A few weeks back, I griped about the music download service, Puretracks. In that entry, I'd unsuccessfully tried to make a purchase from their site. Poor usability, horrid coding and just plain bad design was the final verdict.

I'd decided never to darken my internet cache file with their site again. But when a gift certificate ended up in my lap for $10 of music, a revisit was in order. I'll not bore you with the details of my tribulations. I did eventually manage to get my music – but let me tell you it was such a nightmare and ridden with problems.

I've not been back to their site since, but a couple articles caught my eye this week. Puretracks has announced they on a limited number of tracks and albums, they are cutting prices. They will be backing this pricing change with a television and media campaign.

No details are disclosed, but I'm guessing a campaign of that size is likely to run them a minimum of two to five million.

~sigh~

Okay. My free advice to Puretracks.

Abandon your planned media campaign.
This is the internet – the ultimate dissemination of information. If you have a worthwhile service – you will be visited in droves. How much money has Google spent in advertising? How many television ads do you see for Amazon? You are a net based service. Print and television ads, in my opinion, are an ineffective means of promoting yourself.

Make a worthwhile service
Worthwhile is not defined by exclusive. Worthwhile is not a product of co-branding. Worthwhile is something that makes life easier and convenient for people, or is enjoyable in and of itself. I use Google because it helps me find the information I'm looking for, quickly and without the clutter of pop-up ads and other annoyances. I use Amazon because I can find what I want very quickly, it gives me the information I need to make a purchasing decision, and the prices are often the best.

Take the resources you'd otherwise be throwing away on television ads that are ignored and newspaper ads that are lining the bird cage. Hire yourselves a Usability expert. Seriously assess your service and determine what is worth saving. Toss the rest and recode it all. But recode it right. Make it work for Macs. Make it work for Linux. Create the best damn music store in existence.

Final bit of advice
When you finally have things working right, it's going to take a lot of work to bring back the customers who were burned by your initial shoddy offering. There's a stat that's floating about in usability circles: for every marketing dollar spent attracting a client, it takes 100 dollars of marketing to bring them back after a bad usability experience.

My advice would be to adopt a viral model of promotion. For example: offer five bucks worth of music for everyone who registers an account and give five dollars worth of music to any registered customer who refers a new customer. Get your customers working for you in spreading the word that it's a new and improved Puretracks.