Wisdom - General Marketing & Advertising 7

This is a simple story of how viral marketing performed against more traditional forms of advertising. The industry is health and fitness. The Objective: Acquire 10,000 new leads for the manufacturer’s E-commerce website. The Strategy: Use Print Advertising and Viral Marketing Online acquisition that could later be used for 1-to-1 sales initiatives through email and web. The Tactics: For print, have a back cover of a national fitness magazine that had a call-to-action and a vanity URL to subscribe to win a collectors edition poster (1 of 15) autographed by the stars of the industry. Circulation was estimated at 300,000 including pass-along rate. For web, we used a viral marketing tactic that included an email blast to the 60,000 current subscribers, home page links, and several other links to the contest site throughout parent website. We set-up the contest to allow one ballot for every entry. Each contestant entered their information onto the form and received one ballot. They then had the opportunity to refer up to 10 of their friends via an email invite to receive up to 10 more ballot entries, for a maximum of 11 ballots. Contestants could login anytime to see how many ballots they had. The result: The print ad gave us only 2 new acquisitions at a cost of almost $10,000. That’s a whopping $5,000 acquisition cost. The web viral marketing gave us over 8,500 new acquisitions at a cost of $6,500. The cost was due to the outsourced viral technology engine. This CPA was much lower at just $0.76. Overall, the key learning here is that print to web on almost every occasion performs so poorly, it’s really not worth the investment. Why? I believe that it’s only a brand builder that establishes a promise and unless you’re giving away a million bucks or a chance of a lifetime, forget it. People have too many other distractions by the time they get to their computer to remember to put the exact vanity URL into their browser. BUT, if you use the same medium as we did for the viral component, then the barriers are down and there is ultimately less friction. By the way, the E- commerce store experienced a sales lift of over 20% since then and continues to climb. In fact, we also started to use the viral component on a full-time basis with coupons and are experiencing an astounding 83% redemption rate! Darren Contardo, http://darrencontardo.typepad.com