Promotional Ice Scrapers Make Great Business Sense!

Have a read of the following blog entry from http://www.claims.co.uk/ who recently purchased promotional ice scrapers from Code Promotional Merchandise.


"With winter approaching I was thinking about a few quick and easy ways to get people looking at the claims.co.uk site, build some links to it, and do something useful.

I settled on the idea of giving away an ice scraper as they are cheap to produce and quite useful to people in the inevitable bad weather. Hunting around online points to various suppliers, types and quality. I prefer to deal with UK based companies as one of the benefits of running your own company is to decide where the spend goes, plus if there is a serious issue you have the option to ‘pop round’

Google is a great tool to discover reviews and experiences, and I hope this pops up for a search for “Code Promotional” as they were great (Hi Ian!) not only in the creation process but speedy delivery. Check out their site here – Their product had a built in tyre tread checker, a simple yet effective tool. Having spent £405 on tyres due to low tread earlier in the day this did seem genuinely useful!

A box arrived via courier, so I ripped that open and spread them out on a sheet for a quick photoshoot using my bog standard Canon 450D. The aim of this was to show that they are real freebies and I have loads to give away! There is nothing worse than faked freebies that dont exist. A few minutes later a page has been created and passed around a few people to get feedback/spellcheck.

I then start researching a few freebie style sites via google and compile a list of 16 in a text file. The aim being to seed them…

I did nothing more.

Late on on the 11th November I had a couple of “ICE SCRAPER REQUESTS” pop into my inbox, on checking the referer it turns out it was this post on MoneySavingExpert . I have previously had a few sites feature on MSE in various forms, and I know it sends a fair few visits.

By 10am there had been 2,238 requests for a free ice scraper and the demand had caused the server to keel over. The load averages tell their own story… 56.60 31.18 20.74… with one peak being as high as 240!

Its worth highlighting the work done by Mark & Nick at dedi.co.uk , who when I asked ‘whats up with the server?’ had already picked up the issue on monitoring and were managing it. Another great UK based company – probably best known to people under their Fast.co.uk ADSL brand.

By 1pm the traffic was making the server yo-yo due to stuff like the 359c ‘hot’ rating on HotUKDeals and several other sites.

What did disappoint me is some comments found from normal members of the public, describing claims management companies as ‘vultures’ and assuming the giveaway was part of some crazy plan to build spam lists. It wasnt, and as I put on the form I hate spam as much as anyone else (even taking people to court over it, and completing ICO complaints).


The stats looked like a trip to Egypt
At the time of writing (Monday 15th Nov, 1pm) this site has seen an extra 57,565 visitors than it would have normally in the same time period. Traffic is worth very little if it is untargetted, so this is more of a vanity measure than anything else. I was asked on Wednesday though if I was going to give the scrapers out around the local Halfords, a very traditional way of thinking about promo item marketing. The ‘reach’ of several hundred freebie items given out against the online version is massive and for mystical offline ‘brand building’ its done well.

Hopefully the below summary will help those thinking of conducting the same, feel free to pop comments and questions in the ‘comments’ section:

Lessons:

•Everyone loves a freebie.
•You really have no idea how many love to have freebies.
•Make the freebie relevant & useful.
•Cheeky ‘reverse marketing’ does not hurt ie. use this so you dont become a client of claims.co.uk!
•Use some ‘freebie’ keywords in content and others will seed/promo/viral it for you.
•Ensure you put ‘limited avalibility’ on the page, I intend to give out as many as possible but dont bankrupt yourself by promising everyone on earth a freebie!
•Tynt style stuff is worth doing as a couple of people C+P’ed content so the auto-appended link worked. I use a self hosted version
•Traffic to the page took out the server by about 10.30am , so ensure wp-cache or the like is enabled *beforehand*
Costs:

•£250ish for the first batch of scrapers.
•£xxx to cover more as I will feel bad if I cant give as many as I can out!
•Time of around half a day.
•It took out the server out for periods of time.
•Envelope stuffing time and postage…
Benefits:

•In theory 57,000 new people exposed to the ‘Claims.co.uk’ name.
•40+ new links, some private, some public.
•6 mentions on twitter.
•80 ’shares’ on Facebook
•The above experience gained

Read more about news by null

- http://www.claims.co.uk/news/40p-scraper-57000-visitors.html