How Namecheap Grew Sales By 20 Percent with a Twitter Contest
By Anna Johnson on May 16th, 2010Count domain registrar Namecheap as one of the companies that have successfully harnessed Twitter to grow sales. Namecheap used Twitter to grow sales by 20 percent back in December 2008, and has continued using the micro-blogging service to its benefit ever since.
Led by Namecheap’s head of marketing, Michelle Greer, the company ran a contest to launch the Namecheap Twitter account. The contest involved posting a Christmas-related trivia question once per hour – over 600 trivia questions in total – and offering the prize of credit for a one-year domain registration to the first three people to correctly answer the question.
The contest worked. Namecheap’s Twitter followers exploded from just 200 to over 4,000 during the month, traffic to its website jumped by 10 percent and, most importantly, domain registration sales increased by 20 percent.
According to Michelle Greer the increase in Twitter followers also resulted in Namecheap’s traffic growing by 30 percent when the company ran a Super Bowl promotion on Twitter in February 2009.
Namecheap’s success in using Twitter to boost sales can largely be attributed to the targeted nature of its contest.
Sure, anyone can run a contest on Twitter and offer all kinds of prizes to generate followers. But by offering a one year domain registration as the prize, Namecheap ensured that only prospects for its products and services participated in the contest.
Source: Sarah Milstein, “Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales: A Case Study,” O’Reilly Radar, February 19, 2009
