Tom recently received an email from someone planning a campaign to coincide with a client's web site relaunch. She asked, "What do I do if the web site doesn't launch on time?" Most sellers of online advertising are pretty flexible. But if your objective is email address collection, consider other options before delaying the campaign. You could be very pleasantly surprised.
This week’s column is the result of a couple of emails I recently received. Keep the emails rolling in, folks. They’re a great source of new column topics. (By the way, that’s not an open invitation for every PR account exec to flood my mailbox with “please write about my client” requests.)
Someone recently emailed me to ask about planning a campaign to coincide with a client’s web site relaunch. This person asked, “What do I do if the web site doesn’t launch on time?”
Most sellers of online advertising are pretty flexible if there is a delay in a campaign’s launch. They want the campaign to work well as much as you do. I probably should have sent this person an email encouraging her to work out the launch issues with her sales reps. However, I was curious and instead answered the inquiry with some queries of my own. “Is this a traffic-driving campaign? What is the objective here?” She answered that the objective was to build a list of email addresses of people interested in her client’s product. “Why, then,” I inquired, “are you waiting for the web site to relaunch? You don’t need a destination site to achieve your objective.”
Certain types of online advertising campaigns benefit greatly from a distributed presence, rather than a drive to a destination site. Email address collection is a great example of a campaign objective that can be achieved without requiring prospects to visit a destination site.
We know that one of the reasons why web users don’t dig banners is that they often take those who click on them away from the site that they’re currently visiting. A distributed presence can help remove that barrier. Users are more likely to click immediately if they know that the banner they’re clicking on won’t take them somewhere else. There are many ways in which to execute this. Here are some that would work for our friend with the email address collection objective:
Here are some other ideas for executing an email address collection strategy without a destination web site.
Some online advertising strategies can be executed without the need for a destination. If you aren’t required to link to a destination site to achieve your objectives, try some of these techniques. A distributed web presence can be a good thing.
