In May 2024, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, hosted a webinar featuring the presentation for the thousands of gun sellers who belong to the NSSF. As the industry’s primary representative, the NSSF navigates political and cultural headwinds to help ensure the profitability of its members. Its research suggests customers are increasingly purchasing firearms on the internet.
The presentation, delivered by Will Altherr, the digital marketing director of Guns.com, a popular online platform that sells guns and accessories, emphasized the role of email in steering consumer behavior through the “sales funnel.”
In Altherr’s analogy, shoppers move through a funnel, heading down as they get closer to a purchase. “If you sell products on your website, and you get to a point — or a customer gets to a point — where they put something in their cart, they’re essentially one step away from a checkout,” Alther said. “That is extremely lower funnel activity.”
Altherr asked: “So how can we get them to cross that barrier from cart to making a purchase?”
His presentation, consisting of 13 slides, recommended tools for tracking, customization, and behavior-inducing prompts. Altherr discussed the strategies at length in his remarks, a recording of which was reviewed by The Trace and Rolling Stone. The tactics he described are familiar in the world of online commerce, from food orders to clothes. But the presentation betrayed no consideration of the consequences that may arise if the tactics are applied in a widespread way to the selling of firearms and ammunition.
As The Trace and Rolling Stone have reported in the series “The Secret Files of the Gun Industry,” first-time gun-buyers do not account for the bulk of the industry’s profits. Instead, gun merchants are heavily reliant on customers who continually purchase firearms, ammunition, and accessories, leading individuals to build mini arsenals. Large numbers of gun retailers investing in customized digital marketing, combined with the ease of online commerce, could exacerbate this trend.
— Mike Spies in The Gun Industry Is Embracing Digital Tactics to Turn Gun Buying Into a Habit
“Large numbers of gun retailers investing in customized digital marketing, combined with the ease of online commerce, could exacerbate this trend.”
I got news for you, and that news is this not new news. “Large numbers of gun retailers investing in customized digital marketing, combined with the ease of online commerce…” has already been a thing for years.
You guys at the Trace and Rolling Stone need to go back to the ‘dark web’ site you got your drugs from and find out exactly what they sold you because you got something that shifts reality for you into some place else.
This is exactly what the left wing liberals pushed for many years ago when the internet came to be, it was going to be a place where anyone could access information and buy and sell stuff. Its just that the left wing liberals planned to control it all and decide who could or could not access what-ever or buy/sell and it didn’t work out that way. So now buy/sell guns and information about guns is some sort of ‘sin’ they want to paint it as because they don’t have say-so control over it and that really upsets them.