how it is you built your list or network in
the first place. What is your hook to bringing traffic to
your site? Let me give you an example. Let’s assume
that you own several different types of networks: everything
from a prize giveaway site where a user can register to win
a free computer, game console or other electronic or
recreational prize to a financial site where a user can save
money on their long distance bill, find an attorney, or
lower their cell phone bill. We pay our partners on a name
and email optin to send us traffic and give them unique and
creative hooks that convert well for them on the back end.
They get paid and they’re happy.
The hooks that we use to bring a registrant
to one of our sites are the keys that determine what our
users want to see. When a user comes to our prize giveaway
site and opts in to receive future mailings from us, we
quickly realize that our list works very well for those
users interested in recreational items. If a user is
interested in recreational items, it’s probably reasonable
to conclude that they have an education or would like to
expand their education, therefore an educational offer would
be ideal. If they have an education or are looking to
expand it because they like recreational items, it’s another
easy conclusion to draw that they might be a homeowner; thus
a home security offer might be a good placement.
The best advice I can offer to anyone looking
to get a better yield is be selective about which offer you
pick to test with, only a reasonable size is needed to give you
statistically valid results, and to watch the numbers…
watch the numbers….. watch the numbers. If the offer does
not work… Pull it. Save the real estate for the ones that
do.
Jason McClain, President / CEO
PrimeQ Solutions, Inc.
Email:
jason@primeq.com
Web:
http://www.primeq.com
