Sweepstakes is an awesome campaign to achieve a range of marketing goals including:
- Increase Sales And Repeat Sales: View Templates
- Grow Email List: View Templates
- Increase Traffic: View Templates
- Increase Brand Awareness: View Templates
- Get Leads and Sign ups: View Templates
- Increase Engagement: View Templates
- Increase Followers And Subscribers: View Templates
- Gamify: View Templates
- Increase Referrals: View Templates
- Attract new readers to your WordPress blog: View Templates
- Build Social Proof (Get Reviews): View Templates
- Get insights by running surveys, quizzes and polls based sweepstakes: View Templates
Checklist
Here's a suggested checklist for running a sweepstakes:
NOTE: These may vary or need additional items depending on the jurisdiction
Pro tip! Attractive prizes and promoting your sweepstakes are the 2 most critical factors for a successful sweepstakes
- Goal: Decide what you want to get out of running a sweepstake. For e.g. Do you want to grow your email list? Get more brand exposure? Perhaps more traffic? See the list of entry methods that will help you in achieving your goals.
Pro tip! With Social Boost and Gratisfaction, you can combine multiple goals in one campaign. Pro tip! If you need some ideas and help in deciding your goals, you can go to your Social Boost or Gratisfaction admin → Campaigns→ Campaign Ideas. Or, see campaign examples on our Demo Page - We have put together an extensive range of campaign templates.
Pro tip! Are you Selling in multiple countries?
You can easily launch multiple campaigns targeting different countries E.g. for US-based customers, launch a 10% off newsletter sign-up campaign, for UK-based customers launch a Refer a friend campaign, and for let's say Canada-based customers launch a Purchase for a chance to win campaign. Each of these campaigns can be run simultaneously or staggered and have its own rules e.g. start and close dates, reward values, what people need to do to enter your campaign, and more. Pro tip! Partner with your supplier or neighboring businesses: With such a collaboration, you can give away more prizes. Also, promoting your campaign will be much easier.
- A start and end date: If it's open to different time zones, specify the time zone with the start and end dates. Pro tip! Higher the value and the number of prizes, the longer you can run your sweepstakes. Typically 6- 8 weeks.
- Terms and conditions: We've put together a generic Terms and Conditions template that you can easily preview , edit and apply for your sweepstakes. This will be shown in your campaign setup.
- Privacy policy: Include privacy policy as per the relevant jurisdictions. Our apps will provide you with GDPR settings that you can activate if relevant.
- Prizes: What will be the prizes and how many. Additionally, are you giving away prizes during the giveaway e.g. daily, weekly and monthly. Describe the prizes and quantity. Pro tip! The right prize is critical to the success of your sweepstakes. Prizes should be of value, not one but many, and relevant to your target audience. Read more tips on prizes
- Who can enter: Any country or age restrictions: Target your campaign to show up for relevant customers.
- How will people enter: E.g. Visiting your web or social media page, commenting on a post, answering a question, subscribing to your newsletter, watching a video, etc. You can add one more entry methods that people need to participate in and be rewarded with bonus entries and optionally instant prizes. See available entry methods in Social Boost and Gratisfaction.
Activate the desired entry methods (aka Actions) and allocate bonus entries for each of these entry methods Pro tip! Always consider activating refer-a-friend action. Referrals are one of the best organic viral growth strategy - Display it: Show your sweepstakes wherever you can. For e.g. as a tab, widget and pop up on your website, embed them in your blog, on Facebook Page, etc. Pro tip! Both Social Boost and Gratisfaction allow you to display the campaigns in multiple ways
- Promote: Very important! If you don't promote, they won't come. Successful sweepstakes depend heavily on promotion. Read more tips on how to promote your sweepstakes
- End date: The sweepstakes will close on the end date and accept no more entries.
- Draw winners: Random or winner(s) with highest number of bonus entries. Optionally you may also draw winners daily, weekly and monthly whilst the sweepstakes is running.
- Contact winners and deliver prizes.
- Announce winners: Subject to your jurisdiction Pro tip! Prior to announcing the winners, consider launching another campaign and include the link and details of your new campaign in the winner announcement- Re-engagement is known to get sales! Pro tip! Do not forget the Losers! These are all the people who made the effort, spread the word about your campaign, but did not win. Be sure to thank them, and keep them engaged and happy.
- Run another campaign and invite them ahead of everyone else.
- Send them a 'thank you' consolation reward. Show you value them as a customer. Many jurisdictions allow you to email the winner announcement to the entrants. Include thank you rewards and information about other campaigns in these emails.
That's it! Plan your next campaign!
