I’ve been working on a swipe file at The Conversion Co. this month and of course, I’ve ended up stumbling across a lot of classic ads.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with ads in comic books and started to notice a pattern that I remember using in my direct mail days.
Let’s play spot-the difference with this classic “Sea Monkeys” ad:
Version 1
Can you see the difference (apart from the colour reproduction obvs!) ?
Well it’s not in the copy, or the images, it’s not the price or any of the bonuses.
It’s not in any of the places I usually talk about testing in your offers.
Give up?
It’s in the address.
The 1st ad has the address at Unicorn House, Dept GKC-10
The 1st ad has the address at Unicorn House, Dept 41-M
So why would you send a response coupon back to 2 different departments?
This is a trick that we’d use in direct mail to track where the responses to our ads had come from.
Every order would have a code attached, whether it was a press ad or a response to direct mail. On TV and radio we’d give a discount code.
Online, we seem to have completely forgotten about this skill.
Sure, we can track responses to ads using Google Analytics, but that data’s not attached to customers, so over time we lose sight of where our best customers came from.
Here’s why it’s important:
Too many people are looking at social media as “free traffic”.
It means we’ve gotten lazy at the things that old-school marketers had to do my necessity.
The all-important equation of keeping customer acquisition costs below lifetime value is what keeps an ad-driven business alive.
On Twitter we’ve been spoiled because they’ve never got the ad platform to work well, so demand for ads is low and we all get lots of organic traffic.
Elon Musk is trying to change that, with his usual level of diplomacy 🙂
Eventually every social platform becomes pay-to-play.
Organic gets reserved for a very top tier of creators who create content that keeps people on the platform, so paying some attention to how the game is played in paid ads is well worth your time.
Step one is knowing which of your ads is driving sales
Step two is knowing which of those sales turn into repeat customers
Step three is knowing how much they’re worth over a “lifetime”
When you know how much a customer is worth, and where they came from, the game becomes rinse & repeat.
What does your equivalent of “Dept GKC-10” look like?
What exact piece of content, on what platform did your best customer come from?
