Caffeine Helps Small Businesses Run Their Own Big Prize Games

(Promo) Move over, Google. Here comes a shot of Caffeine.

Caffeine is a do-it-yourself system that lets small-business owners run online sweepstakes and coupons just like the big brands.

Already, more than 30 small businesses have used Caffeine to field instant-win games and sweepstakes on their own Web sites. The businesses range from boutique hotels and mortgage lenders to neighborhood bars and dry cleaners.

My Quality Cleaners, in suburban Detroit, runs a shopping spree sweeps that awards a $20 Gap gift card every day, and a $1,000 shopping spree at Nordstrom's each month. Kids' clothier HeyPeanut.com courts moms with a sweeps awarding $25 gift cards from Sephora and $1,000 spa sprees via SpaFinder.com.

The powerhouse behind Caffeine is ePrize. The online games shop created Caffeine to make promotions easy and affordable for small- and mid-sized businesses.

"The same way that Google democratized advertising, this is our chance to democratize promotion," says ePrize CEO Josh Linkner.

ePrize hopes to run 10,000 promotions this year through Caffeine. It has already run several dozen promotions since its January launch, Linkner says.

Here's how it works: At CaffeineNow.com, the business owner or chief marketer chooses a prize pool from the menu of 39 pools, then picks a promotion theme (again, from a menu) and adds the business's name, address, logo and URL. Next, the marketer chooses from a slate of questions for customers to gauge their purchase cycle, satisfaction with the business, and other variables that'll help the marketer follow up with customers who register for the promotion.

Then the user sets his market area—as small as a five-mile radius, for a neighborhood business—and decides whether to overlay a coupon offer to the sweepstakes. Finally, he specifies how the promo will be woven into the business's media, including current e-mail campaigns, keyword searches on search engines and media advertising. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, and is designed for laypeople, not professional marketers.

It costs nothing to build a campaign. Users pay $1 for each qualified entrant that enters their promotions. Those entrants go into the business's database, and Caffeine can help business owners with database management and follow-up. Each marketer sets his own weekly budget, based on $1 per lead.

Users can change their promotions on the fly, shifting to a different prize pool or remapping their market area, depending on customers' response.

Caffeine is actually one big promotion owned (and insured) by ePrize. Businesses don't get their own sweepstakes; they join the big ongoing sweepstakes, and share the prize pool with all the other small businesses running promotions at the same time. That way, businesses can offer "a big, juicy, sexy prize without writing a big, juicy check," Linkner says. Each business becomes an entry point into an existing promotion.

Each prize pool is worth $500,000. Most carry daily instant-win goodies and bigger sweeps prizes, from airline miles and laptop computers to Disney trips and leases on new cars. And the pools are peppered with gift cards and shopping sprees.

The official rules explain to consumers that they're taking part in a "pool drawing" with multiple entry points from different brands. The rules state explicitly: "Only one prize will be awarded in the sweepstakes regardless of the number of promotion sites that offer the sweepstakes."

EPrize handles fulfillment of prizes, so it fields any complaints from consumers. Businesses handle their own coupons, so they're responsible for living up to any offers they make. "We try to make it so advertisers can't hurt themselves," with expiration dates and disclaimer built into all coupons, Linkner says.

The company partners with software marketers and search engines who target small businesses to bundle Caffeine in software and search-based ad packages. That lets ePrize piggyback the marketing campaigns of those distributors, and lets its partners pitch Caffeine as an added value item.

Caffeine launched in January after a two-month test with nearly 50 small businesses. ePrize spent more than a year and "many" millions of dollars (Linkner won't say how many) to build Caffeine. The platform uses the same technology that ePrize uses to build national campaigns for clients like Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney and Procter & Gamble.

So what's to keep those big clients from using Caffeine instead of spending $100,000 on a custom-built game? Big brands can use it if they want, Linkner says. In fact, it's a good option for a short-term, regional push for, say, a Coke bottler or dealer. But Linkner is confident that Caffeine won't cannibalize ePrize's core business.

"The trend for big brands is towards very heavy customization and account management, so they don't want something as rigid as Caffeine," he says.

That keeps the cup hot for the little guys.