Imagine you have a small business website with plenty of traffic. Unfortunately, you don’t have many subscribers to your regular email newsletter. These visitors are finding your site okay, but once they leave, they never return.
Now imagine you could give them an incentive for signing up for your newsletter. This might include a chance to win a big prize like a great weekend getaway, a new Tiffany Co Gift Card, an iPad and Apple TV combo or other prize.
A startup called Incentivibe gives you a way to offer high ticket prizes on your website as an incentive for the leads you need. Incentivibe CEO and Co-Founder, Adeel Vanthaliwala, took time out recently for an exclusive interview with Small Business Trends to explain.
The Conversion Problem
Here’s the problem, said Vanthaliwala. While website businesses have worked long and hard to build traffic on their sites, converting that traffic into leads is a bit more difficult. In fact, according to data supplied by Incentivibe, 95 percent of the people who visit your website leave without ever becoming leads.
One solution is to offer free ebooks or white papers to visitors in return for newsletter signup or other actions. But Vanthaliwala said this generally only works for business to business websites with less success if you sell to consumers.
Worse yet, he added, for some visitors white papers or other information just aren’t enough of an incentive to sign up and give you their email addresses.
Larger prizes might create more incentive, Vanthaliwala said. But the cost is sometimes prohibitive to small startup websites. they may not have the budget to spend for giveaways week after week or month after month.
Newsletter Incentives: How Incentivibe Works
Incentivibe offers websites the ability to pool their resources by paying a fraction of the cost of a larger prize. For example, for a $24.99 monthly fee, small websites can participate in a giveaway for a prize worth $500.
A site owner simply install a widget with the giveaway information to his or her website. Incentivibe offers integration with a wide variety of platforms including Magento, Shopify, Big Commerce, Volusion, Unbounce, WordPress and any custom made website.
The contest widget includes only the name of the site on which it appears. So site owners don’t need to worry about promoting other sites inadvertently. They can even co-sponsor a contest with a competitor, said Vanthaliwala.
Incentivibe also offers free administration of the contests and free contest rules tailored to legally meet the requirements of your country or region.
How They Got the Idea
Vanthaliwala and co-founder and chief technology officer Abdul Basit Munda came up with the idea for Incentivibe while wrapping up a previous venture in February 2012.
Carrying $50,000 in debt and working two to three part-time jobs at a time to support their families, Vanthaliwala and Munda decided to learn from their own mistakes and built a new business as a result.
Vanthaliwala explains in a post on the company’s official blog:
We looked at [the] previous startup and diagnosed major problems. We realized that one of the big problems was that we were lacking incentives, big contest prizes, like the big brands. All the big brands offered big contest prizes and got tremendous leads and fans. So we asked ourselves, why can’t we combine the purchasing power of small businesses and help them do the same?
For a basic overview of Incentivibe’s service, view the video below.
