Offset those Green Travel Giveaways, Please

Ecobunga! screens every promotion before we post it on our website to ensure it's bonafide green.  When it comes to giveaways, many are no-brainers.  Prizes like a year's supply of eco-friendly cleaning supplies, new energy-efficient appliances, or a hybrid car are clearly green.

But other promotions fall in that gray-green area. Travel giveaways are a case in point.  We often see companies giving away super trips with an obvious sustainable angle.  Stonyfield Farm gave away a trip to Vermont to see their organic farming operation in action.  The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is giving away a trek in Rwanda to see mountain gorillas and meet the conservationists protecting them.  Both are wonderful prizes, but it's challenging to consider them thoroughly green due to the not-so-eco-friendly air travel to New England or far-away Africa.

We're not advocating that companies stop giving away sustainably-oriented travel prizes, or, to the extreme, people stop flying!  But it would be great to see companies include a carbon offset as part of the prize in recognition of the un-green air travel component.   It would barely add to the cost of the prize.  At one carbon offset company, TerraPass, a one year's flying carbon offset costs just $50. 

The Carbon Catalog has a list of current carbon offset companies worldwide.  We strongly urge companies to take a look at this list and add a carbon offset to your eco-travel prize package.  It'll move your giveaway out of the gray and into the green!

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Webinar: Creating a Great Green Deal on the Web

Thanks to Green America for inviting Ecobunga! to present a Webinar for members of its Green Business Network.

The webinar not only covers our previous presentation on "3 Steps to a Great Green Deal", it provides best practices for giveaways, too.

Check it out, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact us!

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Best Timing for Free Shipping Offers

Ecobunga! conducted a survey of our readers last winter to find out what they considered a "good deal".  The results were discussed the results in an earlier post.

One of the questions we asked was whether readers considered free shipping a good deal.  A majority said "yes", but a sizable number (43%) said that free shipping was a deal only when the product was also on sale.

Ouch.  As if making a buck on green products wasn't hard enough!

We suggested that when possible merchants add free shipping to their promotions in order to sweeten their sales.  Meaning -- if you can afford to cover shipping costs while also offering a product discount (i.e., your profit margins allow it), give it a try.

But are there times when free shipping deals have more punch? ... Likely so.

Truth be told, listings for free shipping deals typically don't get much notice on our site.  But when we include them in our special holiday listings, like our round-up of Mother's Day deals, then they get more traction.

Why's that?

Think about how many people today live far away from friends and family.  And let's face it, just because mom lives 1000 miles away doesn't mean you're not going to get her a Mother's Day present!

As a result, shoppers have a greater need to ship gifts to recipients.  We'd venture to guess that free shipping deals may have a better chance of incentivizing shoppers during gift-giving holidays.

So time your free shipping offers judiciously -- Mother's Day, Father's Day, Wedding and Graduation Season, the December Holidays, Valentine's Day are all good bets.  As they say, 'tis better to give then receive, especially when you can ship it for free!

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Podcast: The Art of Green Deals

Thanks to Carolyn Parrs for leading me in a fun, thoughtful interview last Friday. Carolyn is the creator/host of of Women of Green, a community and podcast about turning up the volume of the feminine voice in green and celebrating the women leading the way.

Carolyn asked some great questions about Ecobunga! -- everything from our experience getting it off the ground to what we've learned from publishing 4000 green giveaways and deals! She even made me Queen of the Universe for a day so I could do anything I wanted. Hmmm ... what would you do?

Listen to the podcast to hear what I accomplished during my brief, hypothetical reign. And get some insights on the art of a green deal. Enjoy!

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Sweepstakes or Contests: What's a Marketer's Best Bet?

You've decided to run a giveaway to promote your hot new product. But what kind to run? A sweepstakes or a contest? Well, it depends ...

First off, let's clarify the difference. In a nutshell, if you're choosing your winner randomly, that's a sweepstakes. If you're choosing your winner by some kind of pre-determined criteria (best photo, video, recipe, etc.) that's a contest. There's a super helpful description of the differences, along with other important legalese, here. As you can guess, it takes more resources to run a contest than a sweepstakes because someone has to judge all those entries!

But more importantly, what's your marketing goal? It's key that you define your goals first before selecting a giveaway format because each kind is better at meeting specific objectives. Are you trying to build brand awareness among people who are unfamiliar with your product? Or are you trying build loyalty among your existing customer base? Are you trying to generate lots of web traffic? Or trying to attract qualified sales leads?

Once you've defined your goals, you can align them with the correct giveaway format. Our Ecobunga! web stats and our own giveaway experience tells us that the biggest traffic drivers by far are sweepstakes. Seems obvious why -- aside from filling out an entry form (and meeting eligibility requirements), sweepstakes have little barrier to entry. So they'll get you lots of entrants. What they won't necessarily get you is qualified leads. There is a large population of folks out there who love to win stuff -- *any* stuff -- and they enter sweepstakes in a blanket fashion. So don't be surprised if a sizable number of entrants don't convert to customers (or repeat traffic.)

Contests, on the other hand, require much more work to enter. The entrant has to *do* something -- whether it's make that 30 second video about going green or send in their best organic holiday cookie recipe. As a result, contests attract a vastly smaller pool of entrants, but they tend to be much more interested in what you have to offer.

Ah, trade-offs. The bane of every marketer's existence. But since we are a green site, we have a hybrid model to offer you: the contest/sweepstakes combo deal.

Let's say you're an electric bike company with a fab new model out that you'd like to give away. You could run a video contest asking people to answer the questions "Where would you go with your shiny new electric bike?" At the same time, you can run a voting sweepstakes. You post the videos online and ask people to vote for their favorite. The vote automatically enters the vote-caster into a sweepstakes for a chance to win a bike, too! With a combo deal, you're appealing to your existing creative customers (the ones most likely to enter a contest) but at the same time extending the promotion's reach to a wider audience.

Here's the quick take: If you're short on resources and want lots of entrants, without regard to how qualified they are -- run a sweepstakes. If you've got some resources to devote to judging and want highly-qualified entrants -- run a contest. If you want the best of both worlds -- run a combo-sweepstakes/contest.

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Headlines that Get Clicks

Let's say you're an eco-tailer running a deal for 40% off organic cotton women's clothing. You come up with a catchy headline, like "Super Summer Sale" that goes out on all your social media outlets -- Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Blog, et al. You're waiting for the clicks to roll in ... and waiting ... and waiting. What went wrong?

The deal headlines published on Ecobunga! go out on RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and our Newsletter. So we've got a good idea of which headlines get clicked. And our experience concurs with what web usability guru Jakob Nielsen cites in his article, "World's Best Headlines: BBC News". As he suggests, headlines for the web should be "short; rich in information; front-loaded with the most important keywords; understandable out of context; and predictable."

This is especially important in social media applications, where users get bombarded with scores of new headlines and posts daily. They can't read all this information word-for-word; they scan. You must consider this when you write headlines that serve as gateways to your promotion. A catchy, slightly ambiguous title might work well in print, where the context is fully provided beneath the title (or when you open that greeting card or brochure.) But ambiguous social media headlines generally don't work. They are bound to either be skipped (because people aren't enticed enough or are confused) or to lead to disappointment (when people end up on a page that doesn't meet the expectation set by the headline.)

So, let's rewrite our Super Summer Sales headline, shall we? Keeping Nielsen's suggestions in mind, let's keep it short, but make it informative and clear.

40% Off Women's Summer Eco-Fashions

It may not be as fun as the original, but the most critical information to shoppers -- the discount and the product -- are crystal clear. We've found, too, that putting in the exact nature of what makes the product "eco" is often helpful (in this case, organic cotton), but not at the expense of the discount or the basic product.

Finally, what about giveaways? The same rule-of-thumb applies. A headline with the generic title of the giveaway, "Earth Day Go Green Sweepstakes" garners far less clicks than one that lists the prize, i.e. "Win $1000 Worth of Gardening Tools".

We love a good catchy phrase, but we suggest you save it for the copy on your website, not the headline leading to it.

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Dear Oprah: Please Take Someone off the Grid.

What do Green Shoppers want to win? This Earth Month, we polled Ecobunga! readers to find out. We offered three (hypothetical) dream green prizes -- a hybrid car, a green home makeover, or a two-year supply of organic foods. Here's what our readers said:

What's Your Dream Green Prize?
- Green Home Makeover (38%)
- Two Year Supply of Organic Foods (33%)
- Hybrid Car (25%)

There were write-in votes for an electric car, an eco-vacation, and "something that caused the earth no harm". And a number of respondents told us exactly what they'd like for their green home makeover (solar panels, wind power, etc.) One comment that cropped up quite a bit was "Take me off the grid!"

Which got us thinking ...

Who better to give out a dream green prize than Oprah Winfrey? She's known world-wide for her generosity -- from her charitable works to her yearly "Favorite Things" episode, where she gives away oodles of prizes to her studio audience (though not this past year, for some reason.)

How about an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" devoted to educating your audience on how to green their homes and helping one viewer realize her dream to go entirely off the power grid? Talk about making every day Earth Day!

(As for everyone who's not Oprah, keep in mind as you plan your eco-giveaways that a green home prize is a sure winner. It doesn't have to be huge -- anytime we post a giveaway for earth-friendly cleaners, or a water-conserving shower-head, or a composting bin, it's a top traffic-getter.)

So Oprah -- Ecobunga! nominates you as the dream giver of the dream green prize. Before you say goodbye to your show in 2011, maybe you'll make our dreams come true.

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