I was wondering if it was possible to configure the rewards offered. I actually tried playing around with the snippet of code you give your publishers:
<iframe src="https://www.rewardlevel.com/plugin/index?plugin=XXX width="100%" height="60" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
XXX is an integer, and I was able to get different rewards to show up by changing its value.
I assume this isn't intended and my value for XXX is supposed to be static indicator of my account ID. But how do you plan on configuring the rewards offered by the publisher?
Shoot me an e-mail if you want talk to more. My site gets quite a bit of traffic and I'd love to offer some easy incentives and this is way more streamlined to use than anything I've tried with TrialPay et al.
"Reward Level charges $5 per conversion, but if the company offering the reward is also a publisher with Reward Level’s widget installed, they only have to pay $2.50 per conversion."
Is this accurate?
If so, I might find it hard to justify paying $5 per conversion, especially for a .2-30% conversion rate increase. This means I'd be paying for every conversion, essentially spending what I'd normally spend and then $5 for each and every signup on top of that? No thanks. While this might make sense for some, it probably wouldn't make sense for those following the freemium model. Sounded great when it was "too good to be true," though.
According to the tech crunch article the company offering the reward pays the $5 and the publisher gets the widget and offers the reward to their potential users for free.
I think it would be great to use as an incentive for participating in a site after signing up. For example on my site, Scribophile, I don't consider a user 'converted' until they 1) sign up and 2) post a critique. Just signing up is useless to the site unless the user also participates.
Looking at the way you've implemented the widget, is there a way I can make the above scenario happen? So say there's a message after you sign up for Scribophile that says something like "write a critique within 5 days of signing up and get xxx reward!"
Also, how do you target these rewards? Again, for a site like mine, users wouldn't want a Kissmetrics account. They'd want something writing-related, like an Amazon.com gift certificate, or the like. Is there a way to choose specific rewards?
I think being a little more clear about your business model will go a long way to allaying concerns among users signing up for RewardLevel.
Awesome feedback. Should we include how we make money in that paragraph?
Except that what I wrote is terrible, but hopefully you get the idea :)
Edit: and please put this above the fold.
a) How are you going to monetize this? (You say on website it is free for companies using it, but you must have thought of some monetization strategy)
b) You incentivizing users signup for a service just to get that exclusive offer under the signup box. Aren't those users going to be no better than "no-users"? I mean, if the only (or part-of) reason for a user signing up for a service is because he wanted to get that exclusive offer, chances of him becoming a long term customer are pretty low. Right?
The problem with any type of incentive on a signup form (not checkout, that's different) is that it changes intent. You end up with two groups of people: those interested in your product and those looking for a reward. Differentiating those two groups can be very expensive. If you are sending out a news letter or other marketing material you also should expect to see higher unsubscribe rates and spam complaints from incentivized sign ups. These people will often not remember where they signed up or what it was for and that leaves you dealing with problems at your ESP or wasting money on increased numbers of mailings. I've seen offers for services where an agent calls the person signing up to complete the process and those are even more fun. Then you have to deal with people that are pissed they are receiving a call from a "telemarketer" even though they signed up to receive a call. There are also other factors working against incentivized forms such as forums set up for the sole purpose of detailing places you can sign up for something for free and receive a tangible reward in return.
Other types of incentives for the check out page of a pay service or store selling goods can work really well. The best example are check out pages that have free shipping thresholds. If you prompt the user "Hey, spend $X more and you get free shipping." You have a great opportunity to upsell or to push smaller items that might have more markup. Additionally a reward like this site seems to be offering might push people to finish the check out process if the reward is good enough.
Having been down this road I would be very skeptical of the quality of the signups as a publisher in this system and as an advertiser I'd want good terms on what qualifies as a conversion as well as well defined return policies on leads. It doesn't look like advertiser information is available yet (did I miss it?) so hard to say what terms they are getting.
A) We make money on some of the rewards which will be paid. We are seeing good conversions on the "customers" (the people who opt-in to receive the rewards) we send to the companies. For the next few weeks we are giving tons of credit for people to add their companies / products as rewards.
B) Yea, it's hard to say whether the users are "good" customers or not. The data is showing they are.
We look it more as a bonus for the person to try out your service. Think of it as a free bonus that makes you more likely to try a product (ie. free toothpaste w/ toothbrush purchase)
When looking at your signup form, it's not really obvious what I'm supposed to do, because the reward button, question button, and submission button are grouped so closely and look so similar. I would tone down the yellow of the input boxes a bit and change the colors for the reward info buttons - example: http://i53.tinypic.com/29mt4l5.jpg
Also, I think if they click in the reward box it should only check the box, not check/uncheck like a label.
Great idea though! I Apologize if you don't like my thoughts, just some quick first impressions!
PS: Tidy up those "Reward Detail" popups! Keep it up!
PPS: The email link on the about page is "protected" (hi [at] rewardlevel [dot] com) whereas the email link at the top is not.
Appreciate the feedback.
We will solve it with inventory and the algorithm, just takes some time get it all right.
Redesign for pop-up and hopefully js version with roll-over coming shortly.
Yea, hopefully google apps can do its job at protecting spam.
For now you can block sites you don't want showing on your profile link.
Are you getting me any exclusive deals with these vendors?
The novelty of this approach is that RewardLevel acts as a broker and manages all those relationships and then their algorithm supposedly shows the deals that work best on your site. That leaves you with higher signups and in theory more revenue, and RewardLevel's advertisers with more leads. RewardLevel makes money by sitting in the middle and managing that pool of advertisers. You would have to weigh the cost of having someone manage those relationships for you versus the supposedly free increase in conversions on your landing page by having RewardLevel do it for you.
I would caution anyone planning on implementing this that while it is "free" to place the RewardLevel widget into your sign up forms there will be costs associated with those people that sign up for nothing more than the reward. The balancing act is to find offers that only really appeal to your core market to begin with and that is in the hands of the RewardLevel algorithm.
Right now the algorithm optimizes to the rewards that work best for your site.
