Free Samples Equals Viral Marketing Success

My company Kinoli handles the Internet Marketing for Freshpet, makers of the healthiest dog food on the planet. We recently redesigned the web sites for their two brands, Homestyle Select and Deli Fresh.

After launching the new Homestyle Select web site, we sent an email to a list of veterinarians and dog owners encouraging them to check out the web site and fill out an online form. In return they would receive a free sample of Homestyle Select. The only way to access the free sample form was through the link provided in the email.

A few weeks after we sent the emails to our list of veterinarians our client noticed that they received a few hundred submissions for free samples in the time span of a couple hours. This didn’t seem right because the request for free samples was greater than the list of veterinarians.

Free samples get viral quickly

Somehow the link we sent to the veterinarians in the email a couple weeks earlier made its way to many of the free samples and discount web sites/forums. With in a few hours there were a few dozen links coming into the free sample page.

Redirect traffic to home page

We were thrilled with the traffic the web site was getting, but we weren’t prepared to give free samples to thousands of people so we redirected the traffic to the home page.

We used a 301 redirect as opposed to a meta tag redirect because we wanted the search engines to transfer the authority of the inbound links to the home page, rather than leaving the authority on an irrelevant page.

Viral Marketing Success

Within ten days of going viral the web sites traffic increased by more than 10,000 visitors, most coming in the first few days, and close to 5% of all visitors signed up for the Homestyle Select newsletter.

Conclusion

In a time when 85% of all viral marketing campaigns fail it’s nice to stumble into a viral success, even if it wasn’t planned.

We learned that free giveaways and product samples can get viral very quickly. All it takes is one link on the right forum and it will spread like wildfire.

If you plan on doing a giveaway like this, make sure you have enough product and infrastructure to handle the requests.

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Great post, it sounds like you did a great job and your client was please with the results.

The other plus is that people who receive a link from a forum with a free sample don’t always expect that the link will work. It was good that you were able to redirect the traffic in such a short time and capitalize on the hits from the the free sample sites.

It may even be an idea to post fake free sample links in the future. Then re-direct the link to the home page. It seems like a win win situation.

Hi Ian,
Thanks for the comment. It is true that you could probably drive a lot of traffic to your site by posting links on free sample forums to non-free content material. However, do this to much and your potential customers will have a bad experience which could end up doing more harm than good for your business.

Most post are done by individuals and not the company them selfs.

Do you think that would reflect badly on your company? or badly on the forum where the link it’s posted?

Sharing these codes and people finding them is almost like people sharing, music, or pirating software. The good thing that comes out of it is brand awareness and product awareness. I would think the consumer would almost half expect the link not to work.

And the only thing I could see happening is eventually once someone has tried this a few times and it doesn’t work, they won’t try it again and you’ll have to find another method to reach the consumer.