PROMOTIONS
THAT DRIVE TRAFFIC
TO YOUR INTERNET SITE
by Cynthia L.
Ironson
Need to draw
people to your Web page? Try a blend of online and offline
strategies, including promotional products. Counselors reveal the
methods – and products – that work for them and their clients.
While the term “heavy traffic”
has always had a negative meaning for most, the Internet has
changed all that. When you’re talking Net, if a company has a
solid presence there, you want heavy traffic at your site; you
want the virtual equivalent of a fender-bender – something that
will make people slow down or stop to take a look.
It’s a problem shared by all kinds of companies these days. Some
large retailers have abandoned their e-commerce initiatives
because they just didn’t draw enough consumers to their sites.
Promotional consultant Dan Willens, invested in a “premium”
Web site to promote his own small business. “For the first four
months, absolutely nothing happened. Nobody came,” he says.
“They didn’t come because there was no advertising.” As a
result, he developed a strategy that combined Internet outreach,
search-engine registration, some banner placement, opt-in e-mails
and promotional products. Since then, his daily Web-site traffic
has improved dramatically.
The truth is, there isn’t one all-encompassing strategy to
ensure your site gets new and/or repeat visitors. This is best
accomplished through a blend of approaches, both online and
offline, to draw traffic and create technology-enabled
relationships with customers. And promotional products – an ad
medium most firms already use for other reasons – can play a key
role in the quest to generate the best kind of traffic.
Why Should They Visit?
According to NetNames Ltd., on the morning of September 19, 2000,
there were 28,781,217 domain names registered worldwide,
17,801,236 of them with a dot.com suffix. Think that’s a lot?
Not even close. Remember, that’s just registered names.
Last year, Nature published an article estimating there were 800
million Web pages. In May, it reported that there are now more
than a billion pages, and in only two years that number could grow
to a mind-boggling 100 billion.
Considering there are that many choices out there for Web surfers,
why should visitors come to your site? Are you providing them with
reasons to do so? How are you communicating these reasons?
“In our advertising, it says, ‘Come to our site and receive a
free gift,’ ” Willens says. “When they come to the site,
more often than not they enter the $1,000 drawing.”
Once someone has visited the site (it only takes a few minutes to
process each hit, he explains), Willens implements his strategy.
He mails out each visitor’s gift right away with a thank-you
letter. The product? An imprinted memo holder that attaches to a
computer monitor. It features the company logo, Web address and
phone number.
Many Web sites use giveaways and sweepstakes to lure first-time
visitors and make them repeat-hitters. Search engine iWon.com’s
popularity surged recently because of its daily drawings for
$10,000, a monthly drawing for $1 million and an annual $10
million sweepstakes. To enter, a person must register at the site
and use it to search the Net.
Promotional consultant Jeff Stier sees these tactics as a call to
action. “Like almost everything else in this world – including
promotional products, incentive marketing and direct marketing –
you need to give people a reason to take action,” he says.
“Putting a URL in an ad, on a billboard or on a promotional
product without any reason – without any driver to have people
take action to actually go there – doesn’t work.” He adds
that products imprinted with a URL and an invitation to visit the
site to win something will likely have significantly higher
response rates.
Here are some reasons you can use to convince people they should
visit your site:
- You have an amazing product selection.
- You post how-to articles and other educational information
people can read and/or download.
- You have daily, weekly or monthly special offers.
- You have an online company store offering cool products
bearing your company’s logo (where some are put on sale
regularly).
You can also mix your media. Print ads, as well as promotional
products, can tell recipients (or readers) why they should visit
your Web site.
Counselor Andy Fink suggests telling people they’ll regret not
visiting your site. Well- written ad copy and creative product
choices can get that message across. “If someone gets a wild
promotional piece and they’ve never been on your site, there
might be a consequence,” he says. What might the recipient miss
out on by not visiting that someone else – perhaps her
competition – may benefit from?
Online Outreach
“Companies with Web sites are out there using the traditional
methods of outreach,” Willens says. “But somehow, in their
vocabulary, promotional products haven’t been connected to Web
promotions. They use them for their picnics, they use them for
employee recognition. [But] they haven’t thought of using them
for their own Web-site promotions.”
High-tech firms were among the first to use promotional products
and programs as traffic-builders and goodwill generators. Similar
methods, chosen with the target audience and Web-site’s purpose
in mind, can help almost any company reach out to potential
visitors. The bonus is that – unlike a print ad or billboard –
promotional products can keep a Web site URL handy (which might be
hard to recall, given how many there are these days), as well as
the main reason why people should visit. Further, logoed products
can even help forge an ongoing relationship with your Web-site
visitors.
Skeptical about the relationship part? Take Fink’s
“Squeeze-A-Buddie” Web-site promotion. This yellow,
sand-filled balloon character (one recipient named him Howard) is
imprinted with Fink’s company logo, Web-site address and a
reminder to enter his Web-site drawing. Fink mailed 300 of them to
prospects and clients. “I had clients hitting my site who never
hit my site before,” he says. “And if they had hit my site in
the past, they never entered the drawing. But Howard reminds you
to enter [it].”
Bottom line: The mascot drew traffic to Fink’s site and
generated new business. In fact, his product was often placed in a
spot of honor on top of the recipients’ monitor. Now, any time
Fink gets a request for information or samples, Howard goes in the
box, too. “Maybe he’ll end up on someone’s desk in another
department that may not be doing business with me,” he notes.
Looking at the bigger picture, any product you chose – possibly
your own mascot, imprinted with a URL and a reason to visit your
site – can be used as a bill stuffer, trade show giveaway, sales
leave-behind, thank-you gift and more. Many logoed products,
particularly those that are computer-related, are light, flat and
won’t affect mailing costs all that much. Mousepads anyone?
The Power Of Direct Mail
Like Fink, promotional consultant Robb Pair believes a creative
direct-mail campaign can generate good Web-site traffic. But he
hasn’t always been a fan of direct mail. “Now, with the
Internet being such an intangible property, I feel that direct
mail is coming back around and is going to hold its own,” he
says. “Receiving a physical object in the mail contrasts starkly
with the virtual world and therefore tends to stand out among all
the other information a person receives.”
Though he couldn’t share any specific examples because of client
confidentiality, Pair did come up with a promotion for a
hypothetical pet-supply Web site. It could mail out a
three-dimensional rubber dog bone with a Web address imprinted on
it (in nontoxic ink) for the recipient’s dog. This would
actually create an emotional bond of sorts between the site and
the dog-owner. A letter with the bone could inform the recipient
that if she registers on the site, she’d receive a free gift –
a bag filled with smaller imprinted dog bones. Estimated promotion
cost: $10 to $15 per person. “If a company doesn’t [think
it’s worth] the investment of $15 to have someone spend 15
minutes to fill out a form and give them personal information on
their site, then I don’t know if they really understand the
value of a customer,” Pair says.
Small investments and a lot of creativity have drawn visitors to
many other sites. Counselor Cliff Quicksell did a promotion to
introduce his own Web site and new toll-free pager number to
clients. The direct-mail campaign even won him an award.
Quicksell mailed each client a small box with teaser copy on the
outside that read, “Now it’s easier than ever ...” The
inside continued, “... to catch me.” The box contained several
imprinted products – a computer mouse, mousepad, pen and BRC/reaction
card. The kicker was a real mousetrap that was attached to the
cord of the computer mouse to tie into the promotion’s ad copy.
An incredible 93% of recipients checked out his site, and
Quicksell generated $50,000 in new business.
Sticky Is Good
Experts call the amount of time a person spends at a site its
“stickiness.” Content is one of the major factors that
contribute to it. Drawing repeat visitors will depend on whether
your site gives its target audience interesting and useful
content.
If your site sells baby supplies and your target audience is new
parents, for example, you could post articles on feeding babies or
getting them to sleep through the night. Chances are parents will
return to your site for more information – and to buy some
infant supplies. Hopefully, they’ll also refer their friends to
your site.
Pair says even the most creative traffic-building direct-mail
campaigns using the most perfect promotional products will
ultimately fail if the site itself isn’t strong. “It’s
solely the responsibility of the Web site to hold their
attention,” he says. “If you use a great product or a great
campaign to drive someone to a site that doesn’t have content,
the second time around it’s going to be a huge
disappointment.”
Pair’s own site – eye catching and playful – has created a
community of visitors. “Basically, you can go on our site and
fill out information to get your own title. Then you’re part of
our company,” he explains. After a visitor gets a title, he
receives monthly e-mails, each providing what Pair calls a
“creative share,” something humorous and fun his creative team
dreams up: “Obviously we want our clients and vendors we work
with within that six degrees of separation – in other words, the
same type of thinkers we are.”
The e-mail contains a hyperlink that connects the recipient right
to Pair’s site, acting as a subtle reminder that the company is
out there. “We don’t use [e-mail] much for advertising,” he
says. “We allow the person to come on to our site to find out
more information and updates – we’ve had great response.”
Cynthia Ironson is features editor of Imprint. |
