Wow, what a nice week ... shame that it's already dried up and too small a sample upon which to base an efficacy judgment.
I was digging through the mail a couple of weeks ago, all the usual stuff, and was stopped short in my driveway by the Musician's Friend catalogue, which has this gorgeous picture of a Les Paul Vintage Mahogany on the cover. I don't even particularly like the guitar but it got me to stop and think. Someone is being paid to determine what products go on the cover of catalogues. Chances are they know more than I do about their product lines. Maybe I should listen to them.
I set up a landing page which featured a very nice pic of the LPVM and ran some ads on AdWords targeting the specific product, figuring that there would be at least some small spike in search volume as MF mailing list members went looking for info on the guitar. I only got 20 clicks on my ad, but 13 of them converted to sales. Not all of them bought the featured guitar, not all of them bought a guitar at all -- one bought something cheap as hell, maybe strings or a strap or something, as the commission was very low -- but WOW. 20 clicks = 13 sales is not something I've seen in a long, long time.
Will continue to try to duplicate this with other catalogues and see what happens. The key points, as far as I can tell, are:
1) Specific product getting all of the attention on the cover of the catalouge. Something with branding and recognition already built in, so stay away from eg. Hammacher Schlemmer or Nieman Marcus and other specialty places.
2) You must be able to quickly find a good aff. program for that product if you don't already have one.
3) In my case, I made a nice looking splash page with some pictures I got off of the Gibson website and reviews that I wrote based on reviews at Musician's Friend and other sites. The reviews peeked just over the first fold, and the buy it now button just over the second (after the reviews.) About, Contact and Privacy links way the hell down at the bottom -- no other nav or content on the page.
Anyway, will try again and see if this wasn't just an insane fluke. Obviously a 65% conversion rate is probably not going to happen everyday, but I've always been a big believer in letting big companies pay smart people to think about product promotion for me, eg. getting niche ideas from the "New Releases" section of the "Dummies guide" website. And having the people who put together catalogues at some insane rate of pay give me the inspiration on specific products to promote seems like a pretty good idea.
Frank
I was digging through the mail a couple of weeks ago, all the usual stuff, and was stopped short in my driveway by the Musician's Friend catalogue, which has this gorgeous picture of a Les Paul Vintage Mahogany on the cover. I don't even particularly like the guitar but it got me to stop and think. Someone is being paid to determine what products go on the cover of catalogues. Chances are they know more than I do about their product lines. Maybe I should listen to them.
I set up a landing page which featured a very nice pic of the LPVM and ran some ads on AdWords targeting the specific product, figuring that there would be at least some small spike in search volume as MF mailing list members went looking for info on the guitar. I only got 20 clicks on my ad, but 13 of them converted to sales. Not all of them bought the featured guitar, not all of them bought a guitar at all -- one bought something cheap as hell, maybe strings or a strap or something, as the commission was very low -- but WOW. 20 clicks = 13 sales is not something I've seen in a long, long time.
Will continue to try to duplicate this with other catalogues and see what happens. The key points, as far as I can tell, are:
1) Specific product getting all of the attention on the cover of the catalouge. Something with branding and recognition already built in, so stay away from eg. Hammacher Schlemmer or Nieman Marcus and other specialty places.
2) You must be able to quickly find a good aff. program for that product if you don't already have one.
3) In my case, I made a nice looking splash page with some pictures I got off of the Gibson website and reviews that I wrote based on reviews at Musician's Friend and other sites. The reviews peeked just over the first fold, and the buy it now button just over the second (after the reviews.) About, Contact and Privacy links way the hell down at the bottom -- no other nav or content on the page.
Anyway, will try again and see if this wasn't just an insane fluke. Obviously a 65% conversion rate is probably not going to happen everyday, but I've always been a big believer in letting big companies pay smart people to think about product promotion for me, eg. getting niche ideas from the "New Releases" section of the "Dummies guide" website. And having the people who put together catalogues at some insane rate of pay give me the inspiration on specific products to promote seems like a pretty good idea.
Frank
