Have a high-converting offer but no marketing

Air2air

Air2air

Banned
May 10, 2010
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Aliso Viejo, CA
www.dunningmarketing.com
Question: I have a mortgage client who has a new unique, differentiated offer that is also very high converting. As in, +/- 10% and a $38 commission.

Neither they nor I have managed an aff program before; I've always been on the publisher side like most of you guys. Up till this point their only marketing has been a few craigslist posts per day, and a horrible landing page. But the conversion rates are sick.

The offer is a new prequalification service for home buyers. It allows a buyer to go to their lender having met the government (FDIC) qualification criteria already. It's about 1200 bucks but the cost is taken off the loan, and if the buyer does not qualify we refund them.

This has been a huge hit. For this little mortgage company it's quickly become half their business in just a few months. Fortunately competitors are very few since only a few companies are licensed to process the approvals.

They got ahold of me to market the hell out of it. I am wondering if I should just have the aff companies manage this, or if I should try and manage it myself and make it available here direct to you guys on WF. And in this latter case, I do not have tracking set up or any of that to run our own aff program. What do you guys suggest?
 


Well, I don't know you or your skills personally, but if I didn't have all the skills or any experience and I wanted to bank hard with this, and if the offer is as great as you claim it to be, I would broker a deal with an aff network or someone who knows what they are doing and has experience and just take a cut.

25% of $100,000 is better than 100% of $15,000, you know what I mean...
 
Yep, just make sure they don't skip the middleman, if it's about money, you need good contracts...so I'd definitely check a lawyer before trying to broker a deal like this.
 
Thanks OneCent. So you're saying I should just sign up as an affiliate advertiser and take it from there? Yeah, perhaps so.

It sounds like this is just a textbook case to be an advertiser, and there's nothing special that you guys on WF can offer as far as a standalone managed aff network, and give you guys the money instead of CJ/Google etc.

Or in fact if I should just skip aff and do PPC/SEO, with the guys here.

My skills are on the site and marketing programs side, and I have fallen behind on WF-type skilz.
 
Unless they got enormous 8 figure ad spend, immediate backend sales, or close to it, they arne't gonna have the cashflow to reliably pay a 38 dollar offer conving at 10% getting massive, massive volume thrown at it, unless they cap it to shit, if they open it up publicly.
 
One very critical question : What is the GEO of this product?

My guess is it's local to Southern California? That's a problem with some of these awesome high converting local business offers - tough to scale like a national rebill.
 
Sure. If you broker your client to an affiliate network, you don't want to be just an affiliate, but get a share of every single conversion.

It's pretty much like a real estate broker, with the same problem: Once the contact between your client and the network is established, you aren't needed as a broker any more and cost them money. A contract with them simply makes sure you get your share.

Shake hands deals are nice, but when it's about money and maybe alot of money, trust alone isn't sufficient. My own experience.
 
I've gone through the analytics of this offer and talked with the mortgage company tonight about their performance history. It looks even better now, so here are the bullet points and stats:

They will pay sliding scale (per month):
$50 per case file up to 20 - $75 per case file 21 to 50 - $100 per case file 51+
Conv rate is 17% currently (explained below).

A 'case file' is an approved sale. This means a customer submitted their loan application information and paypal'd the $1297. About one third of these approvals are declined, so the customer gets refunded - and the commission too :(

They have been running this program on a very limited basis since January. As I said before they had no clue about marketing, so would manually enter about 50 Craigslist posts per month and send those people to the site to close 10.25 case files per month.

The customer flow has been from the Craigslist post (a horrible, dreadful pitch) to the site, then the conversion event is the Paypal payment. I want to dump Craigslist and get some of you guys to do this for real.

But get this - total lander uniques per month has only been 60. That's a 17% conversion rate.

The combination of low traffic and high conv rate tells me the messaging must be very specialized to the target customer. I am very good at that part - 20 year marketing veteran with my own agency - and will work on creatives and messaging you guys can use.

I will send further updates as we go. I appreciate the PM's and advice from all you guys!
 
If craigslist is working and the offer is not scamming them, why would you want to dump it?

There is some sick targeted traffic for this on cragislist.

PM me if you want to scale it up on CL
 
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