Caffeine Helps Small Businesses Run Their Own Big Prize Games

(Promo) Move over, Google. Here comes a shot of Caffeine.

Caffeine is a do-it-yourself system that lets small-business owners run online sweepstakes and coupons just like the big brands.

Already, more than 30 small businesses have used Caffeine to field instant-win games and sweepstakes on their own Web sites. The businesses range from boutique hotels and mortgage lenders to neighborhood bars and dry cleaners.

My Quality Cleaners, in suburban Detroit, runs a shopping spree sweeps that awards a $20 Gap gift card every day, and a $1,000 shopping spree at Nordstrom’s each month. Kids’ clothier HeyPeanut.com courts moms with a sweeps awarding $25 gift cards from Sephora and $1,000 spa sprees via SpaFinder.com.

The powerhouse behind Caffeine is ePrize. The online games shop created Caffeine to make promotions easy and affordable for small- and mid-sized businesses.

“The same way that Google democratized advertising, this is our chance to democratize promotion,” says ePrize CEO Josh Linkner.

ePrize hopes to run 10,000 promotions this year through Caffeine. It has already run several dozen promotions since its January launch, Linkner says.

Here’s how it works: At CaffeineNow.com, the business owner or chief marketer chooses a prize pool from the menu of 39 pools, then picks a promotion theme (again, from a menu) and adds the business’s name, address, logo and URL. Next, the marketer chooses from a slate of questions for customers to gauge their purchase cycle, satisfaction with the business, and other variables that’ll help the marketer follow up with customers who register for the promotion.

Then the user sets his market area