Posted in Internet Marketing Strategy	April 9, 2007

Promotional codes are an inexpensive way to identify what is working for your online business and what needs to be changed.

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group LLC

Metrics are vital to knowing if you are reaching your audience. Detailed metrics are increasingly available in the digital world, but with so many channels for reaching users, and with several metrics for each channel, the blessing of metrics can be a confusing curse. Simple systems that track how users are converted are either scarce or expensive—until now.

M. Lee Smith Publishers Vice President of Marketing Guy Crossley suggested using promotional codes as a customer tracking device at SIPA's Boston event on March 27.

Mr. Crossley said his company creates codes that users provide before making a conversion. The code entered corresponds to the channel—whether it’s an email newsletter, advertisement or direct mail—that brought the user to the conversion. This almost immediately tells Mr. Crossley which methods are working and which are not.

Any publisher can start using a similar system to discover which methods are effective at driving conversions and which methods need to be tweaked or discarded. Simply put a unique “promotional code” in an advertisement or email newsletter, offer some benefit for entering it, and users will begin telling you how they were drawn to your company.

Learning how users were brought to a conversion is only part of increasing conversions. Designing effective rapid conversion landing pages are also a proven way to get users to buy products, give email addresses or perform some other conversion. Creating Landing Pages that Sell is a great tutorial on how to get users to perform the action that drives your online business.

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