How Contests and Sweepstakes Can Increase Sales

Posted by Alicia Doiron

Spring is a time for new beginnings. Flowers are blooming and birds are singing. It’s also the perfect time for online retailers to evaluate their marketing initiatives.

If you’ve never run an online contest, it’s time you did. Promotional marketing has been utilized by brands for years because simply put, it works. There are so many benefits in doing so. Statistics taken from HubSpot really encourage this point:

  • New campaigns acquire a 34% audience increase on average
  • 1/3 of contest entrants sign up to receive email updates from brands and partners
  • Running a mobile contest increases the number of entrants by eight times
  • Statistically the best duration for a contest campaign is 25-60 days

But by far the biggest advantage to running a contest is that it can improve sales. The following are 5 different ways contests can help boost your bottom line this spring.

Brand Awareness

Promotional campaigns allow you to cast a wide net and introduce your brand to more people. We had the pleasure of witnessing this with one of our clients, Kiwi Collection.

Kiwi Collections, the largest independent collection of international luxury hotels and booking specialists, needed to build brand awareness. So they set up an Instagram account and in order to grow their customer base quickly they ran a contest through the visual social network. They further promoted the contest on Facebook, Facebook ads, through a newsletter, and on their website. During the monthlong promotion, Kiwi Collection’s Instagram spiked 50% and by another 100% the month following the contest. Today they have over 10,000 followers.

Kiwi Collection Instagram Contest

New Products or Services

Running a contest or sweepstakes if the perfect way to draw attention to your new product or service. Even loyal customers may be reluctant to try something different, but by running a contest you’ll remove that barrier to entry. You could even encourage the winner or winners to write a review after they’ve tried the product or service and could perhaps even offer something additional in return. Consumers trust reviews from strangers online as much as they do from family and friends so this could be a solid strategy.

Website Traffic

Driving new traffic to your online business is surely one of your top goals. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients and this is always a top priority. One of our users, Frameri, had this very business goal, so they ran a contest. Initially, Frameri was seeing about 600-700 visits to their site per week. After the contest they saw a traffic increase of 3,000-5,000 visits per week.

Frameri Contest with great results While new traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to more sales, it does increase your chance of higher conversions. And higher conversions means more sales.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still an effective method of converting visitors into buyers when done right. But how can you send out email when you don’t have an email list? You can’t. But you can start to build one by running a contest and encouraging participants to sign up for your monthly newsletter. Make sure to mention that it features more exclusive contests and promotions. Sending regular email will keep you at the top of your customers minds and encourage sales.

Make this Spring one of your seasons yet; run a contest with Strutta and watch your sales bloom!