What drives traffic to your web site? Paid search? Search engine optimization? Those tactics are effective and should be a part of the online strategy for most marketers. However, there is a less tech driven way to prompt people to visit your web site: curiosity. Two examples I encountered recently came from Southwest Airlines and the National Water Council. Southwest is currently running a campaign that offers 50% fare discounts, with a different city featured each day over the course of the four-day promotion. The catch: consumers need to go to Southwest.com to find out what the “mystery city” is each day of the promotion.
I received a postcard recently offering a free bottle of my favorite laundry detergent. All I needed to do was go to www.freedetergent.com. Once I arrived there, name, e-mail address, and favorite laundry detergent brand info was requested. The promotion is an effort by the National Water Council to get participants for its National Water Quality Awareness Program. The promotion expands the group’s database of persons it can reach with its message. The intrigue of the offer and the straightforward URL made it too tempting to pass on visiting the web site.
These examples remind us that if we want to web surfers to visit our site, we must go beyond considering the architecture of web site design and analytics of keywords. Create some excitement through a mystery promotion, one that is too compelling to ignore!
