ViralSweep is 4 years old now and has grown from a side project into a fully fledged business. In that time we’ve fostered great relationships with our customers, who have given us insights into where ViralSweep can best help brands grow.
This customer feedback has helped us create the new ViralSweep.
We’re very excited about the new ViralSweep and the direction the company is headed. On September 27, 2012, we introduced ViralSweep to the world.
Our original infrastructure is great for launching simple sweepstakes but doesn’t leave enough room to expand ViralSweep in the ways our customers need.
The new ViralSweep was reworked from the ground up.
We started planning and surveying for the new ViralSweep back in November 2014 and accepting users in a closed beta in February 2016. We’re very happy with the product we’ve built, and more importantly, feedback has been resoundingly positive.
So what does this mean for you?
If you were a paying customer of the old ViralSweep and want to transfer to the new version, shoot us an email, and we’ll get you set up.
Old campaigns will not be transferred into the new system. However, you will still have access to the old dashboard to view your campaigns.
In the coming months, we will remove campaign creation on the old system, and everyone will be forwarded to the new ViralSweep to create their campaigns.
The New ViralSweep
The new ViralSweep is sporting an entirely new look and layout. Creating promotions is now easier and faster. Promotion data is now quicker to access and more in-depth.
The Dashboard
Old Dashboard vs. New Dashboard
The new dashboard features your campaigns on the left-hand side and a live data feed to the right. Hover over a campaign to view all the options for that specific campaign.
Campaign Options
Live Feed
Over to the right-hand side is where you will see the Live Feed. You can quickly check up on campaign performance and noteworthy milestones here.
The Live Feed is still in its infancy. We are only showing a few data points for the time being: new milestones, total referrals, total entries, top referring sources, and technology (mobile vs. desktop users).
Soon, we’ll provide suggestions and key notifications based on your campaign data—information that can quickly help improve things mid-campaign.
Live Feed
Test Mode
We’ve introduced a new Test Mode feature that can be toggled on-the-fly. Every campaign starts in Test Mode and can be set to Live right from the dashboard in one click.
Test Mode makes it easy to share your promotion with coworkers or clients to get feedback for finishing touches before a campaign goes live.
Any entries that occur in Test Mode will appear in the Test Mode column under the Entrants tab. You can have unlimited people testing your sweepstakes before you are ready to go live, and none of those test entries get mixed up with your real entries.
Test Mode
Entrants
In our old version, you needed to export a CSV file to edit or delete entries. This can now be done right from your dashboard.
The Entrants dashboard is now more robust, allowing you to see entry email, entry location, entry time, how many entries the person has, as well as the ability to edit and delete entrants.
To see a full breakdown of actions each entrant has completed, hover the Entries column and click View.
To get all entry data, including any information you requested from users upon entering your promotion, simply hit Export at the top of the table.
Entrants Tab
Analytics
Our new Analytics dashboard provides in-depth insights into all of your campaign data.
Along with pageviews and entries, we track all of your social data (followers, shares, website visits, etc.), referral data, and a breakdown of desktop vs. mobile entries. You can view this in two formats: chart view and table view.
All of the analytics can also be exported into a CSV file.
Analytics Tab
Drawing Winners
We’ve updated our winner draw system so that you can now select winners at any time. Previously, winners could only be drawn when a sweepstakes ended.
You can now draw winners during your campaign, allowing for daily drawings or selecting weekly winners. You can also draw winners from any timeframe during the promotion by bringing up a calendar to select a specific date range.
Winners Tab
New Promotion
We won’t go too in-depth on all of the features added to our New Promotion page, but here are the ones our customers love most:
Old vs. New ViralSweep
We’ve completely rebuilt our promotion builder to make it even easier and faster to create high-performance campaigns.
Autosaving & Interactive Preview
Autosave & Preview Mode
The most helpful improvements to promotion creation are the autosave and preview functions—these are massive time savers!
Any time you make a change to your sweepstakes it will automatically save, allowing for a quick preview on desktop or mobile of any changes you make.
You can also toggle between the different preview “states” to see what your page will look like before the sweepstakes begins, after it ends, and what it looks like before and after someone enters.
WSYWIG Editor
Gone are the days of having to write your own HTML. We’ve now included a WSYWIG editor that allows you to style all of your text. You may still write your own HTML if you wish.
WSYWIG Editor
Forms
We tossed out our old forms section and rebuilt it with flexibility in mind. We now allow you to add any type of field that you want to your form, whether it is a radio field, checkbox, dropdown menu, text area, or any pre-made fields like name, zip code, birthday, etc.
We give you full control over these fields, so you can change the text and placeholders, set the fields to required or not, and change the error text that appears if someone doesn’t fill out a required field.
Drag and drop to re-arrange the order in which your forms appear.
Form Editor
Social Actions
Similar to our forms section, we also rebuilt the entire social actions section to allow for flexibility and ease of use.
Social actions are what drive the most entries to your promotion, so we spent a lot of time giving you full control over every detail.
We support more than 15 different actions for a user to complete, with more being added monthly. To add an action, choose it from the left menu and then edit the fields as they appear on the right hand side. Just drag and drop to change the order in which they appear.
For co-promotions with multiple brands, we display a segmented breakdown on the Analytics tab to show how many followers each participating brand received.
Social Actions
Integrations
One of our largest goals is to help you link your promotions with as many powerful services as possible. We’ve added several integrations, including Google Analytics, Bit.ly, and a Webhook feature that will allow you to send data to any endpoint of your choosing. We’ll be adding more integrations every month.
3rd Party Integrations
Email and CRM Integrations
We now connect with 17 different email service providers and growing, including many larger CRMs. This includes: ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Bronto, Campaign Monitor, Cheetahmail, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, GetResponse, HubSpot, iContact, Infusionsoft, Klaviyo, Listrak, MailChimp, Sailthru, Salesforce, and Vero.
We have several more in the pipeline that will be released soon.
Connecting your sweepstakes to your email service provider or CRM is as simple as choosing it from the list and filling in the required fields to make the connection.
We allow you to connect your sweepstakes to multiple email service providers at one time.
Email Integrations
Spam Filter
We’ve made our Spam Filter more straightforward, and we’ve also added an Events feature that allows you to accept all entries for campaigns promoted at events and trade shows.
You can also store and view invalid entries that get blocked by our filter.
Spam Filter
Geo Targeting
Our Geo Targeting feature allows you to lock your campaign to target specific countries.
For example, if you only want people in the United States to be able to access your campaign, anyone outside of the USA would see a message that says the campaign is not available in their location.
Geo Targeting
Formatting
Our new Formatting section allows you to make changes to the core styles of a promotion: width of the forms, button colors, and image positions on both desktop and mobile devices. Want the image above the form on desktop, but below the form on mobile?
No problem!
Formatting
App Updates
It’s important to keep you informed of changes, improvements, and additions we are making to the app. Sometimes a feature update may not be immediately apparent.
We’ve created a changelog that is constantly updated so you can follow along and stay informed with all the changes we are making with the new ViralSweep.
You can view the newest updates to the app from within the dashboard, or you can see the full changelog here: ViralSweep Changelog
New ViralSweep Changelog
Sweepstakes Template Styles
We’ve updated our three core template styles (Full Page, Widget, and Lightbox) with a new design. The entry form sports some new features like automatic field validation as the user types, as well as email address recommendations when we detect a user mistypes their email address.
On the thank you page (post-entry), entrants can complete actions and see their entry count automatically update.
In the coming months, we’ll be releasing some preset themes for these templates, as well as the ability for you to easily create your own theme without having to write your own CSS.
Template Styles
Partner Network
In the next few weeks, we will be rolling out the first version of our Partner Network.
This network is a powerful tool for finding other brands to run promotions with. Partner promotions are becoming more and more important for small and large brands alike to engage with audiences from similar market segments.
As the line between product and content brands continues to blur, partner promotions will only gain more importance for brands who want to grow their addressable market.
In early 2015 we wrote The Advanced Guide To Partner Promotions, which is a complete guide for any brand looking to run a promotion with several other brands.
Since the release of this guide, we’ve had more requests for a way to allow brands to connect with one another through our platform than any other feature. We’ve listened!
If you are interested in signing up for the network, you can apply here: Partner Network Application. The network is starting as invite-only. We will slowly roll it out to more brands when we reach our internal goals for total network usage.
Partner Network
The Future
We have so much planned for our customers this year!
We will be releasing more integrations, template themes, and a bunch of exciting features like A/B testing. We’ll also be releasing new core products to expand on top of our Sweepstakes product.
We’d like to thank all of our customers who have supported us and all those who continue to support us in the future: thank you for all of your help, advice, and feedback. We love that we are so close to our customers and that we get to see some amazing brands grow, young and old, using ViralSweep.
If you have any questions or comments about the new ViralSweep, please leave them in the comments below.
