Imagine this – after a busy morning, you finally have an hour to yourself. You make yourself a cup of tea, you have your favourite bikky, and you are sitting on your comfortable sofa, watching a bit of daytime TV to relax for a while. An ad comes on and a phone number comes up on the screen for the offer. Now it’s going to have to be a pretty special offer to make you get up off the couch, abandon the show you’re watching, and talk to either a call centre person or a super salesman for the next 10 or 15 minutes.
So what types of offers might provide enough motivation for potential customers to do just that?
You need one of three types of offer:
- A low commitment offer: for example, offering viewers a free report or a no-obligation quote. One of our clients, Craftmatic Adjustable Beds, was targeting people with back pain, so they offered viewers a free report on ‘The Top 8 Tips on Relieving Pain from Chronic Back Problems’. This required low commitment from viewers to respond, but put Craftmatic in touch with a whole range of people with back problems.
- A high value offer: for example, “Find out how you can save $600 in interest a year on your credit card”. If you consider that the average person probably keeps a credit card for 3 years and may spend $5000 to $6000 per year, this could result in the advertiser getting a high lifetime value customer.
- An offer that will create curiosity: for example, a real estate agency may be able to offer viewers information about house sale prices in their area – “If you’re thinking about downsizing or relocating, wouldn’t you like to know how much houses in your street have sold for?”. This may prompt the viewer to take action, and again, provides the advertiser with a set of targeted leads.
- We have found that these types of offers work particularly well when the viewer can respond by SMS, because again, there is low commitment, and they feel in control of the interaction.
If you’re really lucky, you might have the ‘kitchen sink offer’ – a combination of all three