Sarah Milstein, an author at O’Reilley Radar published this story about NameCheap and an effective way to increase your revenue through the micro-blogging service, Twitter.
Namecheap, a 70-person company headquartered in LA, is a domain name registrar that’s been in business for nine years. They rely mostly on word-of-mouth advertising and have just two people who do marketing (one of whom is devoted to SEO); almost everyone else provides customer service.
Michelle Greer, their sole marketing specialist, has been on Twitter personally since 2007, and she thought the service might be a good fit for Namecheap. To convince the CEO, she showed him what Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO, was doing on Twitter, including promotions. He gave her the go-ahead to experiment.
Michelle set up a Namecheap Twitter account, and in December, to launch it, she ran a contest: once an hour, she posted a Christmas-related trivia question (she’s used TweetLater to pre-schedule the posts and a book to help her come up with the 600+ trivia questions). To win, you had to be one of the first three @replies with the correct answer. The prize was credit a for one-year domain registration; to receive it, you needed a Namecheap account.
The company considers the contest a success. People got addicted to it, battling to get in the first replies. And they Twittered and blogged about it, too, helping Namecheap’s follower count jump from 200 to over 4,000 in the one month and bumping the company’s PageRank, too.
So what about the actual business numbers? Namecheap’s site traffic increased more than 10 percent in December, driving a 20 percent increase in domain registrations. In addition, Michelle says, “The increase in Twitter followers allowed us to see a 30 percent increase in traffic when we ran a Super Bowl promo on Twitter [in February].”
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