Do-It-Yourself Sweeps

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 offers just like the big brands.

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

Already, more than 30 firms, ranging from boutique hotels and mortgage lenders to neighborhood bars and dry cleaners, have used Caffeine since the January launch.

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

Here’s how it works: At www.CaffeineNow.com, marketers choose a prize pool from the menu of 39 pools, then pick a promotion theme and adds the business’s name, address, logo and URL. Next, users choose from a slate of questions for customers to gauge their purchase cycle, satisfaction with the business and other variables that will help the marketer follow up with players. Then, the user sets his market area — as small as a five-mile radius, for a neighborhood business — and decides whether to overlay a coupon offer to the sweepstakes. Finally, he specifies how the promo will be woven into the business’s media, including current e-mail campaigns, keyword searches and media advertising.

It costs nothing to build a campaign. Users pay $1 for each qualified entrant. Those entrants go into the business’s database, and Caffeine can helps with database management and follow-up. Each marketer sets his own weekly budget, based on $1 per lead.

Users can change their promotions on the fly, shifting to a different prize pool or remapping their market area, depending on customers’ response.

Caffeine is actually one big promotion owned (and insured) by ePrize.

Each prize pool is worth $500,000. Most carry daily instant-win goodies and bigger sweeps prizes, from airline miles and laptop computers to Disney trips and leases on new cars. And the pools are peppered with gift cards and shopping sprees.

EPrize handles fulfillment. Businesses handle their own coupons.

Caffeine launched in January after a two-month test with nearly 50 small businesses.

The platform uses the same technology that ePrize uses to build national campaigns for clients like Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney and Procter & Gamble.