How To Create Profitable Consumer Contests
Part 1 of 2

How many contests have you run that only captured e-mail addresses? It’s time to leverage more out of your online or offline contests and to arm your consumer marketing and operations teams with valuable customer intelligence.

Whether your contest is developed to promote a new product, enhance brand awareness or increase customer loyalty, you should always keep return on investment at the top of your priority list.

This two-part tutorial will help you enhance your contest strategy to promote your brand, increase customer loyalty and generate a measurable return on your investment.

Why Online Contests Work Best

Marketing your brand over the internet will attract a larger audience, in a shorter amount of time. Highly interactive online contests have the ability to attract and engage customers far better than offline methods.

These days, most sweepstakes-style contests have abandoned their physical form and gone virtual. No doubt, this is due to five significant benefits to online contests:

1. Higher consumer response - It used to be that marketers were concerned about how many consumers would actually use the Internet to enter a contest. Today, this is by far the most accessible and convenient channel for running a contest. This translates into significantly higher levels of customer engagement and more contest participants

2. Cost savings - In the online world, there are no ballot forms to print, no distribution and collection of ballot boxes and no need to pay for data entry. While money must be spent to build the online infrastructure, this cost is miniscule by comparison.

3. E-mail capture - Although offline contests allow you to capture personal information, such as e-mail and mailing addresses, the accuracy rate is superior with online contests. No longer do you need to rely on penmanship from consumers and accuracy from data entry staff

4. Viral capabilities - Online contests can be posted in Facebook and Twitter accounts. They can be linked to in e-mails and on other websites. You can reward customer loyalty by offering incentives to consumers for telling their friends about your contest. This all ties back to point #1 above - higher response to your contests.

5. Enhanced brand presence and customer engagement - A dedicated contest website or web page allows marketers to reinforce their brand positioning far better than most offline contests. The online version can be interactive, more colorful and can use large amounts of virtual real estate to communicate key brand messages. In the online world, marketers can extend their brand across borders, leading to high levels of customer engagement.

Consumer Sweepstakes and Instant Win Contests

The sweepstakes:
A sweepstakes is by far the most common type of consumer contest. In this format, a contest entrant is selected from a pool of entrants to win a prize from the prize pool. There may be a single grand prize drawn at the end of the contest, multiple weekly prizes, or some combination of both.

The instant win:
An instant win format allows participants to immediately see if they’re a prize winner. Traditionally, this could only be achieved offline, using scratch tickets, pull tabs, spin-the-wheel, etc. With technological advancements, instant win games have been taken online and provide just as much customer engagement, anticipation and excitement.

Which format is better?
Like any consumer marketing initiative, you must first determine your target audience before developing your contest strategy. At BehaviorWorx, we have found that consumers of all ages, geographic locations and household types play online instant win games. As a result, we typically recommend a combination of sweepstakes and instant win. Ultimately, some consumers are attracted to large, alluring sweepstakes prizes, while others are attracted to the immediate gratification and excitement of instant win games.

Remember, your existing customers represent your largest source of untapped revenue. It may be worthwhile to create a “customer only” component to your next contest to increase brand loyalty.

Read "part 2" of this tutorial…

Read part two of this tutorial, which covers: Adding Customer Intelligence and Making Your Contest Viral.

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