local media insider

New competition for mobile coupons is not a pureplay

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Anyone who has tried to sell brand advertising to a Valpak customers can still hear the the argument (Can you get me 200 responses for $400?) ringing in their ears years later.

Valpak's new digital approach hasn't been an easy task; the company has had to persuade its 26,000 customers to process digital redemptions. Their approach is examined here.

One critical deployment I have not seen local media deploy is Valpak's use of pop-up boxes on their coupon site to collect mobile phone numbers and preferences for text messaging campaign. Pop-ups are universally hated by traditional media companies - and universally used by pureplays to gather data from customers. I'm curious to see how the conversion rates compare.

Another lesson from Valpak is marrying a complex set of technologies - an advertiser dashboard to track multiple product redemptions and a wide array of mobile and digital applications - with simple packages that small businesses can understand.

Use of simple, easy to understand packaging is also part of latest successful Journal Register sales drive that end about a week ago and is described here.

Every one of the 165 advertiser sold across the 21 markets was offered a splash page for their campaign. This is a critical element that is often overlooked, but  local sales managers and consultant I talk to say a top objection to buying online ads forsmall businesses is that they don't like their site, have them under construction, or cannot build an extra page to match the campaign offer. So being able to deploy a data collection page quickly is a matter of getting the deal or losing it.

If you are interested in creating some templates, we've included a few examples of splash pages and key elements  to look at here. 

If you have splash page templates or good examples, please send them  to AlisaCromer@gmail.com and we'll include them in this list.

Many thanks this week to John Krivosheyff for sharing his sales drive with us, Jim Buckley of Valpak, whose presentation at Borrell Local Mobile Advertising Conference inspired the Ten Strategies report, and Leslie Laredo, of Laredo Group, another top sales trainer who is working with KPAX.com, one of the television station sites featured here, and who we are pleased to have as a new sponsor.

laredo group, Borrell, krivosheyff,