To work properly, special offers have to be … well, … special.  Ideally they are time sensitive (“And if you call in the next 10 minutes, we’ll throw in the Slap N’ Chop FREE”), they have to be of enough value to get the prospect to act, and ideally they should have an illusion of exclusivity (“Only the first 20 callers will get this special deal”).

One of the challenges of online marketing is where do you deliver these offers?  After the sale – either in an email or a confirmation web page – will help increase sales from existing customers.  Godaddy does a masterful job of offering discounts for extending subscription period (“buy for 2 years and save 20%”) just before you make your purchase – increasing their per cart revenue.

I recently came across a web site that uses a secret link to deliver a special offer.  Tucked subtly amongst a series of text links at the bottom of the home page is this “secret link”.

Just the mention of something secret gets most people’s attention.

Where does it go ?   It links to this secret landing page with a special offer to save 20% :

This call to action is brilliant in its simplicity.  Without spending a lot on tracking technology, they’ve found a way to reward those people who’ve spent enough time on the site to notice the “secret link”.  And if you presume that the longer someone stays on your site, the more interested they are in your product or service (and the “warmer” the lead they are), then it is a great way to move them from a prospect to a customer.

Why not just offer a discount up front, you may ask ?  Quite frankly, it diminishes the value of what you have to offer.  You need to firmly establish the value – in terms of dollars as well as worth – of your products and services.  Offering the discount right off the bat undermines that.

How do you take this idea to the next level ?  With a little creative programming, you could dynamically insert the “secret link” only after the prospect had visited the site for X many minutes, or perhaps returned to the site Y many times.  While the example above has been executed in a very simple manner, your campaign doesn’t have to be.