Special Offers: Handle with Care

'Specials' can be a powerful marketing tool, but in the ISP business, unless you manage them carefully, they can get you into trouble.

by Jason Zigmont HowToSell.net [June 11, 1999]

'Ray . . . Kmart Sucks.'
—Tom Cruise to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man

Specials are a time-honored tool for building businesses and are often used by ISPs. The idea is simple: Make it easy for people to try your service, find out how great it is, and become permanent customers.

There are three essential components to a successful special offer:

•  The hook: special pricing or other offer to entice the prospective customer to your service
•  The expiration date: the action item that induces customers to sign up
•  The tracking number: essential to determining the effectiveness of an offer

The hook
Free-first-month specials are very popular in the Internet industry, but they have one potential built-in problem. If you are offering free months and takng sign-ups on line, you lay yourself wide open to spammers and other abusive users. Realistically, you probably won't have huge numbers of abusers, but you need to be vigilantly proactive in your monitoring of these sign-ups. Be sure to get full contact information from each user before you activate the account.

Tip: Consider offering a reduced price for the first month of service. A token fee, such as $1.99, is still a good hook, will discourage at least some spammers, and has the benefit of actually creating a billing cycle for the customer, thus verifying their billing information a month sooner than you would otherwise.

Target your specials
If you're looking to attract AOL users, for example, you could place an 'AOL refugees wanted' ad, with a special price for users who switch from AOL. AOL has a bring-your-own-provider program for $9.99/month which consists of an AOL user using your ISP to connect to AOL. If you offer AOL users a deal for $20 for the first two months of access, then they can use AOL's bring-your-own-provider program and your service for two months. The goal is to make the users realize the difference between you and AOL without having to completely cut the umbilical cord to AOL. Make it easy for them to switch. Put instructions on switching on your web page. (See http://www.howtosell.net/html/aol.html)

Expiration date
The expiration date is the 'act now' part of the special. It entices people to sign up and motivates them to take action. This is crucial, because human beings tend to wait to act. Sometimes indefinitely. And, of course, while they're waiting, your competitor may come up with a better special and steal your potential away from you.

Tracking numbers
If you can't track the results of your special offer campaign, you have no way of knowing how successful it was—and, by extension, whether you should repeat it in the future. So a system for results tracking is essential. To do this topic full justice, we'll discuss it in next week's column.

—End

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