As you likely know, I ran a contest last week. If it’s news to you, please…let me know because it means I have a hole in my marketing.
Here’s what I did to set up the contest. Buried on one of my Etsy shop listings was a coded riddle. Players had to find the riddle, decode it, and send me the answer in order to enter the drawing for one of two prizes. Alternatively, purchasing something entered them into the drawing automatically. This way, there were two ways of entering and I was fairly flexible about how to get the riddle answer to me, though most folks wound up using the contact form on my site. Only one person reported a problem with the form, which is pretty fantastic. Throughout the week I dropped several more hints on a page set up on my site specifically for the contest. Having one central location for the information allowed me to post one link in multiple locations, consolidating maintance.
Ultimately, there wound up being only 5 entries in the drawing. Five. That’s it. But the contest was still a success.
How can that be? There were so few entries. The answer lies in the intent of the contest. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for a massive uptick in sales over the past week, but I’m pretty realistic. My main goal was to increase the number of views on my items, particularly as I start to move closer to craft show season. By not just having people send me their name and putting it on a list, I drove people deep into my shop, looking in every listing until they found the riddle. Along the way they of course had the opportunity to look at what I have made to sell. By encoding the riddle, I made it so it was near impossible to search for via keywords. And finally, by making it more gamelike, it was a little less onerous for the customer. A few people caught on to my intentions, and that’s fine, I didn’t exactly hide my agenda. So how were the numbers?
I have my Etsy site connected to Google Analytics to give me some high level data on traffic on the site.
June 7-13, I had 183 visits, 556 page views, 3.04 pages viewed, average time on site: 3 min 28 seconds.
June 14 – 20, 73 visits, 186 page views, 2.55 pages viewed, average time on site: 1:55.
On the week of the contest:
June 21 – 27, 247 visits, 2764 views, 11.19 pages viewed, average time on site: 4:41.
That’s a pretty healthy spike in traffic. Importantly, I increased my exposure of the products to my customers. People had to scour and process the descriptions of my listings in order to hunt down the riddle.
So what were the costs involved?
Sunday night, partly because of my own procrastination, I was up until 2 am finalizing the riddle location, setting up the main info site, and posting links to the page.
In addition I produced two marbles as prizes. One of them was actually fairly nice and went as first prize. The other was an experiment I had lying around but was actually pretty in it’s own right. Since the winner of the second prize was also a lampworker, I tossed in two sticks of GlowStix from a sampler I had purchased. This made for a nicer prize overall, and it may drive a little business to the main distributor of the glass itself who’s a decent human being and does a top notch job on the customer satisfaction end.
I posted links on several lampworking forums including TorchBugs. Within thses listings, I made a conscious effort to only update the thread as necessary (to report a new hint was listed, updating the prize photos, or answering questions) so as to not annoy other users. Additionally I posted links and occasionally made mention of the contest on my Facebook page. Again, I tried to keep it to a minimum. However, one unforseen glitch occurred during the contest and my Facebook account was crippled. While it’s remotely possible the two could be connected, I really think it was more of a problem in the way Facebook tags abusive users than a direct result of my actions. I’ve hawked things before, and other folks are as repetitive in their posts as I was if not more. However, because I made an effort to cast a wider net for marketing, this was only a mild inconvenience in regards to the contest.
When it came time for the drawing, I wrote out the 5 entries on similarly sized slips of paper and placed them in a hat, then enlisted my wife’s help in drawing two winners. As luck had it, first prize went to a person that actually purchased something from me during the contest period.
All in all, I think it was a pretty decent contest, and in a few months perhaps I’ll put together another one. I tried to make it a little bit fun for the user, and I made sure the encoding of the riddle, and the riddle itself were not terribly difficult to sort out. For the riddle, I used the riddle of the Sphinx, which is easily searched for on the web. My goal was to drive views, not drive people made.
If anyone has questions, feel free to pass them along, post them below, or include them in the ‘instructions to seller’ box when you buy something from my shop.