Pingo Case Study on Co-Branded Promotional Phone Cards with an Offline to Online Marketing Strategy
Goal:
Create a co branded phone card that would provide a viral marketing tool for our partners to increase conversion rates and provide an additional revenue stream for both companies to meet there objective.
Strategy
Pingo needed to find a way to get affiliates to be more pro active with its new Linkshare affiliate program. In doing so Pingo developed co-branded able prepaid phone cards as a way to get fellow merchants and affiliates to use for there offline marketing.
After reading a case study from Marketing Sherpa that suggested using free trial as a way to boost your sites conversion rate. Pingo decided to build a system and take the risk of distributing up to 50k worth of phone card minutes to its potential partners. The goal was to create viral marketing buzz since the phone cards would be kept in prospects wallet and purses but the acquisition of the customer would be acquired only online through email marketing and co-branded landing pages with special coupon codes to attract the prospect from a free trial to a sale.
Then Pingo went out to solicit potential partners. Pingo was able to gain a great deal of attention and interest in potential partners from the value this offered its partners and its customers. In doing so Pingo was able to create the following partnership in the course of about a month.
Current Affiliate Partner: (Confidential at this time) Large Rebate Affiliate Site agreed to distribute the phone cards as a value added benefits with its top producing three thousand rebate earning customers. An introduction letter and co branded landing page with additional coupon codes was created to bring the customer back to the affiliate partners website for the added benefit for signing up after the free trial.
FTD: Large flower delivery company, agreed to distribute in its seasonal marketing events as a value added wow benefit for its customers
Smart Destinations: A large travel discount card agreed to ship out the phone cards as a value added benefit but also as a tool to boost site conversion rates and create a call to action benefit to push its customers to a certain shipping option that reduced its overall cost of sale.
Ecommerce Site: Large merchant in the golf and fishing industry offered it as a value added benefit for its customers to use on there next fishing or golf trip.
CollegeBoxes.com: Distributed 20k co-branded phone cards in two weeks with 120 college marketing reps as a way to promote its summer storage solution and create a viral marketing buzz about its company and the free promotional phone card offer on about 50 campuses.
Pingo was able to gain these partners that typical would not have signed up for our typical affiliate program by offering additional benefits to its customers and creating a strategic co-branded offline to co-branded online marketing partnership.
Resources
Pingo needed to create a promotional phone card that could be easily co-branded and provide state of the art offline tracking of sales while also protecting fraud. Pingo developed a system to build these promotional giveaway cards and then recruited multiple partners as merchants and current affiliates.
To promote this new concept of viral marketing. Pingo created an article that was optimized and distributed to hundreds of article directories.
Example:
5 Ways to Increase Web Site Sales By Word of Mouth Marketing with Free Viral Internet Marketing
Results
Pingo’s partners have seen a considerable increase in conversion rates and support for certain call to action goals. These co-branded phone cards have been a great tool for new customer acquisitions. Pingo was able to acquire these new affiliate partnerships in a short amount of time with a great deal of interest. Pingo has been able to benefit from taking the risk of giving away 50k to each partner in free phone cards that created an overall better CPA vs. traditional direct marketing strategies.
Pingo has some great additional new partners in the works that should be launching soon.