Mighty Good Offers (myoffers.co.uk)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	myoffers.co.uk
Date:	22/12/00 (219 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, easy, free & you'll get a mousmat if nothing else!!

Disadvantages: Junk email (if you not careful)

/#/ UPDATED 29/03/2001! /#/
Had a few problems getting my prize, I reveal all at the end of this opinion, but first.....


I joined MyOffers some months back now after feeling my luck was in from winning a competition on bluecarrots.com (a £150 golf club!).

My Offers seemed a great idea to concentrate on pure competition entering, here’s what it’s all about…

My Offers is basically a site full of prize draws to enter where you can win anything from a year’s supply of cereal to a brand new car.
You need to sign up and get a username and password so that they can keep track of how many draws you’ve entered, and naturally, how to contact you should you win. Once done, you’re free to get prize draw entering!

The actual prize draws are supplied & thus sponsored by other companies and not MyOffers themselves. In return, entry to the prize draw consists of mini-questionnaires. Some are simply just a couple of questions while others are a bit more in depth, although, in any case it only takes a few seconds to complete them.

The draws are organised nicely into categories, for example ‘travel’, ‘shopping’, ‘fashion’ etc. You can also view the latest draws, review which ones you’ve already entered and view your progress in the other MyOffers ‘special’ offer draws (see below). There are even draws in which the winnings are split 50/50 with a charity and draws aimed specifically at students.
The draws are made at the end of each month, so, although it makes it easier visiting the site every now & then, you can just have a mass draw-entering day a few days before month end! Winners are notified within a week of the draw date and a list of winners is displayed on the site (and emailed to you) about 2 weeks after the draw.

There are always at least two ‘special’ draws running in parallel with the main prize
draws, for which you need to enter so many normal prize draws in order to qualify. The draws vary from month to month so I won’t put the current one here – as it may well have changed now (if you know what I mean!).
There is always the opportunity to gain from referring friends to MyOffers, again these vary but have included the chance to win a car, cash and various other prizes in return for getting your friends to sign up with them.
If you have your own website, there is also the possibility to put a banner up and get paid (via tradedoubler.com) for all signups referred from your site. It’s currently 40p per signup.

The site is extremely well laid out, there is no superfluous information on the site, it’s all about the prize draws and that’s it. There are no adverts (since the questionnaires form the income) and the site is very quick.

There is one gripe that I have with MyOffers, or rather the companies that sponsor the draws is that you can end up with a lot of junk mail, after several months using their site (entering 95% of all draws), I now get about 2/3 junk emails a day as a result of using MyOffers. This is understandable since, you are often effectively joining a mailing list when entering the draws, however MyOffers should perhaps make it clearer when a company is signing you up for their ‘junk’ email. In fairness, MyOffers do tell you, but it’s in small print and not easy to spot.
I do not see this as a problem however; you just need to apply the following couple of rules to MyOffers…

/#1/ Sign up using a new web mail email address, that way your normal email account will not get bunged up with junk emails. It also means that you can simply stop using the account & get another one should the junk email get too much - a hell of a lot easier that attempting to get your email address taken off umpteen mailing lists. Better still, if you get your own domain nam
e (only £9.99 - see my ‘easily peasily’ opinion!), you can use that, for example I use myoffers@<my-domain-name!>.co.uk which directs all mail to a web mail account. The other advantage with this approach is that you know exactly which junk email has come as a result of MyOffers.

/#2/ Remember, you do not have to enter all of your details into most prize draw entries, I never enter my address or phone numbers, if you have to, I’d rather enter ‘rubbish’ into there than my real address. I really hate this kind of junk mail!


Another bad point, albeit it a minor one, with MyOffers is that of the questionnaire entry forms. These can be awkward to complete, as every question seems to need an answer, even, for example…
Q.1 Do you eat cereals? Q.2 Which is your favourite cereal?
Now, obviously, if said ‘NO’ to question 1, question 2 would not be relevant, sometimes it will even say ‘If not, skip to question ?’ but with MyOffers, you still have to answer question 2, even if it’s just selecting ‘N/A’ from the drop down list.
This seems silly, and you frequently end up going back through the questionnaire to find the question(s) that ‘you did not answer’ purely to select ‘N/A’ to them all!


Anyway, that aside, MyOffers is excellent, and as I always say, if you don’t enter, you won’t win! I have actually won something via MyOffers, 5 Electronic Arts sports games in their November draw, so you see you CAN win, what is there to loose? At the very least you’ll get a mouse mat or a cup or something, you won’t go away empty handed and you never know!


So, as you can tell, I’d certainly recommend it!



/##/ UPDATE 29/03/01 /##/

As I said above, I won 5 EA Sports games in their November draw.
Actually receiving my prize has taken quite sometime and a lot
of moaning (I’m good at that!!). Here’s my story...

Having been notified of winning the prize at the beginning of December I was quite excited, and a week or so later I got an email from EA (Mark Robson - Relationship Marketing Manager to be exact) congratulating me on my prize and asking my to confirm which platform I would prefer, PC or Playstation – PC for me! He stated that the prize would be sent out to me in January - a bit of a delay I thought, but as it was Christmas I wasn’t too fussed.
I replied promptly, enjoyed Christmas, New Year and waited for my prize!
Alas January came, and January went, but with no prize in between! Actually that’s a bit of a lie – MyOffers sent me a ‘I Am A MyOffers.co.uk Winner’ mug, in fact they sent me two!!
Now I’m not one to forget about things like this, so the very first day of February I emailed MyOffers to let them know I hadn’t had my prize. I very nice person by the name of Seher Najib replied back with apologies and said that she’d emailed EA and asked them to let my know when I’d get my prizes ASAP.
A week or two later, still no prize and not even an email from EA, I’m starting to get pissy! So I send a rather more hard lined email to both EA and MyOffers which amongst other things, reminding EA that it is less than legal not to supply a prize, let them know I’m not the type to leave things and thank MyOffers for actually replying to my previous email.
I left to boil for another week or two with no reply from either EA or MyOffers, until a very apologetic email from Seher (or Sara) saying that she’d been on holiday, which was why I’d not got a reply earlier. She’d tried phoning EA but the number was not recognised but said she was going to speak to the sale director when he was back on Monday.
On the following Tuesday I got another email from Seher saying she’d spoken to the
EA sales director and he’d promised to send out the prizes that week – yippee!
Better still, the very next day I got an email from Arran D'Aubigny of EA (wow), apologising and stating that the person who ran the competition had left without making anyone else aware of it.
So I waited for my prize, a week later I got another email from Seher (MyOffers) asking me if I’d received my prize yet. I replied stating that I hadn’t.
As fate would have it, exactly 11 hours after replying to that email (i.e. the next morning), the prizes had arrived! I let Seher know and thanked her for all her help.
The End!

Whilst I have been tempted to downgrade my rating to 4 stars, I’ve decided not too, after all it’s wasn’t MyOffers fault and they (or rather Seher) was extremely helpful and for that she and MyOffers have my utmost respect & gratitude.
A BIG thank you to Seher Najib!




Thanks for reading, hopes this is of use, either way, feel free to comment and rate ;-)
Tobes.

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