Free iPad Raffle. Campaign Design

Name:

20min Free iPad

Objectives:

1. Generate new registrations on the site.

2. Learn from the experience

Scope:

Spain

Media:

20minutos.com cross-site banners. 20 minutos is the most read free newspaper in Spain and the electronic edition is the second most visited news site.

Goals:

· Good: 5000 registrations

· Fair: 2000 registrations

· Bad: 1000 registrations

Design:

Landing page with a short explanation of the site and the raffle.

The Participate button takes you to a registration page where you only have to enter your e-mail address to get a free ticket for the iPad raffle.

Advertising Methodology

Marketing & Advertising has never been a science where one plus one equals two. In fact it can equal three or minus four.  But when you add the word internet into the equation, the results can be bewildering because it can equal five hundred or you can directly bite the dust.  The nice thing about it is that you enter into the twilight zone - everything is possible. If somebody tells you they have the knowledge and expertise and know what really works on the net, run away and don't look back, you are in danger.

Advertising Methodology

But, when you do things, you have to follow a  method. You can modify it or change it, but you at least need a method. I am writing my method. I am not saying that it works, but it is the one that I am going to follow… for now. It is an exercise of putting on paper (in a post) the initial method and the different modifications in a reasoned way. Let's start.

My Method (today)

Marketing & advertising on the internet is not a science but must be worked with the scientific method of trial and error.

1. Start by emptying your mind of prejudices and making and educated guess of how to attract customers to your page.
2. Implement it
3. Put all the necessary tools in place to analyse your client's behaviour and start your data capturing. Google Analytics can help in this phase. Their tools are easy to understand, simple to implement and give you a wide range of information. And it is for free. 
4. Never launch a massive campaign. Always make sure you can pause your campaign to adjust parameters and resume it to continue with the data capturing.
5. Pause -Analyse -Modify - Resume -Capture-Pause-…
6. Never think the results you get from your analysis are a consistent truth. 

Gaming License

Let me explain briefly how gaming licenses work in Malta and what different types of licenses you can apply for.

Remote gaming in Malta is regulated by the Remote Gaming Regulations, 2004 issued under the Lotteries and Other Games Act 2001 ("LOGA"). The regulatory body in Malta supervising remote gaming operation is the Lotteries and Gaming Authority ("LGA").

In order to provide remote betting/gaming services from Malta, one needs to obtain a license of the class appropriate to the operations. I have been dealing with the whole process and it has been tough work. They ask for all the details of your operations and the requirements are really strict. It is a pity that customers don't realize how strict it is because that would make them feel safer and more secure.

Licensees are expected to operate in compliance to LOGA and the Regulations, as well as anti-money laundering legislations, e-commerce legislation and any other relevant law. The following four classes of licenses are available in Malta:

Class 1: For operators managing their own risk on repetitive games. This class covers casino-type games, skill games and online lotteries.

Class 2: For operators managing their own risk on events based on a matchbook. Under this class falls fixed odds betting, pool betting and spread betting.

Class 3: For operators taking a commission from promoting and/or betting games. This class includes P2P, poker networks, betting exchange and game portals.

Class 4: To host and manage remote gaming operators, excluding the licensee himself. This is intended for software vendors who want to provide management and hosting facilities on their platform.

We operate under a Class 3 license because we earn commissions from raffles.

A basic tenet of the Regulations is the requirement that the core part of the online gaming/betting operations must be physically located in Malta.

Marketing Strategy

Does somebody really know how to launch a new site like raff.me? I am really tired of listening to the "specialists", the ones who theoretically are the gurus of this 2.0 universe. We have been working with different agencies and what is a sacred rule for one, is a fatal error for another. You finally end up with a nice guy who admits that there are neither sacred rules nor fatal errors. There are growing trends in certain directions, but no one can tell that something that has worked well with other sites will work fine for you. It is a game of test and error. Good.  I didn't need gurus to get to this point.

If you have a huge budget and you can play the game until you find your own recipe, you are lucky, but that is not our case. We need to guess where our balance between online & offline marketing, viral marketing, brand building, SEM, SEO, SMM…and a long series of other acronyms is. Too many variables in the recipe to get the right flavour in the first try.

Viral Marketing

The first serious proposal from the agency was a viral campaign based on a video. They worked on a good script. The main character was a funny freak that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Augmented reality gags made it spectacular and the result would surely be a good video. Probably a viral one, in fact they guaranteed more than 500K views. Spectacular! But is it really what we need? If 500K internet users enjoy 30 seconds of a good video, will this drive them to my page? And what is even more important, will they register? Or it will just make some branding and they will get familiar with the brand and will recognise it the next time they listen to it? That's not worth 70% of my marketing budget. Nice but not worth it.

Social Marketing

Besocialmyfriend. The next agency was a hyper-social one. The secret lies in being social, creating communities and living in facebook and twitter. They are probably right. Social Media is the present and the future, but to draw a strategy you cannot be obsessive. There is life offline and you can't ignore it. There is an old saying that states "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Our Strategy

We're back to our initial thoughts. We are launching a raffle platform, how can we promote it? Through raffles! We are creating promotional raffles, some of them free raffles and we are designing a banner and advertising campaign based on some massively visited sites, facebook and AdWords. We are creating focused campaigns to filtered targets, pointing to free raffles of their interest in music, technology, cooking, sports… .

I will go into further detail in future posts.

Ready to Launch

We are officially launching raff.me next Wednesday , May 21st, in a press conference together with Microsoft and pasiona. Microsoft will be present with Enrique Fernández-Laguilhoat, Director of Platform and Development explaining the platform and technologies used in our development and David Teixidó, CEO of pasiona, the Microsoft Gold Partner that has carried out the actual development.

That will be the start of a series of marketing campaigns combining the online and the offline world to start spreading the concept of the platform and the different promotional raffles (some of them free).

Payment Gateways

When you arrive at the payment page of a web site, you have the feeling of finalising a journey. You have googled through different sites, made your choices, compared similar offers and probably read feedback from other users on the product or the service you are acquiring.

You have made your decision. You are buying. You just have to pay for it. Simple.

Or not. Because there is nothing simple when there is a bank involved.

Payment Methods were never  present in the list of risks or complicated duties when we designed the project. It was one in a bunch of agreements with suppliers, but nothing special. It has turned out to be one of the main time consuming and frustrating parts of the process.

PayPal does not accept us because we fall in the category of gaming companies. No problem, there are other options. Neteller, Ukash… but they charge very high fees.

Credit Cards are the main option, but we have to be careful with chargebacks and fraud. 3DSecure is an option to avoid risks, but the majority of card holders are not enrolled for it. Some banks directly reject your transactions if you are an adult content or gaming site and you do not use 3DS. Other banks make it difficult for their customer to enrol and you get more than 50% of their transactions rejected due to lack of enrolment...

… there is a complex world behind a payment page.

Customer Care

Alleluia! We finally have a telephone line and Internet connection in our office in Malta. It took more than a month to get the office running. We have been working from home for the past few months and we were waiting to start working in the office and separate our personal and professional life.

Our office in Malta will be initially be attending our customer's questions and requirements in English, German and Spanish.

Customers can contact us through different channels:

e-mail: We will reply as soon as possible. ( support@raff.me )

The community: There is a community section on our website where any user can post questions, opinions, suggestions… and other users will reply. Our Community Managers will post comments and act as moderators.

Telephone: There is a local number in every country that is routed through voice over IP to Malta. (Initially Spain, France and UK)

Twitter: We have created a twitter account and we will tweet relevant information to our followers and users can send messages. @raffme_es in Spanish, @raffme_en in English and @raffme_de in German.

Facebook: We are setting up a facebook page for each language.

Unfortunately we can't offer 24x7 customer care . We will initially be available from 10 to 8 and depending on how things move, we will adjust accordingly.

Our Customer Care strategy is to be direct and transparent. If something is not working, we will be quick to admit it and even quicker to solve it.