Interactive

This is a great question. In other words, where does an interactive promotion make sense versus other types of efforts.

The answer lies in relevance and how interactive strategies can address your specific marketing needs. Do you need more opt-in consumers to interact with? How do your offline efforts perform in terms of numbers? How many of your consumers are online and may interact with online promotions?

Sometimes this question is best answered by you. Would you be happy if 50,000 people registered and 25,000 opted in for future marketing efforts? You may base the answer to that question on whether the interactive campaign cost you $18,000 to execute versus $150,000. It is important to set goals, and measure carefully throughout an online campaign to try and maximize your results. Interactive and online promotions provide immediate feedback and response, meaning results can be reviewed and analyzed as the promotion is running. As a result the creative and marketing messages can be addressed and changed on the fly. The end result is that online and interactive promotions can be fine tuned both immediately and for the future.

So the answer is one that each and every marketer needs to answer for themselves. For one group, getting 5,000 new leads is a success and for another getting 300,000 unique visitors is a dismal failure. The possible upside (for instance, do I already know how many respondents will convert to a direct sale?) of a promotional activity needs to be examined versus the cost (and possibly the opportunity cost) of the activity. Interactive campaigns should be a part of your mix if they perform well against your other activities – they are not a universal solution for all situations.

Although I did not attend the PMA webcast, I’m fairly certain that IRC, in this context, refers to Instant Redeemable Coupons.
Couponing is a proven winner when it comes to below-the-line promotions. According to data from the PMA, 76% of the US population use coupons. IRCs, according to 2003 PMA estimates, make up 1.5% of all coupons. An IRC is a coupon usually found on a product’s packaging that can be easily removed for shoppers to redeem it at the time of purchase.
IRCs are available in a variety of types, styles, and sizes. IRCs typically receive a higher consumer redemption rate than normal coupons.

You should always be very clear in your legal rules that participation requires the players to be 13 years and older. In your registration pages you should ask for date of birth, instead of stating “YOU MUST BE 13+ IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE” as this type of language may actually encourage users to submit a fictitious age. Your online system should not allow them to play or database their information if they enter a date of birth under 13 years of age, and it is also a sound practice to bar such users from attempting further registrations on your system.

Yes, quite often if you reward a person for sending on your message with an additional entry or another game play you will have much better results in increasing the number of people who will do that for you.

You could utilize a form of CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"). These systems force a human-eye to read a randomly created selection of letters and characters and make the person re-type the characters they read. This system keeps users honest by preventing automated floods of entries via scripted or robotic code. In a well-designed CAPTCHA, characters are very difficult for automated systems to discern and read. In addition, tracking of IP address access speeds/frequency should be tracked in order to assist in throttling the rate at which any single user should be able to participate. Quality data centers will also provide a level of monitoring and defense against certain types of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks.