September 07, 2000
Case Study

Results from AllBusiness.com’s “Free Employee for a Year” Campaign

SUMMARY: No summary available.
CHALLENGE
AllBusiness.com wanted to drive more traffic to its site and build awareness of the site.

CAMPAIGN
AllBusiness.com ran a “Free Employee for a Year” sweepstakes from February through the end of March. The winner of the sweepstakes would receive the salary (up to $50,000) to hire an employee, plus other small business services that were provided by AllBusiness.com partners including ADP and Headlight.com. Thus the winner would be able to hire an employee essentially for free.

Scott Schroeder, senior director, relationship marketing for AllBusiness.com, points out that many new businesses feel that hiring workers is the number one challenge and the sweepstakes acknowledged that major concern. In order to enter the sweepstakes, the small business owner needed to become a member of AllBusiness.com and to enter some demographic information. The sweepstakes was promoted concurrently offline and online. For the online promotion, AllBusiness.com ran banners on Office.com, SmartAge.com and 24/7.com. Offline, the sweepstakes made use of one-page print ads run in American City Business Journals.

RESULTS
The sweepstakes drew 150,000 visitors to the site and garnered 5,000 new members during the eight weeks it ran, says Harry Kniznik, manager, customer acquisition for AllBusiness.com. The results of the online campaign showed that the more targeted business sites had better click through but were more expensive. AllBusiness.com felt the banners were effective in driving traffic to the site. Third part opt-in email also proved to be very effective, Kniznik says, noting that the short versions of the emails used worked better than the long versions. Regarding offline results, there were “noticeable spikes in site traffic when offline ads were running,” Kniznik says.

Further, AllBusiness.com learned that the shorter to survey form, the better the response. “The less cumbersome the form, the more people will use it,” remarks Schroeder.

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