ForwardTrack Marketing
I’ve been doing a lot of air travel this year. I use Kayak.com to dig up air fares — they seem to have the most flexible search tools, include the costs of fees and taxes in the prices and direct you to the origin site (usually the airline itself) to book the flight, rather than taking a cut like more traditional sites like Expedia. It’s a great service. I’m surprised more people haven’t heard of it. Anyway…
Today I was researching fares for a possible trip to Michigan and/or Florida in the near future and noticed Kayak is running a “win a free trip” contest. Nothing too exciting (submit an idea for a trip and get entered) on the surface, but they included an interesting little feature: they offer to email your trip idea to a friend and, if your friend visits the site and also enters a trip idea, not only does s/he get entered in the contest, but you also get an additional “entry” (i.e., chance to win the drawing).
This is ForwardTrack applied to marketing a contest (which is designed to market Kayak.com’s trip planning tool and the airline sponsoring the contest). ForwardTrack is software that allows participants in a web campaign to get “credit” when their friends follow through on an action online. So, for example, if you ran an “email your senator” campaign, the web site for the campaign would include a “click here to email your friends” and then show you a count of which friends (or friends of friends, etc.) eventually followed through on the action. It gives organizers the ability track who is participating and how, but also turns individuals in to organizers and a simple tool to measure better see their own impact. The ability to see the results becomes an incentive.
Instead of giving participants abstract “points” for their participation (which may be enough when the participants care about some cause), Kayak turns those points into additional “entries.” Tricksy!
