Use Polls and Competitions to Grow Traffic and Collect Data

Successful online publications need to maximize interactivity to succeed, and there are few better ways of doing this than enhancing publications with polls and competitions. System 7 enables editorial staff without technical skills to quickly add new polls and competitions to content such as news articles and features by completing user-friendly wizards within the WYSIWYG edit.NET online content editor. Polls provide users with an easy way to express themselves, and competitions enable publishers to collect useful user data for marketing.

Polls

Editorial staff add online polls to content by invoking a special user-friendly wizard provided by the edit.NET online content editor. Once a new poll has been described within the wizard, which often takes no more than a couple of minutes, the underlying code required to display the poll to an end-user is automatically added to the content copy with no further editorial action necessary.

The current voting results are displayed to users inline with the content. This serves to enhance the content, even when users choose not to take part in the vote themselves. When users do submit a response to the poll, the underlying System 7 code transmits the information to the poll system without reloading the page being viewed, and the results displayed are quickly updated to reflect the user's input, providing an optimal interactive experience.

Competitions

Competitions are added to content inside System 7 publications using a user-friendly wizard in the same way as polls. Each competition can contain arbitrary components, including multiple-choice questions, and text answers, which can be used to collect user information such as names and email addresses. System 7 administration websites for competitions provide features that can randomly select winners from users with correct answers, and export information collected in CSV format.

A System 7 publication recently ran a competition for a laptop, which enabled it to collect the details of several thousand users. The commercial value of this information far exceeded the value of the laptop, illustrating how System 7 competitions can help publishers drive their online businesses forward.