The Benefits
eTipping utilises our love of a fun tipping competition to create an effective marketing tool for your business. Tippers will go to your website two or more times a week to: check their, and friends, results; to put their tips in; to change their tips and often to have a look at the various areas that contain some stats, such as the ladder or team v’s team pages. The more engaged your entrants are, the more often they will visit the competition pages, and thus your website, to ensure they are doing as well as possible, especially if there are some good prizes on offer!
Depending upon the goals of your competition, you will most likely actively promote it to either a specific group, such as your current customers or VIPs, or open it up for entry to the public.
The main benefit of running a competition for current customers, or VIPs, is that you will stay front of mind with a group you already have a relationship with. Especially if you are in a cyclical business, where your customers only use your service ‘every so often’, an eTipping competition will ensure that your business name, logo and information you would like to ensure they see, stays in front of them for the duration of the chosen sporting code’s season; for AFL and NRL this equates to over seven months marketing each year. Are there any other marketing avenues that will keep your business in front of each entrant for cents a week?
With opening your tipping competition to the public, you will be able to get a real boost to website visitors! While it is always great to have more people visit your website, with your new tipping competition these people won’t just be stopping by. They will be joining the competition, providing you with their information, getting multiple ‘competition’ emails from you each week as well as visiting your site 2-4 times a week for the entirety of the sporting season. Fantastic!
When your entrants join your tipping competition, they agree to receive competition emails. To help keep your entrants informed, we suggest sending out two competition emails a week. The first email will be the ‘start of week’ email, which lets them know the competition has been scored and can include things such as their result, the league ladder and any other message you would like to get out to them. The second email will be one to let them know about the upcoming round, who is playing who and when they need to get their tips in by. Once again, you can include other messages in this email, giving you the opportunity to cross-sell with every email sent through this permission based marketing opportunity. You can also send out other emails you would like your competition entrants to get. This is easily done from within eTipping’s Admin area.
With the ever-increasing use of our phones for, well, pretty much everything these days, we have created smartphone specific pages for your eTipping competition.
The smartphone pages will automatically be shown when eTipping detects that your visitor is viewing your competition from their phone, this is true even when your competition is within an iframe or frameset, as the code will break out from the frame to show the phone friendly pages.
The smartphone pages have been designed to make the user experience one that is fun and easy, and yet containing the stats that the more 'serious' tippers will enjoy getting to go through before making their selections. Your tippers won’t need to pinch, and expand, their screen to be able to see what is there.
As we need to show a different set of pages to your visitors, what is shown will be different to what is seen on a large screen, this is especially true for competitions that have been ‘framed’. With this in mind, your smartphone can only show a limited amount of
‘customisations’.
The areas you can set include:
- Background colour - select from the twelve colour options available
- A banner at the top of the Home Page
- A banner or advertisement at the bottom of all pages
- Text to appear on the Home Page of the smartphone pages
- Your logo, or other graphic, being used as the ‘icon’ on the user’s Home Screen
Unlike some other providers, all of this functionality is included with every eTipping competition.
Easy to manage
eTipping has been developed to not just be a fun, easy to manage tipping competition but also to be a complete online marketing tool. With eTipping you can directly leverage people’s love of AFL, NRL, ALeague, NBL, EPL, Netball, etc to increase exposure for your organisation.
When people head to your competition you can specify the information they need to provide to join up. This information is collected in an easy, unobtrusive and consensual manner, building a database for your future use.
The software can optionally create divisions within eTipping that allow your tippers to compare how they are going in a specific demographic category. So where Joe Smith might be ranked 114th in the full tipping competition, he might be the 5th amongst Sydney supporters. A benefit of running with this Option is that your entrants feel a stronger connection to your competition and a greater affinity to the people they have something in common with. This leads to greater participation and will increase your ability to communicate your message to the tippers.
eTipping has a simple, straight-forward set-up.
You will follow a simple step-by-step process to create the way you want your competition to run, the rules you will have in place (whether people will need a password to join, how people win, how many points for a correct pick etc), customising the look and feel of your competition (text and background colours, page setup etc) - this can be either through altering the competition template, from within the Admin panel, or through the use of CSS to directly control how it appears.
Value for money
Depending upon the goals for your competition you may want to set the number of entrants allowed, or have it open to as many as want to join. With eTipping either option is great and (the best part now) we will only ever charge you for the number of active tippers you have at Round 5 of the season. If your competition has a select group of 50 entrants, or an ‘open to all’ 2600, we will only charge you for the ‘block’ of tippers your competition number falls into, see the Pricing page for specifics on this. In doing this we ensure your competition remains as cost-effective as possible.
Don’t settle for a competition that is going to charge you the same dollars as someone with one or two thousand more entrants than yours. You will be paying for a service you aren’t using and don’t need!
Securing your competition
The eTipping server and database are backed by the latest in secure technologies. All possible efforts are in place to ensure a safe, secure and reliable experience for you and your tippers, including a secure Windows Server Platform, SQL Server Databases, Daily Data Backups, Firewalled Multi-Backbone Network, and more.