Remember back in the day when you’d go to your mail box and inside you’d find a catalog, a letter from Aunt Petunia, and a fistful of mailers from America Online containing sign-up disks or CDs? Those were good times, as the supply of coasters for wet drinks was plentiful. It was also a good time for AOL, which went from 200,000 paid subscribers to 25 million in a decade using that tactic.
But at what cost? Well, we could go off about how AOL isn’t exactly the powerhouse it used to before the ill-advised Time Warner merger…but I mean the actual cost. In a Q&A at Quora.com, former CEO Steve Case and some of his C-level execs replied to that question and the total was stated: $300 million. The company gladly spent $35 to attract each new user. It paid off, since new users were once signing on every six seconds, staying around 25 months, and spending $350 for the privilege.
That high sign-up rate is probably because, as Jan Brandt, the former AOL chief marketing officer said: “At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it.” I believe at least half of them came to my house to defend my coffee table from stains.
