Co-op E-Mail
Low cost, captive audience, measurable results. Not a bad trio of reasons for the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau to try the Tourism Department's co-op e-mail program. They went with the Packages & Deals ad mail, sent to a list of subscribers who opt-in specifically to receive that e-mail. Only a handful of specials are featured with each monthly Packages & Deals e-mail, so its high visibility for the participants. The Department takes care of everything - creating, deploying and tracking. All the Greater Madison group needed to do was supply copy, in this case promoting a "Winter Getaway" package. In turn, they saw a measurable increase in Web visits to that particular page of their site. As they noted, "We were very happy with the results for such a minimal investment." In fact, they went on to tell us this ad-mail tactic produced response numbers that were "far and away higher" than some of the other marketing opportunities they chose.
Co-op Newspaper Advertising
One way to find out if a newspaper ad is working is to include a specific call-to-action. In the case of Marquette County Tourism, they used the Tourism Department's low-cost co-op newspaper ad program to run a series of ads prior to nine different sports shows they were participating in, noting the booth number in each ad. According to tourism officials there, the ads helped improve attendance at all nine shows. For this group of small communities - they themselves joke that “if you blink you'll miss us!” - the co-op program helped put them on the map in a big way.