Designing a Contest
One of the easiest ways to build traffic on your website and collect names, addresses, and emails of potential new customers is a sweepstakes. But anyone who has tried to set one up knows just how complicated all the rules and regulations can be, requiring hours of legal work by a specialist. Now a new online service called Caffeine is offering to do the grunt work for you. The company combines many small companies into one large sweepstakes, taking care of all the paperwork and even the prize. Caffeine is run by ePrize, who runs promotions for large corporations, like Disney and Coca-Cola. The best part about the new service is that you pay only $1 for each new customer name you collect, you don’t have to pay a set fee or set-up costs. Like other online advertising, you can set a limit to what you spend each day. The contact names you pay for can be limited to a geographic area: you can opt only to pay for consumer names with addresses within a 20-mile radius, for example. Caffeine can offer contests for so little because many companies are pooled together into a single giveaway. The prizewinner might not be from your list of entrants and there is no limit to the number of entrants. But because several contests are running at the same time, you can join a contest easily with little or no lead time. Another promotion offered by the company is customizable online coupons that you can use to drive traffic to your store. Caffeine will really be useful if it can be incorporated into search results advertising: consumers may be more likely to click on ads if they know the company has a sweepstakes or a coupon. They are also more likely to send a link to the site to friends and family.
