Customers As Your Viral Affiliates
Private customer sales are very effective ways to get viral
marketing started for your own web site. All that you have to do
is provide them with a special incentive for that they can use,
but also send to their friends and family.
You do it by offering a discount on someone else's products and
not yours. You make money on someone else's money.
The process is straightforward. You offer your customers a
discount on a third party's products. They get the discount by
using a discount code that promotes your web site and encourages
them to send that discount code to their family and friends so
that they too can get the discount.
To get the discount when they want to buy something, they go to
a page that promotes your company and further encourages them to
send the discount coupon to their family and friends. When that
happens, they are lead to your site and they are further
encouraged to pass the discount offer on.
As this process moves forward, you gather opt in email addresses
of people who are interested in special offers. Periodically
they are sent email with a special offer that brings them right
back into the circle of viral marketing.
You can see this process in action at
http://www.qlbr.com/aff_master_page
Key to your success is:
the use of an affiliate program that uses discount codes instead
of cookies, and
the use of an affiliate program that provides you a customized
page that promotes your company.
Affiliate programs with discount codes are not that prevalent on
the web because they are easy to set up and provide benefits to
affiliates that many companies do not want to provide to
affiliates. The biggest benefit that affiliates get is the
ability to get long-term commissions and not to be affected by
customers deleting cookies.
If you can't find one to your liking, you can set one up
yourself very easy and use it as part of your own viral
marketing plan. The whole program is based on using a shopping
cart into which you can insert a discount code. That you can get
in many places. And you can even get one free at
http://www.chamberofcommerce.pl/own_store
For a model, you can use the affiliate program at
http://www.qlbr.com/aff_shoppoland_program . Use the concept and
make your own marketing materials. Note that it just uses a
simple free form for affiliate applications and the store that
it promotes uses the free shopping cart mentioned in the
paragraph above.
But back to the private sale and your customers as viral
marketers.
There are many ways to get your customers started.
Email, of course, is of the first. Just send the information
about a special offer to your mailing list. Email is fast,
direct and you can generally predict a response rate.
A postcard is second. Postcards have legs. Unlike email that
gets deleted, and web page addresses that are forgotten,
postcards hang around. They get read, they get filed, they get
put on refrigerators and they get results. They are particularly
attractive when they make your customer feel important by
telling the customer that this is a private sale. Customers
respond.
The real money comes with the follow up email or postcard with a
special offer for a unique and special item that is available
only to people who are on your list.
As you develop your viral marketing business model, you will
develop tactics and strategies that keep your customers telling
others about the special deals that they are getting through
you.
And you will find that your customers are the best viral
marketers that you have.
Gary Granai is a publisher of the Eastern European Review Blog
and several web sites that are related to Eastern Europe. His
site is at
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