Today the debate rages - price integrity v. increased exposure. How do you deal with maintaing a standard price for your product or service while trying to increase exposure and sales via price based discounts? In today’s digital age, the mass distribution of a promotional code is only a few keystrokes away. Blessing or curse?

Take for example the PubCon promotion we had this month. At our booth at WMW Vegas, we handed out some glossy cards telling people how great we are, and why they should check us out. For attendees of the conference, we provided a discount code good for new submissions at 50% for the month of November. One of the conference attendees posted about the promotion at his blog - Marketing Fan. See BOTW Promo - 50% off. Coupled with some additional business development deals we have going, and an uptick in the buzz around the forums, and we run a pretty decent number (close to 20%) of our month at discounted rates.

Now of course offering our submission review at 50% off cuts into the margins. We expect x number of submissions at that level, and with word of mouth receive x+y. So, for the month our margins run at a lower rate, but the number of new submissions improves dramatically.

We try to limit our exposure to the rogue posting of discount codes, but with just about anything online there are loopholes. For the savvy there are typically many ways to skin a cat. We do believe that our promotions are good for our members, and are beneficial to BOTW as well.

And for those interested, the code from WMW Vegas - good for submissions at 50% off - is HPWR5H. Good only until the end of the month, so submit your site soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Promotions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.