Help why isn't my strategy working?

[smeagher]

I'm offering a $500 amazon voucher on my site to the member who brings in the most referrals by the end of July. But I'm finding people aren't acting on it. So far I've had only one member take a real interest but because there is no real competition he has stopped his efforts. He is well ahead at only 24 !! I cant believe how badly this is working out! Any ideas?

[mktgbiz]

When I respond I try not to evaluate, rather go with the first thought that instinctivley comes to my mind.

The instant I read your post I thought - I don't need anymore to read (Amazon to me represents books) May not be the right thought, but that's what appeared first.

If the offer was for $500 C-A-S-H as opposed to a voucher it may have triggered a diferent thought.

Maybe, just maybe others are having the same thoughts???????????

My 2 cents.........

[smeagher]

you could be right ... a lot of people probably do associate amazon with books which is not a very sexy prize at all! I had thought first about offering cash but was adviced against that. I need to act quickly though . My competition deadline is end of July and if I dont get referrals from it, I've wasted $500 ! I'm going to try to get my members to post bulletins on their myspace. It might help!

[Coqui Colunge]

yep! i agree with mktgbiz
Cash does sound much better.
If you can't give'em $500 at
least give them $300 but give
them CASH!

Unless of course there are some
legal issues involved, which i don't know.

Hope your situation improves

Coqui

[smeagher]

I can give the cash since I haven't bought the voucher yet. Does anybody know if there ARE legal issues with giving cash?

[Grokodile]

Maybe you can talk about $500 worth of merchandise from a company that provides games, movies, books, etc, etc. Who cares if it is Amazon, just say it is thousands of products and that they ship, hopefully, worldwide?

However, I'm not so sure that the books issue is your only problem. I recall at one point offering a fairly large prize, but nobody cared. I ended up giving it away with very little to show for it.

I am guessing that people don't really believe in promotional gimmicks. They feel that it will be difficult to win, that they will work for nothing, and they may not even trust the prize to be truly awarded if your site isn't incredibly professional or a known name already.

The best you can do, like I did, is consider this a learning experience and try to find ways to make sure you get good value for promotional efforts. Maybe it would work better if you gave a daily $10 prize for fifty days. Better yet, maybe a weekly prize, based on weekly results, for fifty weeks.

If you can stretch out the contest and keep people motivated, perhaps saying that a weekly winner is entered in the grand prize, but can't win another weekly prize, so that people feel they have some type of chance, then they might be interested.

Anyway, I'm honestly not an expert at this, I just know I got burned a bit from it once. I am thinking of finding a way to offer people something for adding themselves to my directory, but it can't be very expensive... and it has to be easy to manage, and it has to be worth it in terms of return.

Hmm, I'm getting some ideas now...

[smeagher]

thanks Grokodile for that. Yes, I have began to think o f it as a learning experience! I haven't given up though. I'm still going to try to sqeeze as many referrals out of it as I can and yeah, maybe the copy of my ad is a bit weak! It's all trial and error for me in these early days!

[SalesPractice]

Are posting the current results for members to see they fair in the competition?

Are you giving them suggestions on how to obtain these referrals?

[smeagher]

I haven't really given them direction on HOW to get referrals. That's something I definitely will do. Things have improved a little since my first post ... another members has become active with referrals so now there's a battle between the two top referrers! I wish it was more though !

[Rob_TID]

Yup, a while back I offered an amazon voucher as a prie for an online contest and also had a terrible response! LOL.