» uk-netmarketing: roundup: 21-04-2000

Free wine whine
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - April 21, 2000

Maybe it's because Easter is here, but it seems even giving away free booze causes some people to grumble. When a subscriber posted >http://www.madaboutwine.com/free to the list, I’d guess there was a peak in traffic on the website. Naturally enough the comments came in thick and fast.

Chris Heathcote recounted his experience, "On Thursday the server was v slow but still working (good) until you tried to checkout, at which point it fell over (bad), dropping your bottle of free wine on the floor and running away... As always with these free offers, a great idea in principal if you've got the server resources and fulfilment resources to throw at it. This has made me even less likely to buy from them in the future."

Mark Button also suffered problems, "I kept getting script errors and couldn't register. Tried about 4 times and gave up in the end. Booo, not boooooze."

Not everyone had such a bad experience, although the competition for free booze was obviously intense. James Cronin wrote, "Worked absolutely fine - unfortunately it took longer than boo.com did when we launched to get through the purchase path though... That and the irritating errors and obscure error messages being produced by their e-commerce system which presumably couldn't deal with stuff being free. But still - there's a bottle of wine allegedly on it's way to me so I'm not going to whinge that much. Seems like quite a cheap way of getting lots of people to talk about them. Good advertising spend I think."

Trevor May proved the wait was worth it; no doubt with a glass of free plonk in his other hand, he wrote, "I think I had it open for about 45 minutes on and off hitting submit, then back, submit, back. I did finally get my order through on 4:30 on Friday and a confirmation email arrived right away."

Commenting on the tendency of this type of free offer to backfire, Richard Dougall emailed, "I think what they have offered is a decent ploy to get PR and users interested in their site. The problem for marketers is that this style of marketing has received such a bad reputation that it is virtually useless. One thing that can be leant from this is that they backed their email up with a specific web page which lent credibility to their offering - something that not many people do [especially] with banners."

Sarah Clelland added some thoughts on how to finesse the experience in case of problems. She replied, "I must say though, it really irks me that a business goes to the trouble and expense of a marketing ploy like this, with a site that throws up error messages. It's totally unnecessary - their developer should have been on the case and provided messages saying 'Sorry, we're very busy' or words to that effect. OK, so this message might not make you feel any better when a bottle of free vino is dangling just beyond your reach, but at least it shows that they were prepared, with a properly developed website."

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