Infomercial marketer says sales stronger when viewers place orders on web
Infomercials are central to the marketing strategy of IdeaVillage Products Corp. to launch unusual products like the Handy Stitch handheld sewing machine. But infomercials produce more sales when viewers use the web to order, says Jordan Pine, director of marketing. "The web is more cost-effective," he says. "More people are comfortable buying over the web than ordering over the phone after seeing an infomercial."
Consumers are referred to an IdeaVillage product-ordering web page through one of four ways: the placement of the IdeaVillage.com address in an infomercial, search engine results, banner ads and e-mailed marketing messages. The banner ads and e-mail messages are attached to rich media infomercial tapes, which allow consumers to immediately click on and view an infomercial. Overall infomercial view-to-order rates run about 30% for web orders, Pine says, adding that e-mailed infomercials produce the best results.
IdeaVillage outsources its web marketing to Livemercial Inc., a company that attaches infomercial tapes to e-mail and banner ads. Livemercial also provides a link from each infomercial to a designated product-ordering web page. Pine attributes much of his web success to the combination of having e-mailed infomercials link directly to a product-ordering page.
The effectiveness of the multi-prong web strategy has pushed the web’s share of direct sales to 25% or more, up from 2% from an earlier web strategy of forwarding infomercial viewers to an online shopping mall of "As Seen on TV" retailers that included IdeaVillage.com, Pine says. "When we were listed among hundreds of other retailers, we were just an afterthought," he says.
Although Pine says he doesn’t have comparable hard data to show view-to-order rates for orders placed over the phone, he figures the web offers a higher sales conversion rate because it enables consumers to bypass a concern many of them have regarding placing orders through a call center. "People feel they don’t have as much control on the phone, because they’re concerned they’ll be up-sold," Pine says. "But on the web, if they don’t want to be up-sold, they just close out the up-sell windows."
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