Using a competition to launch / re-launch

I thought I’d share with you a live example a friend of mine is using to launch his new eCommerce business.

Blog post title suggests – it’s a competition.

The new eCommerce Business

Back in episode 73 of the podcast I chatted with Jon Butt of Fire Protection Online. He’s just launched a new business with his son called Blue Coffee Box .

Yes, they sell great ground coffee from a hand selected bunch of awesome roasters.

The customer already has a LOT of options in the coffee subscription/online buying of great artisan coffee market. So how to cut through the noise, establish the brand and kick start those early day sales?

Take a look at the site and you’ll quickly see they’ve done a great job of the ‘brand package’ – the site, the story, the product – all looks great!

But success lies in getting traffic.

blue coffee box competitionThe competition

Obviously they’re going to give away coffee! So the prize is doing it’s job of attracting the customers who want coffee.

A competition is a great way to get your connections (friends, family etc) to share your exciting new business with their networks. It’s not too pushy, so it feels like you’re doing a favour to everyone!

What a really love about this competition though…

You can check it out here (go on, enter!)

… is that it incentives the actions that are going to bring the biggest benefit to the buisness.

It’s not just – “sign up to enter, bye”.

it’s set up to get as much social sharing as possible AND get those important email sign ups.

AND it rewards purchases too – a whole 20 extra entries!

This set up could come across as confusing – but the layout and design is such that it really isn’t.

The tool

If you want to give it a go, the tool they’ve used is Gleam.io .

I’m hoping to get them on the podcast in a few months to talk about it – so expect to hear about some results in the future.

How could you use this idea?

Whilst I think this is an awesome way to very quickly get some traction for a new business.

You don’t have to be launching a new business to use this method.

  • Use it to launch your next season
  • Use it to launch a new product
  • Because it’s August!

The one thing you do need to do before using it – decide on what you’re objective is. So you can focus the activity, and have something to measure the results against.

Making a competition like this really take off is a lot of work – lots of personal emails to send out.

So you want to be clear on why you’re putting in that effort before you start.