Contest design - Part 3 of Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite

Part 2 of this series told the story of how we iterated over the visual design of Cleartrip's My Purpose microsite. This part describes the design of the contest & user-flows.

What's in it for me?

Sharing holidays pics, party pics, and status updates on Facebook/Twitter has become part of a person's online identity. Because of the network effect – the (almost) omni-presence of one's friends on such networks – a person wants to share bits of his/her life online.

It would be naive to expect users to find such a value through our campaign microsite – in all of 4-weeks. We were asking users to share personal travel experiences with us, without giving them anything tangible or intangible in return.

We took an easy route to fill this gap – a contest.

A contest builds a direct, sometimes shallow, give & take relationship between the user and the marketeer. An obvious incentive for the user to do what the marketeer wants. It's very nature makes it a fine line to tread.

Keep the incentives (prizes) high with the barrier-to-entry low, and you're almost guaranteed a high number of low quality responses. On the other hand, keep the barrier-to-entry too high and you'll be disappointed with the response rate.

Balancing act

One of the earlier thoughts around the contest was to also give people the option to upload their videos in a format similar to our TVC. However, expecting users to shoot+upload a video was a very high barrier to entry. We dropped it and went with only photo uploads.

Even for the photo uploads, we spent an awful lot of time debating the "tense" of trips. Did we want people to tell us about why they went for a trip in the past? Or, like our TVC, did we want to know about an ongoing trip (on location, at present)? Or finally, did we want a travel wishlist (i.e. future – "I want to go to Leh/Ladakh to see the Phunsuk Wangdu lake")?

• While future trips would make for interesting purposes, without real user pictures to accompany them they wouldn't make for interesting engagement. Forced to upload, people would lift destination pictures off the Internet and we would be stuck with copyright issues.
• Current/present trips, again, posed a challenge. How would a person know about our contest while he/she was vacationing? Even if someone did find out, how would he/she upload a picture while on the move? Should we accept entries via a mobile site or MMS attachments? Again, high barrier-to-entry and too complicated. Dropped.
• Past trips were perfect from the standpoint of our contest. Everyone had personal travel pictures and going by the number of pictures on Facebook, people did not mind sharing them with the world.

So, we we changed all prompts across the site to cue for past trips. "Tell us about an interesting trip" "Where did you go?" "What was your purpose?", etc.

One step at a time

Drop-offs at each step of a multi-step form is a well-known phenomenon. We'd had first-had experience with it on Cleartrip's main transaction site. We've spent a considerable amount of time on our 4-step ticket booking process – tweaking & testing each step to reduce drop-offs to a minimum.

We were expecting similar behaviour on our multi-step submission process on the microsite. While the first step on the home page (enter destination & purpose) was simple, there could be a considerable drop-off on the other two steps:

1. Sign-in: We wanted users to sign-in with social logins (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail). A slightly complex & potentially confusing process.
2. Picture upload: We were cuing the user to upload a picture from a specific trip – not just any random picture. Add to that the fact that users might end up uploading huge files (10-15MB) on slow dial-ups. Again, a candidate step for large drop-off rates.

In a 4-week microsite, we would definitely not have the time to test, analyze, and iterate on multiple designs for each step. So, we went with designs we intuitively believed would achieve a certain baseline with respect to conversion funnels. And as marketeers tend to do, we decided to incentivise the user for each completed step – the 'assured prizes' – to keep the dropoffs at a minimum:

1. Sign-in: For completed sign-ins we were immediately giving out Cleartrip coupon codes worth Rs 150. For new users, the coupon would also act as an incentive to come back & try the Cleartrip product. Additionally, we also also allowed the users to proceed by entering their full-names & email IDs – albeit a slightly lesser prominent option.
2. Picture upload: For uploading a picture we were immediately giving out Zoomin coupon codes redeemable against personalized mugs & calendars.

Here's what the final submission process, with steps & incentives clearly communicated, looked like:

The strategy seems to have worked. The % exit & bounce-rate numbers given below speak for themselves.

From an overall conversion standpoint (final goal being creation of a destination/purpose page along with a photo) the microsite home page converted at a 33% (including bounced visits). If one excludes the bounced visits the conversion rate looks even better – 61%

Apart from the assured prizes we kept two daily prizes with moderate incetives – flight tickets worth Rs 5,000. As for the mega-prize we kept the incentive high - two winners to get free travel worth Rs 1,00,000. But getting these prizes would require some 'social work'. More on that in my next post where I'll take a detailed look at how we integrated social media into the contest and used it as an extremely effective traffic acquisition strategy.

• Part 1: Genesis of the MyPurpose microsite
• Part 2: Visual Design of the MyPurpose microsite
• Part 3: Contest Design for the MyPurpose microsite