Online Marketing 2017: Still Wasting Old Links and Promotions
Millions of links get created (and then wasted) for online advertising campaigns along millions of landing pages and special promotional domains.
They get dumped like outdated gadgets. Some find recycling with people who buy old domains but many just join the waste-yard of e-commerce. And I believe this is wrong, like any wasteful behavior.
Every link you create should serve you long-term to avoid bad customer experience and to minimize sunk costs!
The Customer Experience I’ve just been through
Before archiving old e-mails I went through deleting those which I feel do not need to be kept. One mail I came across was a promotional mail offering a free report and outlook on Twitter for the 2012 to 2020 period.
I consider old predictions and prognosis to be fascinating and often find them to be fun, too. So I opened the old email clicked on the link and……
Well, I do not claim that all people have an inbox like mine but I doubt that I am the only one clicking links in old mails — let it be two weeks, two months or two years after one got them.
…. and I ended up on the homepage of a totally different company. Happens to be that either the old business did get renamed or merged into the one I ended up with.
The two things I do not find on the homepage are answers to my urgent questions:
- Where is the 2012–2020 Twitter forecast?
- Why did I end up here?
My other question is: Why do I end up with such questions, such kind of user-experience in 2017?
In 1997 broken links were common. 2007 had redirects at best. But in 2017 and despite Content Management Systems and all the hype talk about User Experience, Experience Design, Storytelling and so onm the only story I get told by my experience is, that people still waste their old work in an era where everybody talks about sustainability, recycling and customer care?
Stop wasting your time, effort and marketing success
No matter if you talk about an email, a web promotion or whatsoever: Every time you get a link to a prospect or customer you have scored. You may not know that you have.
In my above case, I just kept the e-mail. No opening, no clicking, no purchase, like, share, inquiry. It just simply did not get deleted right away! And you should — but cannot — count that as successful marketing.
Think of bookmarks, Instagram or Pinterest: Your summer 2014 promo link, pic or pin may find itself shared or looked at in 2018. Where will a click take people to?
To a spam page? An adult website? To your competitors? What will the customer experience look like and what lasting impression will you leave? How many clickes will you generate for others under your name? And how many clicks on your up-to-date, new links will you lose due to people having dismal experiences from clicking on your old ones? How much do all your dead links cost you in terms of leads, sales and profit margin?
This old link I just clicked
I did some “research” when I had this disappointing experience: The guy I got the e-mail from in Febuary 2015 now is one of the Managing Directors of the company on whose homepage I ended up after clicking that old link.
So this is not a case of someone buying a vacant domain. It is a merger of businesses and content — or rather businesses but not their marketing activities! In my case only a download of a free report was lost. That can hardly account for business. But it accounts for a promotional loss, a loss in branding and winning prospects. No one needs to produce such collateral damage from either merging businesses or ending promotions!
With a little bit of love for your past work and some honest customer care in your hearts, you can find a way to avoid bad customer experiences!
In the case I just experienced, a simple design change and an inset saying “X was merged into Y” while keeping the old domain and site-structure would have done. From that initial point on one can always make step-by-step changes when needed or the situation permits (i.e. if you are scarce in resources).
Unless spamming the web with dead links is your company objective, you got no excuse for creating dead links with your marketing budget!
Summary
When a promotion is over, do not kill the landingpage. This is 2017 and storage is not as costly as in 1957. This is not 1997 either and your Content Management System should help you manage your sites and maintain lists of promotional pages or pages with content that will expire. If it doesn’t, get a new CMS quickly! It it does but you do not use this capability, then update your work procedures!
Unless you are in the business of selling domains with links pointing to them, do not sell promotional domains (as does one of Germany’s most successful Online retailers, the Otto Group). Yes, you get a few bucks in return for showing no customer care and delivering a lousy customer experience. But think of the value you can create by keeping domains, landing-pages and/or URLs alive or at least from dropping dead by building landing-pages for promotions and campaigns long over!
Stop creating dead links and sunk costs with every dime you spend for your online marketing campaigns!
I have built a very simply and basic table on Airtable (called Base there) which can be viewed publically. You may join Airtable (and use it) for free or take it as an inspiration for building your own table on Airtable to keep an eye on the promotion links you post. Airtable works with IFTTT, so you can automatically fill your table with links and descriptions through RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or other triggering services.
No more excuses for losing any of those old promotional links!
Of course you can also use a Table on Google Drive and feed it via IFTTT if you like, but Airtable has a few nice features you may enjoy while building your own overview. No matter how: Start building, start building your own way to links that serve you long-term!
And if you ever clicked on a pic, pin or promo-link and ended somewehere you did not expect to end, then please like this post by clicking on the Green Heart!
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
