Online sweepstakes: 10 tips for success

Contests, sweepstakes, and promotions can be a great way to grow your audience and increase sales from your online store.

Let’s look at the characteristics of each and how you can use them to boost your business:

• A sweepstakes involves a small audience participation. For example, you ask people to enter an email address to enter a giveaway for a product of your brand.
• In a competition, people interact more. There are simple contests, like asking users to choose a new product’s name, and more complex ones, like asking your audience to upload their own photo or video.

In either case, dissolution of the contest might require the other people to vote for the most original content and that be the winner.

• The most common form of advertising is offering a discount coupon to buy a product in your online store.

Each strategy has its peculiarities and what is interesting about them is that they can achieve good results at a relatively low cost, although it depends on your goals.

Even so, often, lack of planning and unmethodical execution can lead to failure, thereby losing a valuable tool. To prevent this from happening, we reveal 10 effective tips!

1. Clearly define goals

In order to make your sweepstakes or giveaway a success, you must first be sure of what you want to achieve with it.

You must define the goal as clearly and realistically as possibleand never lose sight of the audience you are targeting so that by the end of the process you can understand if you got what you were looking for.

Some achievable goals can be:

• Increase your brand positioning: The idea is that more people know about your brand and visit your online store. So you will not focus on sales but on getting more followers on your social networks.
• Generate more sales in the short term: Here it is best to offer a discount coupon. This increases the conversion rate of your e-commerce.
• Expand your email database: It’s important for people to sign up for you to keep their email. You can then send your communications via email marketing campaigns.

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• Promote a new product: Since you are announcing a novelty, you can appeal to your audience’s creativity and start a competition in which people have to create original content (photos, text or videos).

2. Choose the right platform

Next, choose the most appropriate platform to host your online contest or sweepstakes.

Depending on what goals you set beforehand, you need to decide whether you want to focus on a social network or on your online store.

If you want to increase your followers on Instagram, you must focus specifically on this network and make free Instagram giveaways. You can also focus on your online store and try to grow the rest of your channels from there.

Drawers and applications for free online draws

Some tools you can use to create and manage your contests are:

• fastory:the platform allows Create contests, promotions and games to integrate with your online store or social network. In addition, everything you create looks great on both web and mobile versions.
• wishing pond: Not only can you generate competitions, you can landingsforms and popups, among other things. Offer a free trial!
• Simple offers: the tool that offers a wide range of functions and at an affordable price! Check them out on their website.
• sweepstakes app: allows you to create giveaways for Instagram and YouTube for free, quickly and easily.

3. Come up with a concept and offer a price that fits your brand and your customers

After defining your goal and platform, Come up with a theme to define the type of competition you will be running and what will you offer in exchange for participation.

It is advisable that the prize consists of a product of your brand before products from other companies, incredible as they are. Better than identification with your company!

Next, the award must represent the interests of your audience. If you offer something that your audience doesn’t care about, they will unsubscribe.

💡 You can even Use a special date as an opportunity to promote your competition. Take a look at the 2022 business calendar and plan your giveaways for the most important days in e-commerce.

4. Describe the basics and conditions of participation

Whenever you conduct online sweepstakes, contests or promotions, You need to write some basics that govern audience participation. Although each country has specific laws for these cases, there are a number of things that cannot be missing:

• campaign start and end dates;
• the manner in which you participate (with prior registration, sharing a publication, etc.);
• the details of the prize to be awarded to the winner.

Still, you can get legal advice from a specialist to make sure you’re doing things right.

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5. Set the duration and allocate the budget

Now that you know how and where your online giveaway will be, You have to decide how long it’s going to take and what the budget you’re going to use to make the most of this time.

If you’re short on cash, you may need to rethink some of your strategies at this stage to make them fit your budget.

The money you allocate will be used to promote your contest (e.g. via Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads). You may also need to hire a designer to develop the banner or promotional image. If you dare to do it yourself, here we share the best apps to achieve it!

The duration of a competition is usually between 1 and 2 weeksthe time needed for a reasonable number of people to participate and not feel that there is still a long way to go before they know the winner.

6. Use A/B testing to finalize details

If you’re still unsure about which online contest or giveaway to launch, you can run an A/B test to get a first taste of how it’s going to work. Features you can try include:

• The competition prize. You can offer one prize to group A of users and another to group B to see who gets the best response.
• The design and communication you use. Try a more complex and fun design with a group of users and a simpler and more specific one with the rest to see which message got the most activity.
• The kind of record you ask people. I split a simple registration (e.g. just asking for their email address) and a more sophisticated one (e.g. entering more data or using their Facebook account) between the two groups.

If the results you got are not what you expected, don’t be discouraged! The good thing about the tests in this case is that you have time to correct mistakesalthough you may need to extend the start of your competition a bit.

7. Announce the launch and promote the competition

You already have everything ready! The most important thing now is this Focus on clearly communicating what the contest is about and start promoting itso that it reaches as many people as possible.

Depending on the budget you’ve already set, you’ll need to spread the money across the various tools at your disposal, such as social media and search engine advertising, email marketing, and blogging, among others.

It is important that you target the right people Otherwise, you’re wasting resources on people who don’t care about your brand.

8. Do a good follow-up

As much as your advertising is targeted and you receive many entries to the competition, If you’re not paying attention during the process, the results may not be as good as they could be.

When you get the emails, get started build a relationship with them. First, thank them for taking part in the initiative, and then send them emails that match their needs.

It is likely that some people will ask you questions about participation, so try to answer them in good time.

9. Make the draw online and announce the winner

This is the moment your audience is waiting for! The announcement of the winning person. That’s why, Consider this moment with the importance it deservesrespect the day and time of the announcement and communicate the news in a clear and transparent manner.

10. Measure results

Finally, You need to be able to measure the results to analyze if you’ve achieved the goal you initially set yourself.

That number of people Who participated is not the only important fact. Also look out for those geographic area from anyone who days and times which had the highest turnout and the diffusion that the competition in social networks had.

All this information will help you to continue on the right path if you have achieved the proposed goal, or to correct the necessary if the results were not entirely positive.

Conclusion

Through online competitions or raffles you can grow your followers, increase your sales or simply get more publicity.

It is crucial to have a specific goal, with resources to implement it and with a final analysis which allows you to measure the results achieved.