If you had asked us in 2004 if email submit offers would still exist in 2009, we would have bet money against it. Fortunately, we didn’t bet money because we would have lost. For reasons outlined in our overview of the incentivized landscape, the email submit offers, what we referred to as the breakage / media buy model, have lost ground. While they still continue to generate upwards of nine figures annually, it will never see the half billion plus numbers from 2007. Their decline (don’t call it a demise), has nothing to do with incentivized marketing being inherently bad. It is more a reflection on the particular levers at the disposal of the email submit offers. They, like any purchased media model in customer acquisition, rely on a handful of pretty simple factors – the click through rate on the ads, the conversion rate on the landing page, and the subsequent value of the user that converts.
The ubiquity of Apple products used as part of the hook for people to enter into the funnel earned the email submit offers their alternate nickname, "Free iPod" offers. It’s not that email submit offers used iPods that matters. What matters is understanding that iPods simply converted better on the banners and landing pages. They were the perfect run of network item – something of high perceived interest that would motivate a user to act. The motivation to acts matters most, because the success of the email submit style offer depends on users entering with momentum. That momentum leads them down the start of the process, and for most, the start leads to some less than fulfilling end when they realize that it will take much more work than they initially expected. But by this point, they have already committed time and the offer owner hopes some conversions a well.
Media cost has risen, media sources have become more restrictive, and users a little bit more wary. Those, among other reasons, mean that the Free iPod offers don’t compete as effectively against other ads. Those buying traffic for them can’t pay as much on a CPM as they could and publishers run it less than they might because the returns back out not as well as they once did. Equally important, no great run of network product exists – one with high appeal and low penetration. Now, iPods, iPhones, and the like have become simply too attainable. It doesn’t mean they don’t still run, but they won’t generate the appeal they once did. Thus, the success of the fake blogs – run of network appeal, low barrier to conversion, high momentum entering.
As a result of the changes in the buying / conversion landscape, those running email submits continue to look for other areas. One is emotional – the survey model of trying to ask a question that will come close to eliciting the same level of momentum as a product. Another is continued refinement of the long tail. Unfortunately, aiming for the long tail today is no longer as easy as creating a database of items offered at Amazon and mapping them to a templatized email submit page that could swap out the item based on a variable being passed to the site. Google has effectively blocked free items from showing among the top search results for specific products. Otherwise, we would still see email submit offers on millions more queries. The one template / million product approach is not easy and requires effort. The only difference between that and someone doing just 10 products (much more manageable manually) is scalability. To Google, though, they are still the same.
For email submit offers and almost any other ultimately arbitraged offer, the Google dance comes down to perceived value. They don’t like advertisers who make money by sending traffic to somewhere else. If you don’t add value in the process, you get dinged. So, people need to try and create some value, and that has had an interesting impact. It has raised the barrier to entry – not to a lot but enough that it will discourage the person with very limited reserves. Let’s look at an example. Here is an offer that you can pick up at a network – WeCoverYourBills.com
WeCoverYourBills is a fairly straightforward email submit offer. There is a special skill in making these offers (managing them and their pieces profitably), but here we’re focused on the first piece, traffic. Given that you can’t simply buy diaper keywords and send to this offer on Google, what do you do? This is where the higher barrier to entry comes into play. Those who want to make this work must build something, and they must build something that appears to add value before getting to this page. That page should look like a real site as opposed to something with obviously two pages to it. What could that look like? Here is one that we found – The Free Baby Diapers Online Directory.
DiaperOffersOnline is a pretty neat experiment / play on a site designed to monetize through email submit. To an engine, it could look like it has 50 plus pages with each having some unique content (census like data). True, the site shows its true roots if you read through the text (it’s edited about as well as these articles), but unlike many such sites, this one both tries to build interest and set the context that users have to do something. As for success, that is less obvious. The site was registered in July 2009, so it has been operational for at most four months. And, there is a good chance too that it might not work, so it is time and effort that ultimately returns little to no gains. That differs greatly from the older approach where you could put a site up in a day or two, test, tweak, and/or trash. This means that the serious players will have more market share, but it also means others must look for new offers if they don’t want or don’t have the resources for building more complete sites.
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