Truth #3: Sweepstakes rarely attract profitable
customers
What
is the "S Method" that I revealed in the
previous email that I said could lead to such an email marketing
disaster? The "S" stands for "sweepstakes," and
the S Method refers to any sort of contest, giveaway or
gimmicky incentive that tries to attract an audience by
offering them
a chance to win something.
Using sweepstakes may, at first,
*appear* to be working. At first, plenty of people are
signing up. The numbers are
rising. Everything looks good.
But when it comes time to
actually convert those prospects into paying customers or
subscribers, suddenly reality hits.
Nobody's buying! What's the problem?
A MAGNET FOR NON-QUALIFIED
USERS
The problem is that sweepstakes, contests, giveaways
and programs that reward people for clicking or reading pages
all have one thing in common: they attract anybody and
everybody (rather than the people you really want). And too
often,
people who enter contests are the kind of people who scour
the Internet looking for "freebies" and who aren't
serious prospects to begin with.
Are these people really
your potential customers? Unless you're selling online
gambling services, probably not. And
even if they make a purchase, chances are these are going
to be your MOST TROUBLESOME customers. They'll hammer your
technical support phone lines because, after all, they
have lots of free time and don't mind waiting on hold as long
as you're footing the bill with a toll-free number.
Let's
step back for a minute and look at the big picture here.
By using the "S Method" for marketing, you
will make the three-fold mistake of:
- Attract anybody and everybody, rather than serious prospects.
- Mislead yourself and your marketing team into thinking
that things are working when, in fact, you're just seeing
inflated participation numbers that probably won't convert
to paying customers in the long run.
- Drain your valuable customer resources trying to support
freebie-mentality users who always seem to have a lot
more time on their hands than you do.
Put all this together and it sounds like a terrible marketing
plan, right?
So why do so many marketers follow the S Method anyway?
BE
CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR Here's why: because they're not measuring what matters.
Their metrics focus on the wrong numbers. Somebody up high
said, "Get me more subscribers," and of course,
the S Method gets lots of subscribers. So the numbers look
good and technically, the marketing people are just delivering
what the boss is asking for, right?
Be careful what you ask
for. If all you want is a million subscribers, no matter
who they are, that's pretty easy.
But that's not permission marketing.
Instead, redefine what
you're measuring. Isn't it really true that you want
*higher sales* at lower marketing cost?
If that's what you're looking for, then the S Method suddenly
appears foolish. And it is.
I
remember the story of a finance company that changed
their automated phone attendant to say, "Press zero for sales,
press 1 for support, and press 2 to hear me quack like a
duck." Word spread about this hilarity from office
to office, all over the country, and in the matter of a
few
weeks, the finance company received an extra 400,000 phone
calls. This was headlined in DM News (a weekly paper catering
to the Direct Marketing industry) and was characterized
as a marketing success.
Sure, 400,000 phone calls sounds
good at first. It makes
perfect sense as a marketing success, especially if you
live on Mars and don't have to pay for 400,000 toll-free
phone
calls that tie up all your phone lines with useless calls
from people who probably weren't interested in financial
services in the first place.
See
what I mean? This was called a success, but in reality,
it's a raging failure. It's "Stupid Marketing Tricks
101." Just like the S Method. It probably cost the
finance company tens of thousands of dollars in phone charges
and
lost productivity. They got a lot of attention, yes, but
did it generate new business? Probably not.
SWEEPSTAKES
ARE INCREASINGLY IRRELEVANT Sweepstakes are often nothing more than a carry over from
the old school "interruption marketing" days. Today,
however, they're largely irrelevant. Running a contest really
admits, "We're clueless about how to market to real
people, so we're just gonna run a contest and see who shows
up."
Don't make the S Method mistake. Instead, think
of something that really attracts the kind of people who
can actually
become your customers. Never reward people for entering
a contest, clicking a button or reading a page unless
you can
QUALIFY their interests first.
NEXT: ARE YOU MISSING OUT
ON HALF YOUR POTENTIAL MARKET? There are now 580 million people using the Internet worldwide,
but most email marketers are making a HUGE mistake and only
tapping a tiny portion of that market. Could you be making
the same mistake? And if so, how do you expand your email
marketing reach in a cost effective way that taps your full
potential? In my next email, I'll reveal how.
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