Too Much Of A Good Thing?
I have written before about my customer MeloSleep.com. They wanted to promote their product by giving away free samples. They placed a large newspaper ad with a limited amount of success and then decided to post their free offer on a few “freebie give away” sites.
I haven’t had much experience with sites like this and I have always thought that people will take anything for free even if they don’t need it so I’m not really sure what the success rate will be.
These sites must copy the offers from one another and Melosleep who was averaging 10-20 visitors a day got 4,000 yesterday. It sucked up almost a GB of bandwidth and they got thousands of requests for free samples. These visitors were going directly to the offer page and filling out the form. Not thinking far enough in advance I had some big pictures on that page and the form sent an email request instead of building a database.
As soon as I noticed what was happening I removed most of the pictures from the order form page and the “thank you” page. That saved quite a bit of bandwidth. I made a copy of the page with pictures for the regular visitors and I also changed the form script to save the information to a database which could be used much more easily.
While it was lucky that I caught this early, these things should have been done before the rush of traffic. I could have taken my own advice “the lesson I’m taking from this is that you run a promotion, not only do you have to be prepared for your idea not to work, but you have to be prepared for it to work beyond your wildest expectations (which may be harder).”
I’m not sure what they think a good conversion rate from free sample to paying customer is, but I’ll keep following this and let you know if in the end they think it was worth it posting on the freebie sites or not.
More…
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[…] filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list […]
Pingback by Your First Email Campaign - Your Own List — March 31, 2008 @ 9:08 am
[…] I think that Bag, Borrow or Steal seems to be doing things right and I look forward to finding out how this turns out. It’s an article worth reading and remember something this large might not happen to your business, but you can try to get free or paid mentions in your local media and then plan well for the results. […]
Pingback by Lillicotch.com » Managing Free Publicity — May 27, 2008 @ 7:57 am