High sweepstakes participant engagement is a key feature of a successful sweepstakes or contest.
Why should your brand care about entrant engagement?
First, participants who are actively waiting for your sweepstakes to end are more likely to respond promptly to the winner announcement.
Second, engaged sweepstakes entrants mean that you’ll get more sales as the participants learn more about your brand while enjoying your sweepstakes or contest.
Here are 10 tips to boost sweepstakes participant engagement and how to keep people from forgetting about your sweepstakes after they’ve entered it.
Follow all of these tips, and repeat them as necessary, to help participants stay active during your sweepstakes:
1. Make Your Sweepstakes Marketing Fun and Exciting
People enter sweepstakes for the chance to win a prize, but also to be entertained.
If all of your sweepstakes follow-up messages are overly promotional, you might end up losing your audience’s attention.
By using wit, humor, and surprise to entertain participants, you’ll increase sweepstakes engagement.
Also Read: How Traffic From Sweepstakes Promotions Helps You Go Viral
2. Create Engaging Sweepstakes Advertising
From photos to memes, GIFs, and original graphics, you should incorporate a number of different elements to create unique visuals that will engage sweepstakes and contest participants.
Make sure to feature your brand while using the creatives to tell a story about your sweepstakes. Use images and videos to maximize engagement.
3. Schedule Your Sweepstakes Follow-ups for the Right Time
It’s important that you study your audience to learn what times of the day they are most likely to engage with your sweepestakes or contest follow-up messages and send them accordingly.
By targeting sweepstakes entrants at their preferred times to open your messages, they are more likely to feel that your brand is catering to their personalized needs. This helps to build trust which translates to sales.
4. Increase the Value of Your Sweepstakes With Freebies for Non-winners
It’s not enough to give away a single prize, you also need to give participants rewards for continuing to engage with your promotion until the end.
By offering freebies, as well as discounts and coupons, to non-winners and sweepstakes participants throughout the promotion, you can help them to feel connected to your promotion without even having to win the grand prize.
5. Feature Customers in Your Sweepstakes Promotion
One of the most effective ways to help sweepstakes participants to connect with your brand is to feature your customers in your promotion. You can turn them into brand advocates and share the user-generated content that they’ve created with the sweepstakes participants.
By doing this, you’ll not only provide that your sweepstakes is a real promotion but it also shows that existing customers already love your brand.
Also Read: How Do Brands Make Money From Sweepstakes?
6. Go Live
You can kick up the excitement of the sweepstakes by making announcements regarding your promotion live.
You could announce how many days there are left until the winner is selected live, give reviews of the prizes that participants are eligible to win, or host the sweepstakes or contest itself during an industry event.
Or you could also go live on a monthly basis to announce the latest sweepstakes promotion for your brand if you run sweepstakes and contests regularly.
Going live can help you reach thousands of people and increases sweepstakes participant engagement.
Also Read: Sweepstakes and Contest Management: What Happens After Your Campaign Goes Live?
7. Be Consistent
To train your sweepstakes participants to engage with you, you need to be consistent. Make sure to follow up with them at regular intervals so that they know when to expect sweepstakes follow-up messages from your brand.
8. Respond to Contest Participants
If a participant messages you a question or feedback about your promotion, get back to them promptly. Whether they leave a positive or a negative message, you need to respond to each participant.
You should also make the abbreviated rules and official rules easily accessible so that participants can view them if they have questions about your promotion.
This helps to build trust in your brand by showing participants that your sweepstakes promotion is legal and fully-compliant with sweepstakes laws.
9. Ask Questions
Questions aren’t only for participants. In fact, sweepstakes surveys are popular for brands that use sweepstakes and contests to gain customer insights.
You can poll or survey your participants to learn more about who they are, if they are enjoying your sweepstakes and contest, and what they think about the sweepstakes prizes.
Also Read: What to Include on a Sweepstakes Survey
10. Share Content That’s Relevant to Your Participants
In addition to reminding sweepstakes participants to stay active in your sweepstakes so that they can be immediately notified once a winner is selected, you should also share content that is relevant to your brand and participants.
For example, if you were to give away a backyard BBQ party as a sweepstakes prize, you might share BBQ recipe tips using your brand’s product as one of the ingredients.
The result?
Sweepstakes participants learn more about your brand and you also give them something to engage with while they wait for the winner drawing.
If you want to maximize your sweepstakes marketing ROI, you need to engage your sweepstakes participants both during and after your promotion ends. Follow up and watch your results skyrocket!
Need help with sweepstakes or contest management? Call 305-505-5393 or email us with your questions.
