Added Value: Why Making Room in Your Overhead for Added Value Will Boost Your Bottom Line.
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Allison Hope Added value can be a tricky, but invaluable component to your marketing efforts. If you are trying to drive sales, registration, advertising, or even just traffic to your site, added value is a powerful technique that can help you reach your maximum business potential. Added value means extending the products or services you offer in the way of free add-ons - in the form of intangible or tangible items known as premiums - to reel potential business in. For instance, if you are selling subscriptions you can offer a free product or a complimentary additional issue of your publication. You can offer extended access to your site if you are selling content behind a pay wall, or a couple of free bonus days for paid web advertising. These techniques will increase your base, which ultimately will mean more traffic to your site and more dollars in your bank. Be certain that the source of added value is something representative of your brand. You don’t want to offer something that reminds the customer only peripherally of your central product or service. You want to offer something that is consistent with the nature of your business. You should also make certain that you are offering something of value. You should be able to put a definitive price tag on the added value and should be able to state with confidence that it will somehow enhance your potential customer’s experience with your brand and that it will be useful or beneficial or enjoyable for the customer. There are ways to keep the overhead of your added value down but quality up. Take, for instance, this case study. I work for a niche magazine based out of downtown Manhattan. We have a readership of 200,000 and we employ several industry-standard marketing campaigns each year to grow our subscriber base. We recently introduced a premium CD as added value for our print direct marketing campaign and were able to yield the highest net response in the entire 15 years that we’ve been dropping- from 1.7% net to more than 2%. Added value, in the form of a CD, can be credited with the jump in our response rate. And the cost for the CD, in both production and fulfillment, was under a dollar per piece. The best part is that the increased response offset the cost of the premium entirely. In fact, we actually pulled a profit on the entire mailing for the first time! Similarly, we recently introduced digital subscriptions. We racked our brains trying to come up with a reason why someone would want to pay the same that they would for a print magazine online. We decided to place the archive content behind a pay wall and offer unlimited access to the 15 years of editorial as added value with a paid digital subscription. We have since watched our subscriber base grow and are quite pleased with the results. It cost us nothing (less some staff time loading the content onto the site) to offer this as added value - a venture completely worth our time! If you don’t have anything that you might extend as added value, consider entering into a cross-marketing conversation with another business of similar magnitude. Certainly you don’t want to lie in bed with your main competitor, but perhaps there is a company or a site with complimentary services that could assist you in your marketing efforts. For instance, if you would like to offer a product as added value for membership to your site, perhaps this other site can provide the premium materials for your members and you can offer free advertising or some type of visibility on your site for them in return. Do also keep in mind that premiums go stale, so you want to always be on the lookout for new ideas. Be creative! Use your resources wisely to maximize your sales potential. Keep an eye on what others are doing to gain insight into what might work best for your bottom line. So you see, sometimes it is simply a matter of repackaging what you already have to make your offer more appealing to a potential customer, member or visitor. Other times, you may need to branch out and come up with something new for your offer. Either ways, keep your offers fresh and your eyes and ears open!
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