COMMENTS
But how many of these people are still leads in 90 days? I find that when I do contests, the extra people I sign up are just trolls looking for a freebie. Truly interested people will sign up anyway. Has anyone else seen this?
Where is lead quality in this equation? I am the perfect example of someone who will fill out a form to get the 'report', 'whitepaper' or whatever free offer with literally NO intention of ever buying anything. How many of me are part of these 'conversions'?
While I understand the point is comparing results using "free" and "contest", I think the graphs are a bit misleading. At first glance, all the "visualites" out here could get the impression that "free" produces much better relative results than "contest" because of the height of the bars. However, the respective Y axes are using vastly different scales. The "free" graph is representing a 6% difference and the "contest" graph about a 40% improvement but it's difficult to see the relative magnitude at first glance. I'm just saying.......
We have assisted a number of companies including consultants in growing their businesses, by offering, as well as related business prizes, access to survey results. The key to guard against "trolls" as Kathy rightly points out are out there, is to use a target list to eblast your most likely customers. Although it's not 100% troll proof, insure as well that you include within the rules a series of steps and/or requiremnets to better qualify participants. It is an art form, that we have refined over time, kept within the very tight consumer laws here in Canada/USA and have greatly improved results. As word of caution, don't key on the number of entrants, but do key on the number of conversions to sales when discussing your needs with a Marketing Company.
Carl Cassidy
President
Impaq Marketing & Comnmnunications Inc.
It really worked out fine for me, except I was giving a small free gift to the person they register and now I have a truck load of gifts to make :)
However this did increase my actual orders and fans in a way I had not expected, I think it differs depending on the type of product. In this case, cloth carriers for babies, people are more likely to just be thrilled at the thought and also be enticed to know what you do just because they saw the FREE campaign.
They never got something free... they enlisted a friend to get a free item...
I run a few comp sites, you get LOADS of dud emails. I find mailchimp is great for filtering this as it tracks opens/clicks and gives each subscriber a rating. Export a list of all the people with no activity in the last month and unsub them from your list. I've got around a 30% open rate at the momement which is excellent by industry standard. Plus why pay for all those stale email addys to sit on your list. If they are not interacting purge those suckers.
We took our contest lead form down because the lead quality was usually poor, and our spam reports went up when we emailed to this set. We got much better conversion with leads who downloaded a free trial version of our software, greater than 20% conversion.
Interesting info. It would be awesome if we knew the percentage of trolls in these graphs, but that can be difficult and time consuming to figure out.