Scorecard for Optimizing Your Offine Products

Making money online and offline

Publishers should be using the retail channel—online, offline, or both—and their products sold at retail should, at a minimum, mention a companion website on the package. Even better, the product should contain an incentive to go to the website.

Make sure your URL—the website address of your hub—appears on anything that is being shipped to a customer.     Include in the shipping box—as well as in billing and renewal envelopes—an insert card promoting a free e-newsletter that relates to the product purchased. Word the text on the insert card to indicate that receiving the free e-newsletter is a benefit of buying the product.

Then, upon accessing the home page or landing page, the visitor will see a link to sign up for a free newsletter. If there’s no mention of the website, no incentive to visit the website, and no conversion architecture on the site itself, the publisher is not taking a long-term view and, unfortunately, is missing the boat.

Mequoda guidelines for evaluating a Retail Distribution Program assign the following grades to the program links and website conversion architecture:

Mequoda Retail Distribution Guidelines

Take a look at your own website and evaluate how it matches up in terms of using retail distribution to drive traffic and build relationships with your audience.

This article was written by Don Nicholas with the help of Jane E. Zarem. This is only one part of a whole series on using offline products to make money online.

See the rest of this series below:

  1. How to Build a Retail Distribution Channel
  2. How to Include an Online Offer in Your Offline Products
  3. Online Conversion Architecture Registers Visitors and Starts a Direct Relationship
  4. Scorecard for Optimizing Your Offine Products
Comments

Leave a Reply