By: Jennifer Saba When Christine Holaday Schriock, classified director for Colorado Mountain News Media, started shopping around for a new Web-based application that would allow customers to place their own classifieds, she got a case of sticker shock. She thought the price tag associated with many services like AdStar was too high.
So instead, the mothership in Reno, Nev. decided to help her out and build the application internally. "We tried to mimic Christine's ideal sales process," said Jason Aloia, Internet manager for Swift Newspapers, who was the lead on the project. Aloia and his team came up with an application that allows a buyer to place their classified and ad extra things like images.
For what Aloia deemed as very little investment -- they already had the server and manpower -- Colorado Mountain News rolled out the new online process in December 2003. So far, it's been successful. "We found that people are upselling themselves," Schriock said.
The average upsell has increased 18% to 34% (in terms of overall length of the ad) among Colorado Mountain News Media's four dailies and seven weeklies. Buyers have a choice of placing the ad online or as a print/Web combo (about 95% of the orders).
But that doesn't mean people have been abandoning the call centers where before December placed all orders; Schriock said that they're fielding the same amount of calls but there's an up-tick in online activity. This April she said they booked and sold 693 ads via online versus the same time last year where the newspaper group had collected 562 e-mail inquires. Schriock said that about half of those e-mails would come through as sales.
"We started it as more of a customer service," Schriock said. "We didn't do it to increase revenue but that's been definitely happening."
The program has been so successful that Swift Newspapers plans to launch it in its other properties throughout California and Nevada.
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