Everyone in this industry has seen the last 2 years of online marketing following a trend of gathering leads by offering “free” goods. We have had several articles documenting this trend, and touching on some of the points of why this has come to be, and how effective it is for marketers. In this article we will discuss some of the factors that will help you to become successful with this type of marketing.
It is hard to believe that in less than 24 months the marketplace for incentive based registration sites has become so competitive. The days of running a "process based website" with just a few employees from your dorm room, such as theuseful.com, is not at all a reality anymore. From what I hear, even they employ almost 60 people now.
There are certain factors that influence the sudden swell of the companies attempting to join the incentive space. Without all of these components working together in synch it would be impossible to be any kind of a player in this new richly competitive game. If you have not yet jumped on the bandwagon of one-field payouts for free incentivised offers, here are some pointers to help you succeed in this vertical.
Creative: The reason that I start with creative is intentional. This is a game of consumer appeal. To be a player in this highly lucrative industry, you need to have a sizable creative team that can innovate on the fly. Depending on the amount of registrations you are looking to drive per day get ready to hire about 5-10 full time flash designers
Sales: Offers, Offers, and more offers! Unfortunately the cost of a registration is the cost that you are going to pay out regardless of whether you have 1 offer in your registration path or 100 offers! Sales and your ability to keep the client happy are absolutely critical to one’s success in this game. Consistent offer flow insures that your revenue per registration will remain high and unmoving because the price of the traffic is only increasing!
Media: Depending on your appetite for traffic, be prepared to compete for registrations by paying in upwards of $1.65 per zip code submitted. Saturation is an understatement. The top people in this space are spending in excess of $30,000.00 per day and driving up the costs with all formats of media.
Technology: Think you can build the technology in your sleep?
Guess again! There is much more than meets the eye if you want to compete in this space. Data delivery, data hygiene and fulfillment are big time headaches unless you have a niche-automated system to handle this for you.
All in all the incentive marketing space is hot and on the upswing with lots of companies throwing their hats in the ring. However, the original incentive marketers in the space still hold the majority of the market share. Simply following their model will not be enough to make your mark if you are considering trying this out for yourself. It’s up to the new wave of incentive marketers to keep innovating both with technology and creative in order to make your mark.
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