EPrize Courts Small Businesses with DIY Promo Service

EPrize has launched a turnkey system for small businesses to run online sweepstakes and coupons from their own Web sites.

The service, called Caffeine, rolls out after a two-month beta test with more than 30 small businesses, from online retailers to neighborhood bars. EPrize hopes to run 10,000 promotions through Caffeine this year; it has already fielded a few dozen, said CEO Josh Linkner.

Users follow Caffeine’s eight-step process to set up their own promotions in about 10 minutes. They choose a prize pool from a menu of 39 pools, then choose a promotion theme and customize it with the business’s address, phone number and URL.

A market area can be set up—as small as a five-mile radius, for a neighborhood business—and decide whether to overlay a coupon offer to the sweepstakes.

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

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

“The same way that Google democratized advertising, this is our chance to democratize promotion,” Linkner said.

Eprize is pitching the service to small businesses by partnering with software marketers and search engines who target business owners. Those distributors bundle Caffeine into software and search-based ad packages as a value-added service.