Winning New Subscribers
ADVERTISING Concepts Inc. hopes $125 in customized coupons will entice its online newsletter subscribers to share their friends’ e-mail addresses.
The coupons are the prize in a contest launched last month by the Pittsburgh agency to increase readership for DirectCoupons and Freebies. The weekly free newsletter has 75,000 subscribers; ACI president Jason Wolfe says the goal is to have 100,000 by the end of this month.
In the contest, subscribers were asked to share the e-mail addresses of friends they thought would be interested in subscribing. ACI then sent e-mails to the friends, asking if they would like to subscribe. (Addresses of those who decline the invitation are discarded.)
The prize will be shared among the three subscribers who submit the most successful referrals.
The year-old newsletter’s subscriber base is 80% female, and in the 25- to 45-year-old age range. The company no longer asks for income data from subscribers, but Wolfe notes that when it did, it found that many earned high incomes.
“But a lot of our subscribers just want to save money,” he says. “Maybe it’s their hobby.”
Recent offers in the newsletter included a $10 discount from eToys (the online toy store got an 11% response to the offer, which was on a minimum purchase of $15), a free sample of Excedrin Migraine, a Boboli pizza crust coupon, a $5 rebate on ClaritinR and $1.50 in savings on Glad/Glad-Lock products.
Wolfe said an average issue of the newsletter is split 50-50 between advertiser placements (like the eToys promotion) and editorial information, compiled by his staff, about coupons and freebies that are available around the Internet.
ACI’s Web site (www.direct coupons.com) includes links for various coupon categories, including local, national, grocery and Internet.
Visitors can also sign up for the newsletter or read about the history of coupons (dating back to 1894).
The site is updated daily, says Wolfe, noting that many of the offers in the newsletter are not published on the site.
FAN FARE 1: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WEB He’s a rock star. He’s an actor. He’s a dessert topping. No, wait, that’s wrong. But he is, in fact, now an Internet service provider. For $19.95 a month, David Bowie (www.davidbowie.com) will be your ISP. BowieNet subscribers not only gain Internet access but a password into archives of photos and historical trivia; audio; video; and a journal of Bowie’s “thoughts and ideas.” BowieWorld, a 3-D chat forum with a 3-D store, is slated to debut today. Fans who already have an ISP but want the content can join for $5.95 a month. Bowie himself is reportedly overseeing the site’s design; we assume he’ll let someone else handle the tech support.
FAN FARE 2: A QUICK BYTE The Web is the perfect marketing medium to target vampires with 24-hour-a-day shopping, no sunlight required. With that (and Halloween) in mind, we visited the Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Fan Club site (www.arvlfc.org). Here, fans of Rice’s books such as “Interview With the Vampire” can buy merchandise like “Gathering of the Coven” T-shirts. (A bookstore page was under revision at press time.) Vampire fanciers can purchase coven memberships online, entitling them to buy tickets to the annual gathering in New Orleans (on Oct. 31, of course). We would report on the members-only section, but couldn’t gain access. Frankly, we really haven’t been joiners since being disappointed by the Shaun Cassidy Fan Club fulfillment package at age 10.
FAN FARE 3: BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY Can’t we get just one night off? As we exited a Bonnie Raitt concert one hot night this summer, an arts center employee handed us a copy of The Performer’s Collection, a catalog of celebrity merchandise. Feeling broke after spending all our cash on concert tickets and $10 Cokes, we put it aside and waited to get home to surf the accompanying Web site (www.choicemall.com/performers). We might as well have stuck to print. The pages of the site-which isn’t enabled for online ordering-are the same as the print catalog’s. There was what, on first look, appeared to be a useful index of performers’ products and the pages of the catalog their items were listed on, but direct links to those pages weren’t available. But let’s end on an up note: the links to concert venues affiliated with the catalog were a nice touch.
