Yes, there are some pretty lazy people out there going to sites such as onlinesweepstakes.com and more. In fact, many times, these websites send out announcements to their subscribers telling of all new offers in order to make things worse for the original advertiser.
A couple additions to your suggestions (which were very well put) ,4) Make sure (we did) that you store the ORIGINAL http referring info as well as the referring info for the actual sweepstakes page. Thereby, when someone follows a link from a search engine or contest aggregator, you can easily filter them out for your marketing/sales staff. No reason to call them This is actually pretty mandatory to avoid getting called a SPAMer, as well as a defense against spamassasin and other organizations. You will also want to collect the IP address of the user. Unless your site is a major brand, you can also make sure the sweepstake is not searchable with the search engines by using your robot.txt file. Great input! __________________________________________ Thomas Bosilevac Director of Product Development BRIDGEleaf Studios www.bridgeleaf.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] 913-484-3455 Start your 15 Day FREE trial of BRIDGEexchange -CRM now! visit http://www.bridgeleaf.com/crm/ _________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 12:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [KCFusion] Running an online sweepstakes - lesson learned So I have a client whose end customer had a need for a sweepstakes to promote their new website. The sweepstake was for a high end ($2k+) BBQ grill. The target customers, technical trade journals in a niche industry. We setup the ColdFusion form to capture the sweepstakes registration information, drop it into a database and email us each time so we know we have a new entrant. The lawyers write all the legalese, 1 person per household, etc. First 2 weeks go by, very very small number of applicants (<10), but the trade journals haven't been sent to everyone yet and we are happy with the QUALITY of the applicants (i.e. they were in the industry and likely customers of the expensive customized products being promoted). The past few days we get a dozen applicants in groups of 2-5, same address, last name, etc. Hm.they didn't read the fine print, 1 entry per household, well, they are disqualified. No problem. Our marketing is still hitting the target customer who is likely to win and be happy..Until this morning. I check my email before leaving from work, and the email starts transferring into Outlook.and doesn't stop! Between something like 4am and 10:30am we had over 600 entries! NONE of them were legit target customers! Turns out, there are lots of lazy people in the world who have nothing else better to do than sit at their computers, go to a website that publishes online sweepstakes contests, and then proceed to enter them, thereby wasting our marketing efforts and ruining the chance of a legitimate customer winning. By the rules, we can't very well not accept these entries.state law being as lame as it is. We can't put up big obstacles to make it harder for the masses to apply. We can't shoot the proprietors of the website that is openly mocking our very well targeted marketing efforts. Lessons learned: 1) for a big contest with a wide audience, you are best off following the laws in order to stay clear 2) figure out a way to follow the laws while minimizing the likelihood of your contest being ruined. 3) Giving the people a way to opt-out of future emailings is probably important (may be legally required now), likewise, since your system will be full of entries, its best to do this anyway to help weed out the people who are not potential clients and save yourself hassles.,4) Make sure (we did) that you store the ORIGINAL http referring info as well as the referring info for the actual sweepstakes page. Thereby, when someone follows a link from a search engine or contest aggregator, you can easily filter them out for your marketing/sales staff. No reason to call them.,4) DO NOT have your sweepstakes system send you an email every time someone registers or you will be flooded by emails! =================== Kansas City ColdFusion User Group's website & listserv is hosted through the generous support of Clickdoug.com To send email to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] To (un)subscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your request. For hosting solutions http://www.clickdoug.com Featuring Win2003 Enterprise, RedHat Linux, CFMX 6.1. ================== ========================================================= Kansas City ColdFusion User Group's website & listserv is hosted through the generous support of Clickdoug.com To send email to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] To (un)subscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your request. For hosting solutions http://www.clickdoug.com Featuring Win2003 Enterprise, RedHat Linux, CFMX 6.1. ======================================================
