How to Best Employ Intrusive Marketing Methods
The odds are that if you’ve ever visited a website, you’ve encountered pop-up ads and notifications. Sure, they are certainly valuable from a marketing standpoint, but they are more valuable if they’re used correctly.
They might be in the form of an in-your-face, full page ad that blots out whatever you’re reading. They also may take the form of prompts in the upper left-hand corner of your screen asking you to accept news feeds to your email address or allow tracking of your location.
Whatever form they take, they all demand your attention. When it comes to intrusive marketing, the employed attitude of each user will typically depend on when they appear – thus, timing is everything.
Timing is Critical with Pop-Ups
Would you join a gym or rent an apartment if you were greeted at the door with discounts and specials as soon as you walked in? I certainly wouldn’t. I need to see if what they offer suits my needs before I join or share any personal information. So why do so many websites hit you with pop-ups the moment you log onto their front page?
I’ve noticed that a few news websites that I log onto regularly, have begun to recognize the wisdom of letting you look around for a minute or two before they hit you with ads and come-ons. This has worked in their favour by gaining my subscriptions to their content.
By easing off on this ‘frontal assault’ school of advertising, these sites are proven to attain greater respect. Their digital marketing teams have recognized that site visitors are not necessarily looking for discounts and specials. It’s instead come to their attention that ultimately, visitors actually want to read stories and gain information.
By looking at their marketing exercises from the consumer’s point of view, it has turned into a win-win situation for both parties. In giving visitors a chance to look around the site first, they increase the conversion rate of their pop-ups.
Geo-Fencing – Beware All Ye Who Enter
Take this for example – there are two competing department stores that are situated along a main road. One day, a user receives a couple of text message alerts via their smartphone.
When the user reads these messages, they then realize that one of these stores has discovered geo-fencing; an intrusive marketing method they’re now using to bombard drivers on nearby roads with text messages. Sure enough, within a week the competing store also starts using geo-fencing. Given a certain period of time, the user has to delete up to ten unwanted messages a day.
Most people develop a personal attachment to their mobile device. They see them as an extension of their personal space. By using proximity marketing ideas targeting mobile devices, marketers are playing a dangerous game of possibly alienating the same consumers they are trying to reach.
After about a month, the messages dwindled and then stopped. The stores had obviously had little luck with their campaigns. But they might have been successful if they had simply focused on only texting their regular customers who had opted-in to their programme. That would have been real-time marketing at its best.
By making it seem like they were getting something special in the way of discounts unavailable to others, the regular customers might have regarded the messages as an extra-value reward instead of an intrusion.
By all means, use pop-ups and proximity marketing applications in your marketing campaigns! Marketers need to take advantage of technology. It can do wonders to raise your brand’s identity and increase your conversion rate. But using technology wisely will also help your brand name and profitability…
So start marketing! To find out more about how you can boost your brand image, check out these Next Level: 6 Practical Instagram Trends to Follow in 2018 or discover why Content Is Still King and take your content marketing strategy to all-new heights.
