Oldie but a goodie - refer a friend campaign

The most exciting thing about a customer is that they know OTHER potential customers - people just like them, thus also very likely to buy the same sorts of things from the same sort of places. This is something many, many companies seem to forget - to their own detriment.

I recently booked some flights through webjet and this week I was sent a "refer a friend" promotion. There were several things I thought were clever and "zero budget" about this marketing idea.

1. Most of webjet's advertising seems to be posters at airports & billboards. For anyone who has ever booked a campaign like that, you know they are VERY expensive. This would have been peanuts in comparison, even if they had to pay for the flights they're giving away.

BUT

2. If you notice the Qantas branding on the plane in the creative, I suspect this means that even if they had to pay SOMETHING for the flights, they didn't have to pay the full price. Although I suspect, as webjet likely puts a lot of business Qantas's way, they may even have had the prize flights donated for nix.

Thus, this promotion will only have cost them a bit of a brain power and a bit of design/web work.

Let's say this was $10,000. And let's say they send it to 50,000 people on their dbase. Even if only 10% respond (and they'd likely get more as this is a great incentive sent to a market who've proved they are in the market for flights!) that means 5,000 people respond. If these 5,000 only send to TWO contacts, that means Webjet have reached 10,000 people for a cost of $10,000.

A paltry $1 a "well-targeted" propspect.

I don't know abotu you, but I think a buck is a pretty low introduction fee to someone who's likley to spend hundreds of dollars with you in a single sale.

Don't you?

So webjet, congrats on pulling out this "oldie but goodie". You got me to email my friends. And I'm a cynical marketing type!