Social Media is still a very new field and marketers are constantly looking for examples on how to use it effectively. Measurement of campaigns and ROI is a constant source of discussion when it comes to spending money on social media. This post will showcase how NameCheap solved this in an efficient way and how they managed to adjust their campaign based on interest.
On July 9th a company called NameCheap (a webdomain registrar and hosting company) launched their social media campaign with the following twitter message:
“We’re going to unlock a $0.98 (our lowest ever!) coupon code if we get 30,000 retweets on the message here: http://bit.ly/retweetdeal“.
They gave the users one week of gathering the 30k retweets required. They added some additional requirements for the competition, one of them being that you could retweet several times (once every 6hrs) and the other that you should ”Please follow @namecheap while participating” under the rules section. This tricky wording seems like it is a requirement when placed under rules section but now on a second look it seems more like a suggestion (guessing twitter guidelines might have a say in how you can gain your followers?).
This social media campaign effectively aimed to increase @namecheap followers by 30.000 (adding significant klout and many new potential future customers) as well as getting 30.000 retweets = 3 500 000 impressions or more (average twitter user has 115 followers). Gaining this kind of exposure and marketing contact with future potential customers would cost a lot in traditional media, much more than giving away 30.000 web domains for $1. Additionally this offer would only be available if the goal was reached and then only for 24hrs meaning that NameCheap would either not activate it or if they reached their goal many of the contributers would forget to claim their $1 domain reward. The campaign was launched on July 9th and ended on July 16th, a timespan of one week. Keeping the campaign this short is essential since “news” on twitter lose interest and attention very quick.
The campaign was measured by retweeting the following prepared tweet on the assigned url for the campaign:
Retweet to enable Namecheap $0.98 com/net/org registration or transfer! @namecheap
#ncsale. Details: http://bit.ly/retweetdeal
Tweets from @namecheap associated with the marketing campaign
As can be seen from their twitter account they had a high initial response to their tweets but failed in launching it correctly themselves. Getting 900 re-tweets that failed to include the hashtag #ncsale which seems to have been the chosen method for counting the number of total re-tweets received. The main error they did was trying to push all customers towards a different platform to retweet a message instead of making it easy for customers to participate. Many twitter users are accustomed to find an interesting tweet, click the link and read the website, close down the link and if they found it interesting they would retweet the original link that sent them there. This “normal approach” would have worked as well and could have been integrated into the campaign if NameCheap had just added #ncsale to that initial tweet.
Evaluation of campaign.
NameCheap noticed that the campaign goal had been set too high and decided to cut it in half to 15 000 retweets. This was a smart move which gave renewed life to the retweets when people saw that it was more reachable. They managed to reach their goal before the 16th, got 15 000 retweets/followers, a huge number of impressions (effectively marketing their company) and reached many new potential customers. Their follower count on twitter initially increased by 15 000 people but has now dropped down to a net gain of 10 000 followers (still a significant and important increase since the majority of the new followers are in their customer target group).
After the marketing campaign ended their twitter account has been inactive for two weeks. This is the biggest misstake they have done with this campaign. Failing to properly follow up the campaign and reach out with another offer to those 10 000 new followers who might have missed their coupon for a cheap domain on the 16th (or open up for incremental sales to those he claimed their coupon). Generally their every-day social media strategy is failing to build a good community around their brand. Their time-based campaign displayed a very successful use of social media marketing but overall their day-t0-day interactions over social media can be improved a lot to catch their fan group.
