Let’s get right to it: PromoSimple isn’t perfect, but I think it’s the best of the bunch currently.
Let me start with some real world results from my wife’s contest:
Results from my wife’s July 2nd book release contest. As you can see, the reports are pretty dang cool.
Prizes for this contest included a $25 Amazon gift card, a $25 Starbucks gift card, and a pendant that Jess made. Nothing huge, but still many more entries than I’ve seen with people offering bigger prizes.
My first reaction was that there was a lot more interaction with this tool versus my trials of Rafflecopter and Giveawaytools.
One o’f the most important measures for me is newsletter sign ups. 191 newsletter sign ups is a definite show of success. About 100 of these individuals were already on the newsletter, so getting an additional 90+ signups is great.
What Went Well
It’s Easy
There are two contest tools that really stand out in ease: Rafflecopter and Promosimple. Once you start creating a contest, you can easily select the items you want to use as entries:
Notice that you can choose “required” and Optional tasks for entry into the contest
It’s Cheap
The free version of the tool has a ton of features and easy things you can use. Everything but the email newsletter functionality above is included with the free account!
I elected to pay for the $15 a month option to get the email newsletter integration (This is a lot cheaper than the $60 version from Rafflecopter). You can use custom entries If you don’t need/care about newsletter functionality. I run a contest once every 3 months, so don’t need the paid functionality all the time – I’ll revert to a free account in-between contests.
My recommendation: use a free account if you’re trying to save a few dollars. If you’re looking to grow your newsletter list, it’s the easiest integration with a newsletter list I’ve ever used.
Bonus awesomeness
Facebook integration with a Like Gate that adds this to my Facebook page:
There are about 30 different like gate images like this one
The ability to add it to the Facebook page is easy and a great way to build your Facebook page.
Why it’s now my preferred contest tool
The newsletter is very important to me. And here is what tips the scales on this tool for me: Integration with newsletter providers like Mailchimp and Aweber.
The other reason – I saw almost twice as much interaction. Each person DID MORE in the tool than I’ve seen with Rafflecopter or Giveaway Tools. That’s pretty amazing.
Improvements I’d like to see:
Mobile. Tons of people check their private email at work via their iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, or other mobile device. This is my biggest complaint. The tool isn’t very mobile friendly. I war able to get it to work on my phone, but I heard it wan’t so friendly with iPhones.
Auto-verification. All of the tools have features to verify things like Facebook likes and Twitter tweets/follows. This tool lets you manually confirm or auto-confirm. If you use auto-confirm, users will be required to accept Promosimple as an app in Facebook/Twitter. Promosimple has a good privacy policy, but some users will never accept it. So it’s still use manual verification (which is a pain verifying a couple hundred entries) or accepting that some people won’t accept it. To be fair, this is the same issue with rafflecopter and giveaway tools.
Limited fields for custom entries – If I’m creating a custom task, it currently only allows a short sentence – spelling out a URL is out of the question.
Blog Integration – I’d love for it to integrate better with blog comments. I like to give an incentive to comment on a post and it’s a pain to verify them manually.
Contest Winner – Free consulting
Finally, I’d like to announce the winner of the contest I held to test out the tool with my newsletter subscribers. Congrats to Ashley. I was surprised that there was only one Ashley on the mailing list – so congrats Ashley, you know who you are 🙂 I’ll be reaching out to you directly to schedule some time for us to talk.
Thank you so much for your review! We are always looking for feedback and opportunities to improve our product to make running giveaways as easy and effective as possible, so your review is extremely helpful to us. Thanks again, and please let me know if there’s ever any support help that I can offer!