Marketing Tips

Once you have settled on your business, it’s time to start your market research. Again, this step falls into the category of strategy and preparation. Keep in mind that strategy, not investment, is your ticket to success!

OTO (One Time Offer) Marketing

You’ve seen examples of this strategy if you’ve ever taken advantage of a freebie offer. The OTO theory is simple and straightforward: give away a great product for free, and immediately offer another valuable product along with the freebie for a deeply discounted price.

For example: say your Internet business is selling e-book software. You can advertise for a free report on the secrets to creating e-books that sell, and then offer a discount on the software itself when customers take advantage of your giveaway.

Keep in mind, though, that you have to make the free product available even for those who don’t take advantage of your discount price. If you make it difficult or impossible to obtain your freebie, you will lose that all-important trust—the most valuable commodity in Internet marketing.

Some tips to effective OTO marketing:

• One-time-offer marketing strategies are becoming increasingly popular in online businesses. As more companies take advantage of this technique, fewer consumers will be interested. You should strive to find ways to make your OTO offer unique or give it an original spin, to make it stand out from all the other offers out there.

• Bear in mind that you will likely have to deal with an increase in customer support issues as you implement your OTO marketing campaign. Even if your website contains clear, precise instructions for obtaining your freebie, some of your visitors may still have trouble finding the right link or logo to click. If they don’t see it, they will assume you’re asking them to pay for something that was offered for free. Exercise patience and point them in the right direction, and you will earn their business.

• Make sure you are able to accept a high volume of payments. With any Internet business, it is a good idea to have several payment options for your customers. This helps you by not overloading your payment processors with a sharp increase in sales due to an OTO program. Some third-party merchant account services, such as PayPal, will often red-flag accounts that have a sudden increase in incoming funds, and you may be frozen from your account while the merchant verifies that you aren’t running a scam. Having other payment options in place to cover this possibility will ensure you’re still able to do business.

• A subscriber list is one of the best ways to announce an OTO campaign. If you don’t already have a subscriber list, it is a good idea to build one before you bring out your OTO program. However, building a solid subscriber list for your newsletter or website takes time. If you don’t have the time to get a subscriber list, but you still want to offer your OTO, you could make the announcement about your program through other partners with the promise to reciprocate for one of their promotions at a later date.

• An increase in traffic is good for your business—but it can be bad for your servers. If your product is downloadable, the available bandwidth for your website should also be a consideration. Check with your web service provider and make sure you determine how much bandwidth you’ll require ahead of time. If you’ll need more bandwidth than your server allows, look into an inexpensive file transfer solution such as www.fileburst.com.

In summary, OTO strategy can be an extremely effective marketing technique. Offer your visitors something they would normally pay money for, and give it to them free—then immediately offer something of even greater value at a low price.

Be sure that your freebie and your discount product are directly related (such as the report on creating effective e-books and the e-book creation software). If your sale product is even better and more attractive to your target market than your freebie, your sales numbers will explode!

4 Responses to “Marketing Tips & OTO’s”