Off-Line Affiliate Marketing for CC's - Kind of...

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abhorrent

abhorrent

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Feb 6, 2008
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Let explain first what this is about and then have a few questions.
There was a thread here that I can't find at the moment. Something about free Subway for signing up for a credit card.
That gave me an idea... My brother owns a Tanning Salon. He said he gets about 100-150 people through there a day, between members and new customers. Because summer is coming and it's prom season, it's getting even busier.

He told me today a that quick rough estimate of his cost per tanning session was about $0.30 which is nothing.
So my idea was that he should set up like the subway guy did and offer whatever... 3, 5, 10 free sessions if they sign up for a credit card. the legality of teens (most of his clients) and CC's is his problem but he already owns an age regulated business ( in Illinois anyway) so he may know that already.

I've been checking the few CC offers I could find and am looking at CapOne but on to my questions.
Now I've never pushed credit cards so bear with me.

1. Where are all the CC offers? CJ is the only place I was really able to find any with a recognizable name.
(Performics according to their search has none which I find hard to believe but who knows.)

2. Are any of these Incentive-izable? I've looked at the TOS and general descriptions etc. but maybe I missed it.

3. Do they ALL only pay on application approval or do some pay for just the lead?

There's probably more but that's all I can think of at the moment
 


Most of them pay on approval of the application. I could get some decent ones but have never looked into having them.

I would suggest making it online in someway. Set up a site with a few different offers and ship out vouchers for free tanning to his place. You could do it for him I am sure.

Another thing to get customers would maybe go to your local fast food places with some good flyer cards and tell people to bring them in for one free tanning session. Make it look good but get them to a website.

When you are marketing offline it is a completely different ballgame with leads so you want to get people online, One good idea is to maybe offer some tanning sessions for email to send them newsletters then run some blasts to them. Being local might give you a decent conversion rate and you could always get them when they fill out the form there.

There are a lot of people who undersetimate the power of off-line.
 
AdExhibitJason said:
Most of them pay on approval of the application. I could get some decent ones but have never looked into having them.

I would suggest making it online in someway. Set up a site with a few different offers and ship out vouchers for free tanning to his place. You could do it for him I am sure.

Another thing to get customers would maybe go to your local fast food places with some good flyer cards and tell people to bring them in for one free tanning session. Make it look good but get them to a website.

When you are marketing offline it is a completely different ballgame with leads so you want to get people online, One good idea is to maybe offer some tanning sessions for email to send them newsletters then run some blasts to them. Being local might give you a decent conversion rate and you could always get them when they fill out the form there.

There are a lot of people who undersetimate the power of off-line.
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Thanks for the suggestions.
He gets plenty of foot traffic. What we're looking at is getting something more out of it.

It would be a very localized campaign, even if he did it on his site which is pretty low traffic. Obviously no one outside of maybe a 10 or 20 mile radius would care about the incentive.

I guess my main concern is that I don't want to say, "Hey you should do this!" then have him give away 1000 sessions and not get anything because all the apps were denied. Which is why is one reason I was thinking of going with CapOne because they take pretty much anyone in my experience.

I've been browsing other lead campaigns but don't really see anything worth while so far.
 
abhorrent said:
Thanks for the suggestions.
He gets plenty of foot traffic. What we're looking at is getting something more out of it.

It would be a very localized campaign, even if he did it on his site which is pretty low traffic. Obviously no one outside of maybe a 10 or 20 mile radius would care about the incentive.

I guess my main concern is that I don't want to say, "Hey you should do this!" then have him give away 1000 sessions and not get anything because all the apps were denied. Which is why is one reason I was thinking of going with CapOne because they take pretty much anyone in my experience.

I've been browsing other lead campaigns but don't really see anything worth while so far.
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I will do some research and see what I would suggest and why give me like 20 minutes.

This will be making assumptions on the traffic he gets.

[Email Submit] ONLINEPRODUCTSAVINGS - DOVE PRODUCTS

This is an email submit offer. Now the conversion rate sucks most of the time. However there is a way to make it work for him. Each email is $1 for being submitted. Design your own landing page with the email then once they hit submit pre-pop it into the field on the actual landing page. Also it would be a good idea to increase conversion rates or add some sort of tracking to set up a simple database with the email they submitted and add it to the datebase. Then use Icontact to send them a double opt-in for the tanning salon. This will serve 2 purposes get them in the door maybe and would basically just take time and maybe $100 if you decide to do the flyers. There are other angles you can take like offering a new offer every 3 days and letting them know that. Set up the database to record 3 things each time they hit submit on a offer. The Name Of The Offer, The Email they used, the ip they did it from. I might be getting ahead of myself.

As far as the conversion goes just state that once they hit submit on the second page they will receive an email about a free session. Confirm that link come on in give us your email and you are done. It is that simple/

I just think more local businesses need to really market online. Another nice thing with doing it this way is that he gets emails for future promotions and maybe even you can run a blast or two in it.


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the cc idea is great but just do it as a apply and get approved thing so he doesnt have to payout unless he gets something out of it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What an idiot. I just thought of a perfect offer. he could direct people to also. Make a landing page on his site. can't find it however

You should actaully ask him to promote offers through flyers there and make some good landing pages for diet pills, anti aging and see what you can do.

 
Also one more question... how would you get them to sign up off-line? how would lets say capital one know that you signed someone up
 
vertone said:
Also one more question... how would you get them to sign up off-line? how would lets say capital one know that you signed someone up
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That would be "Off-Line" only in the sense that you would only advertise in store. Say, have a station set up with a laptop with your aff submit page already up and a big sign on your front door or something that say's..
"Get 10 free whatever if you sign up for this credit card!"

You can just put their regular link on your site, That way they can't go to your site and see you incetivizing the offer.

Thanks AdExhibitJason for the info. I will look into all that stuff too. I think though, it will need to have bigger payout than $1.00 to make it worth while. I don't know though, maybe he'd be okay with a buck a pop. Doesn't really matter to me. it's not my store so I won't see a penny. Just helping out my brother.
 
AbHorrent, I made the post whereever or whatever you saw about the subway thing. The guy I knew doing it worked for a company called elite marketing.

They had an agreement saying that whatever incentive they offered, in this case free food, was covered by by the credit card companies. Before the subprime crisis, it was all about volume volume volume, they didn't care about the customer criteria. I would see the same people go in each day while he was there and still fill out an app, and get a free 6-in sub. The reason he got so much volume was cause subway is a very well recognized brand, and all they had to do was fill out an app, didn't need to be approved. But since the stock market shit, they've tightened their criteria a whole shitload and he isn't doing as much volume anymore. He was getting $20 per app and it cost him the price of a 6-in sub, like 5 bucks, plus a couple stupid expenses. He used to go to every college campus and BANK.

By the way getting people to do shit offline is easy when you bribe them :)

Now I had a great idea bout how to go about doing this, but never got a chance to test it out. If you wanna go 50/50 with me on it and are still interested pm me, seeing this got me semi-interested in this again.
 
1. Where are all the CC offers? CJ is the only place I was really able to find any with a recognizable name.
(Performics according to their search has none which I find hard to believe but who knows.)
Click to expand...

You can find cc offers on commissionsoup, ncsreporting, and sunspotweb


3. Do they ALL only pay on application approval or do some pay for just the lead?
Click to expand...

Some are by approval, and others are per application. It's usually the ones for people with shitty-ass-credit that are per approval.
 
The whole offline marketing is a very interesting subject. Do you think its possible to promote zip submits with say 25,000 Flyers.

25K flyers would cost me about $440 from this place
leaflet printing, leaflets, full colour leaflet printing (might be able to get them it cheaper for A6 or A7, especially as that price is for A5)

I can pay a polish guy down the road from me about $100 to hand out about 10,000 flyers outside a tube station here in London. You could probably rinse that many in about an hour.

I'd need to find an offer that is perfect for UK commuters. One that they wont be able to resist getting to work, logging into their email system and whacking in their email address.

Something like free make up sample for chicks would be awesome.

I would need to get a conversion rate of 2.16% to break even, anything more is profit. If I want to scale this idea up I can get more polish dudes and get them to wait outside more tube stations.

I will capture the emails of these chicks and send them other offers by email.
 
Have not had time to read all posts above, so if someone's already mentioned this.. sorry.

Has anyone considered how to get around the one ip address problem. I contacted a couple of (UK) networks about running promotions in a local shopping center. They said if all the applications are coming from one ip address it looks like fraud.

Again, I'm just passing on the info and wondering if anyone's already considered this?
 
check out this New Credit Era offer on neverblue, it pays $12.75 per lead:

Get matched with the best card to suit you based on your application. Minimum initial credit of $250. Secure online application, all applications accepted, less than perfect credit welcome, quick and easy search process. No checking account number required.
 
Seema said:
I would need to get a conversion rate of 2.16% to break even, anything more is profit. If I want to scale this idea up I can get more polish dudes and get them to wait outside more tube stations.
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I have a little experience in the Flyering area. The typical rate at which people act on a flyer is less then 1%
 
narsticle said:
I have a little experience in the Flyering area. The typical rate at which people act on a flyer is less then 1%
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Hmmm yeah I used to promote a club night here in the UL and we used to go on that basis too.

Im wondering if the fact that most of these people are going to be in front of a PC within 10-15 mins AND the fact that there is an incentive for acting might push up the conversion rate?

Was your experience from offline - online promotion?
 
I was thinking to go as far as.. calling example Cap One and asking them if they had an affiliate program for local businesses. Maybe something can be set-up directly with your local business.

I have not had time to do this... but will give it a try
 
Fliers work better on campuses, especially if you are giving something away. Most of the students will have access to a computer very soon and could use something for nothing.
Paying people to hand out fliers isn't so smart, they wind up in the garbage can or just not handed out.
 
Something you are missing is the fact that you are going to have all of these leads coming from the same IP.

Don't you think that will raise some red flags?
 
well, maybe you can contact your affiliate company and tell them in advance what you are going to do.
 
Promoting credit cards on campuses has been put to a stop for the most part. I know that's not really the question, but thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone is interested. Here's a crappy article on the issue, I'm sure there's much better out there.

Student credit card predators move just off campus - Credit Card Debt Management

I've asked the credit card affiliate networks about promoting off-line and they told me it is strictly prohibited. I wanted to set up at football games and give out free shirts etc. but my affiliate managers were always persistent about telling me I couldn't do any marketing off-line.

Didn't really fight it much further, it was just on to the next idea. It's been a while, so you could see if anything has changed. I'm sure you could still do it, but you might have to be careful.

Josh
 
Has your brother been aggressive with up-selling to his current customers? For example, he should have his employees recommending products that will give them a healthier looking, darker tan, lotions for dry skin and acne, etc. Also, diet products/pills, etc should be an easy sell to these customers.

He definitely should be collecting email addresses to promote future tanning specials and to keep in contact with past customers. You can ask people direct for their email address when he puts them into a database for their profiles at the counter. Or you could entice them with a few free tans or product samples.
 
This is interesting. I wonder if the subway thing was a rogue franchisee. My friend used to manage one here and no way would francisees be allowed to do that - the control they have on the brand (here at least) is ridiculous, stores aren't even allowed to reduce prices on their own. (Finding out how they worked really put me off considering buying any franchise.)

Other peeps here will know more about this, but I'm fairly sure I've seen credit card applications on 'free ipod' type sites - one of the big ones i think. So, some do allow incentivised traffic.

Definitely agree about doing it online if you can, not sure about where you are but in the UK if you are getting someone to physically complete an application for credit then you have a lot more responsibilities than an affiliate sending them to the card companies site.

Sounds like a great idea though, maybe something really targeting the demographic? Do The Body Shop or similar have a credit card? (A store card might even work) Or some sort of cosmetics, perfume, etc subscription? Gym membership? (partner with another local business?) Get a good pitch together and approach them directly... show them the $$$s they could make!

Please keep us posted on how it goes. GL
 
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