Why It Pays to Always Be Listening

It’s not a secret we’re pretty active on social media (and if it is, follow us on Twitter or Facebook). We’ve learned a lot interacting with our customers, but we can also pick up a thing or two by interacting and listening to other competitors as well. Here’s a story of how that recently played out for us:

Back in early 2011 when Rafflecopter first launched, there was another giveaway widget that had been released a month earlier by a company called PunchTab. Up until recently, they offered a giveaway product similar to ours, but have decided to put their giveaway product on indefinite hold to focus on their core business, which offers engagement and analytics products to enterprise businesses.

Having competing products with PunchTab for the past three years, we’ve had a good handful of interactions with them over social media. From time to time, we’d tweet at each other, especially in those ‘early days’. We were two similar products trying to solve the same problem, but going about it in different ways. We knew they were there, and they knew we were here, and healthy and friendly competition fuels innovation (which means better products for everyone!).

We first became aware of PunchTab’s recent plans to move away from their giveaway product in a tweet where they gave an unsolicited recommendation for Rafflecopter.

@EB_Jaybird Try @rafflecopter! We hear they’ve got a great free product, too.:)

— PunchTab (@punchtab) December 10, 2014

After that, we connected with the PunchTab team to talk about how we could help one  another. PunchTab had a loyal customer base for their giveaway platform and we coincidentally just launched several new features. The end result was PunchTab’s recommendation of Rafflecopter through an email to their giveaway customers, including a special offer on upgraded plans to any PunchTab customers signing up for Rafflecopter.

A few lessons you can take away from our experience:

• Always be listening. We are always listening to conversations about Rafflecopter and giveaways on social channels. The time between that first tweet from PunchTab until we were on the phone call was about two hours. The world is out there talking about your product — listen to what they’re saying.
• Be nice. Simply because it’s the right thing to do (and you never know when a competitor could become a partner!)
• Look for the win-win-win. When discussing options with PunchTab we focused on an action plan that was good for Rafflecopter, good for PunchTab, and good for the end user. We grew our customer base. PunchTab was able to provide a home for their customers moving off their platform. The customer had a free platform to transition their giveaways to and had the option to save some money on paid options.

PunchTab wrote a blog post on their experience which you can find here.

Welcome PunchTab Users :)

If you’re a previous PunchTab user and found your way hereby way of the communications you received from PunchTab, we wanted to welcome you! We offer a ‘free forever’ subscription along with several paid plans (for a full comparison of features, check out our comparison page here). If you have any questions for us, you’re more than welcome to reach out to us at support@rafflecopter.com. Josh, Greg, or myself will be happy to help!