Dude, It’s for You

Alloy targets teens with free voicemail service BE IT BY PAGER, cell phone, e-mail or good-old-fashioned handwritten notes passed in class, teenagers always want to keep in touch. Helping them do that could only help to make a company part of the in-crowd.

At least, that’s the hope of New York-based Alloy Online Inc. (www.alloy.com), which markets youth-focused apparel and lifestyle products. Looking for ways to strengthen its relationship with its teenage constituency, Alloy began offering eVoice, a free voicemail service, to its 2.7 million member network earlier this year. More than 20,000 young consumers have signed up for the service, which provides voicemail accessible on the teens’ own phone lines or away from home. In return, users listen to targeted audio ads.

“For teenagers, communication is their lifeline,” notes Joan Rosenstock, Alloy’s director of marketing.

The intimacy of the medium may contribute to the effectiveness of the messages. After all, the voicemails the listener picks up are likely from friends or family, meaning they are “the most personal content,” says Chancey Blackburn, Menlo Park, CA-based eVoice’s director of media services. “The environment for listening is strong.”

Consumers sign up for the service, which allows them to receive voicemail from a series of remote technologies, including telephone, wireless applications and computer stations, where subscribers can play voice messages through their computer’s speakers.

Alloy, which promotes itself and its products through the system, enables teens to request a catalog or receive e-mail regarding product information by pressing a button on the phone’s handset at the end of the ad.

The marketer has been playing it safe when it comes to targeting, however. Ever mindful of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it is conservative in terms of which information it collects and how it uses it.

The service’s intimate nature has paid off in terms of the response level. Rosenstock estimates that the “clickthrough” rate on its telephone messages is easily triple that of traditional electronic advertising, such as banner ads.

The online registration form for the voicemail is intentionally simple: Enrollees initially provide only their name, gender, zip code and date of birth (which lets Alloy know whether a subscriber is over age 13). Subsequent communications offer the ability to round out the picture of the user.