Get More Contest Entries - 4 Easy Tips

Posted by Danny Wood

When you run an annual contest or sweepstakes like many Strutta users do, such as an annual back-to-school photo contest or Black Friday sweepstakes, it should be safe to assume that every year, you’ll be looking to improve on your entries, votes, and/or views from last year.

Just in time for the busiest time of year for marketers, we’ve compiled a list of 4 great “conversion optimization” tips for your promotion. Improve on your last year’s results, or set the bar high!

Showcase your prize

This is the easiest, yet most-often overlooked aspect of contest-conversion-optimization: showing off your prize. Imagine having a conversation with your target audience, face-to-face, where you tell them about your contest; it can be almost guaranteed that their first question would be, “what can I win?” If possible, use pictures and the name of your promotion to demonstrate to potential participants what they might win: Sing with Celine The CHU Saint-Justine Foundation’s Sing for Sainte-Justine with Celine Dion contest used an image and the title of their promotion to advertise the fact that their prize was a chance to sing with Celine Dion.

Include multiple ways to enter

Promotion participants think the same way that consumers/customers do: they want choice. Don’t restrict users to only being able to enter on your website, give them multiple options, such as desktop, mobile, Instagram and Facebook: Petrolicious Rally For their Drive Tastefully Malibu contest, Petrolicious used Strutta to accept photo entries via Instagram Hashtag, Facebook Tab, as well as through a iframe on their website.

Keep your asks simple

This tip is stolen from landing page science: keep your entry form as simple as possible. With every field that you add to your contest or sweepstakes’ entry form, ask yourself, “is this absolutely necessary to know about my participant?” If the answer is no, don’t include the field. Also, if you’d really like to receive this data point but are worried it might be a barrier for some participants, consider using non-required fields.

Offer a consolation prize

Although grand prizes are exciting and very motivational for participants to enter, a contest with hundreds of entries can sometimes seem daunting to a participant considering whether or not to put in the effort to submit an entry. Consolation prizes are a great way to remedy this: Sydney Airport Coffee Currently live, Sydney Airport’s The Joy of Coffee contest has a grand prize of a trip to Rome, as chosen by the airport. However, in order to encourage more entries and engagement of participants’ social networks, the contest offers a consolation prize of a coffee machine for the entry that receives the most votes.

Please give these tips a try, and let me know how it goes. Already employing all of these tactics and still not getting the kind of entry numbers you’d like to see? Email me about that too, I’d be happy to give you more ideas!