How we doubled our traffic & user engagement with a contest — and how you can too!

Disclaimer – We’ve learnt a lot from TRHS community & we feel it is out time to give back sharing our experiences. It’s a bit lengthy article (8-10 min read), we tried listing down things that helped us through out our journey, so that fellow entrepreneurs can get benefited.

My Dream Store is a crowd funded merchandise platform. With us, one can start selling merchandise to their communities and raise funds without the inconvenience of investment, production, shipping, inventory management or customer support.

We enable anyone and everyone to campaign for their special interest groups like, Hobby clubs, Fan Groups, Music Bands, Social Media Pages, NGOs, College Fests, & Student groups, etc., all through the creation and sale of T-shirts. It’s been one year since we started this business model and since then, we have been getting repeat as well as new campaigns.

We thought this was the right time to take it up a notch and increase the stakes. We launched the Clash of Titans, a high-prize money contest for our existing as well as brand new campaigners.

Clash of Titans — India’s first Tee-Markathon (CoT) was a 22 day long contest run by us at My Dream Store in the month of April, 2015. The total prize money on offer was INR 3,00,000. The first prize was INR 1,00,000.

(Tee-Markathon — A contest where participants or campaigners launch a campaign by designing a T-shirt and then promote it using various social media and other channels at their disposal. Their aim is to sell as many t-shirts as possible)

We were happy the way things turned out, and here we are elaborating the entire process of how to launch such a contest and how to successfully run it. We are here enumerating each and every thought that went behind planning and launching this contest.

Why we did this? How we did this? We will be attempting every question. This exercise is so that we can in retrospect evaluate ourselves and other start-ups can also benefit from the process.

So here goes!

Here are some of the milestones we achieved during these 22 days!

What was the main motive behind launching the Clash of Titans (CoT) contest? — Or simply asked “Why?”

1. We wanted to first and foremost create a buzz around our brand name. We took this opportunity to reward campaigners who take advantage of our model.

2. This was a good way to energize and engage with existing campaigners. As early adopters, they had more experience and knowledge and could win the prize money.

3. We had recently upgraded the entire website and added brand new design studio features. By inviting scores of designers and lay people to use our studio, it was a test to see if our home-grown design studio can be used to create viable, sellable t-shirts

4. Since, we would be corresponding with a large group of users, both new and returning. This was a good time to collect feedback

5. We had launched My Dream Store, exactly 1 year ago. This was our attempt to gamify the model and make it more attractive to potential campaigners.

What was the structure of the Clash of Titans contest? — Or ‘what’ is it?

1. It was a 22 day long contest from April 4th to April 26th

2. At MDS, anyone who wanted to create a t-shirt and sell that to earn money could without any investment or headache. For CoT we would be rewarding the campaigners who sold the most number of T-shirts.

We created a separate and unique Design theme for this occasion

All our quirky little characters — Created by our very own Design team!

We wanted this contest to have a unique special flavour, and for that our design team, came up with a quirky and colourful design which was used in every messaging we sent out, from the contest website, to blog posts and Facebook posts. Read this here to see how we came up with it!

Cut-outs of the same characters, ready for ACTION, for our Stop-motion animation film!

For better engagement, we also made CoT-themed animation videos. Click on this and read the process this involved! The animation videos were absolutely home-made and fabulous!

Now all we needed to do was make sure everyone knew that the CoT was on!

1. We used Mailchimp to speak to our existing campaigners and all those who showed interest on the CoT sign up page. We used the mail automation procedure to ensure that every person who signs up gets relevant information like How-tos and Help resources and the like day after day. We continued to send relevant Newsletters to our larger customer base at the same time.

2. Designers, like other creative people, tend to avoid terms like ‘business’ or ‘making money.’ We had sessions within our office to try to coax talented designers into giving this Business model a shot.

Young designers learning how to ‘monetize’ their raw talent!

3. Our design and Business Dev team also visited NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology) in Hyderabad and spoke to the students and showed them the value of a crowd-funded merchandising platform. We also invited talented designers on Behance — a portal where designers showcase their design portfolio.

4. We used Facebook ads to reach out to relevant audience. We started advertising exactly 15 days before the start of the contest. We targeted ads to our prospective campaigners.

5. We visited forums and groups where our audience meet up.

6. We used Pinterest, Instagram and Quora to spread the message about this contest taking place and the benefits of our business model.

7. We also used Google Hangout just before the contest started to reach out to whoever was interested in participating. We used this session to clear away any doubts and answered questions.

Campaigners started coming on board

Once we started getting a response from the campaigners and they signed up, we established a proper communication with them. Our client servicing team were available all the time, day and night — through emails and calls to take their queries and reply to them.

1. We assisted the campaigners by providing them with design help if they needed them.

2. We had Key account managers to help out with the campaigns. This way each and every campaigner knew their go-to person and could reach out to them at any time.

3. We also established a proper knowledge bank to help our campaigners in any way. The topics ranged from how to promote a campaign to how to get out of a creative rut!

C.R.Y, M.O.M, Bhumi, The Logical Indian, Eat Lo — Came on board!

N.G.Os and other Popular Facebook pages and communities with Lakhs of followers came on board to raise fund for themselves and also create and spread a brand feeling among their fans and followers through a cool T-shirt.

Sign up Discounts

At this point, we offered discounts for signing up at our website to one and all. We did this to encourage more and more people to sign up!

Constant Reminders — In case you missed something!

We kept the participating campaigners abreast of every movement within the campaign. We didn’t want them to miss out on anything!

The contest ended on April 26th — And then what happened?

After building up some suspense, we announced the results on the 29th of April. There were 11 winners who won various amounts.

We are very happy to such a varied range of campaigns. Different groups and organisations like, cycling clubs to Animal Welfare activists supporting a variety of causes are using our platform to raise funds.

We are thirsty for feedback!

We sent out detailed feedback form, so that we could get back any valuable inputs the participating campaigners could give us. Our business dev teams also called every campaigner so as to be able to get any feedback. For a start-up, there is nothing more important than feedback.

We know we can do better!

We got some great feedback from all of our campaigners and the next time around, we will use them to improve our performance

1. Offer multiple product options for campaigners to sell like V Neck Tees, Vests, Tank Tops etc

2. Offer more clip art images in the design studio which will make designing a tee easy.

We’re Happy with the outcome of the event!

Over 80% of the visitors have used our design studio to make their t-shirts. Moreover, the traffic to our website and blog has increased. Clearly, people have gotten to know us, and now they are staying back to learn more.

We feel that our dream was validated by our campaigners who launched campaigns and won money! The youth of India, whether engineering students from Assam or Himachal Pradesh or individual designers from Kashmir or a cycling enthusiast from Hyderabad — all viewed our model as a valid channel for showcasing talent in design or marketing and raising money. And they were right! So we know that our model works and it can help everyone make money! We love that we are motivating young wannabe-entrepreneurs and marketers to learn to use the full power of the social media and sell in a new, innovative, more intelligent way.

With all that we have now learnt as well as the goodwill that we have gathered, it is now time for us to engage our existing audience & maintain the same tempo going forward. Wish us all the best.

We’ll be back!

Credits – Article written by Rock Star Content Manager – Arunlekha S

@_mydreamstore @_karthikvenkat