Dell Outlet Twitter Campaign Duplicable???

Guerilleros, my sincere apologies for completely abandoning this community for almost 3 months. Hopefully you were able to survive without my guerilla tips

In fact, from the Feedburner notifications I’ve been receiving, traffic to the SMGuerilla was not badly damaged. So let’s address that right now.

Recycling Ideas Make Them Fresh?

No, of course not – just like Recyclables are still trash, despite their higher value. But a wise man once said that there are no original ideas, so I’m putting my recycled Guerilla strategy to the test.

I’m sure you heard about the impressive success that @DellOutlet generated: over $2 million in sales from Twitter alone.

Great, huh?

Here’s the challenge

Can the same be done for an Online Fashion Boutique?

I’ve created an @Outlet account for them and fired up all of the inventory they had put aside for “liquidation”.

The next step was to create a special coupon (in this case, tweet10) to serve two purposes:

1 – Tracking (of course, Analytics helps too)

2 – Exclusivity (only followers have access to these great deals).

Here’s where things go a little South:

The company prefers their sales staff focused on “more important things than Twitter”.

Can Twitter create revenue?

Is Twitter A New Sales Platform?

The real reason behind Dell’s success was that they had a real person tweeting, interacting, and actually performing extensive customer service work. They shifted the focus off Dell and started retweeting quotes, participating on #followfriday, and answering @replies.

But is it the real reason? Or was Dell simply the 1st big corporation to try such strategy and benefit off of novelty?

Here’s where my guerilla suspicions come from:

• None of the deals were actually that much cheaper or exclusive
• Dell.com/outlet existed prior to the twitter account

Our Strategy

While the sales staff is focused on more important stuff, and since they’ve paid me for all the work upfront, I decided to run without them.

• My software is updating their outlet account with offers every 10-15 min -
• All offers point straight to the final sales page with that specific item on display.
• We go in once or twice a day to check for @replies.

Here are the stats after 10 days of campaign:

• 114 Visits from Twitter.com
• 69 followers (as of 2/17 at 12:35am)

Considering their usual traffic source is PPC, 114 visits would cost $45.6 (at a cheap $.40 bid).

So even if the campaign turns out less than ideal, they’re at least looking at a cheaper traffic source.

What about you?

What do you think it’s going to happen to this automated Twitter sales process?

Leave your comments!!!

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