A FREE offer as part of your word of mouth marketing is best done when you make sure the offer goes only to proven buyers.
Isn’t this the frustration, asking yourself, “But where can I find buyers?!”
Fortunately it’s not difficult for most businesses begin to find buyers. They are in your database, not perhaps as ‘future buyers’, but under the label ‘past customers’. (You do keep a database of your customers, don’t you?)
Targeting them is an essential part of your word of mouth marketing.
Past buyers have proven ability to buy want what you are offering, or at least what they THOUGHT you were offering.
So what are you doing to follow them up?
In ‘Word of Mouth Magic’ there is an example of a follow-up letter to past clients with a free voucher offer.
In the testing this offer was described in two different ways:
A) FREE $200 gym voucher with every referral.
versus
B) Refer a friend and receive a FREE $200 gym voucher.
Which do you think would perform better?
Here are the results…
Headline A received a 30% greater response than headline B.
So, what’s the lesson?
Even the elements in the letters you write can make a big difference to the number of referrals you get, and in this case putting FREE at the beginning worked better.
Have you specifically worked out how much you can afford to give away in a FREE offer?
Do you know which of your past buyers to send the offer to?
Do you realize there are ones who should NOT get sent this offer?
Are you testing your marketing and getting 30+% improvements?
If you answered ‘No’ to any of these questions, then you can find the answer in Word of Mouth Magic:
http://www.WordofMouthMagic.com/magic/
-Martin Russell
4 Comments
We included a FREE voucher in the xmas cards for our clients to give to a friend. They were well received and have already got new clients from these.
I had suggested ‘New Year’ cards instead of xmas cards & why… maybe that suggestion will be taken up this year… we’ll have to wait & see.
According to statistical analysis data researched by James Brausch, the word “complimentary” is statistically more profitable than the word “free”… It would be interesting to add that variable into the mix, and test the results.
Cheers,
Jim
Hi Jim,
I agree that the word “complimentary” would give more value… and it was a complimentary gift voucher we gave to our clients. We also have a valid date added which makes new clients more inclined to ring up to use their voucher.
I would have thought that Free would turn people off. So much spam these days has that spelled F R E E or fr!ee. When I see it online Ialmost automatically have a negative thought in my mind.
There are 2 headline software tools, one comes from a Clayton Makepeace follower (and I can’t remember who) and the other from James Brausch. I know Brausch’s better but both take your headline and statistically tell you how well it should do against old headlines. Free is one of the words that just does not make it.
love the site.
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