8 Tips on How to Use Sweepstakes to Grow Your Subscriber List
By Meredith Cunningham
Published on eM+C 3/11/2011
Need a new way to engage your email subscribers? Any marketer knows that the main goal of any email campaign is to engage the right subscribers and grow the list. A great way to do that is through a viral campaign or acquisition sweepstakes. A new whitepaper from Listrak, Email Acquisition via Sweepstakes: Attract the Right Subscribers Fast, offers the following tips and guidelines to help you attract the right subscribers, and quickly:
1. Keep it simple. When starting a campaign, it's easy to get overwhelmed with ideas. It's also typical to want to run contests or sweepstakes over a long period of time. The key is to keep it simple. Have a strategic, limited-time offer so that subscribers will respond quickly to your urgent and exclusive offer. Be sure to include banner ads, automated emails, and social media and mobile announcements.
2. Make it personal. Cash prizes can be used, but how can you tell if the subscriber is using you for the cash prize? Make it personal and offer one of your products as the prize. Doing so will attract consumers that are genuinely interested in your merchandise.
3. Encourage social sharing. This is the latest and hottest trend in customer acquisition — e.g., "like" our brand on Facebook and get an additional percentage off your next purchase. Do the same thing for users that either recommend your products or invite their friends to join them in your social media space. This will expand the scope of the sweepstakes.
4. Promote in the right channels. Email may be the most popular way to announce and promote campaigns, but don't forget about your social media and mobile networks. Try including banner ads on your website and other relevant places as well.
5. Send entry confirmations. Email confirmations may by the most important step in this process because they validate the email addresses on your list. Fake or invalid email addresses increase bounce rates, negatively influence deliverability and destroy your reputation. Automated confirmations ensure that email addresses used are, in fact, valid.
6. Welcome new subscribers. Subscribers are most engaged with your brand when they first sign up for your email program. Build on that by beginning the relationship with a welcome message. Not only will subscribers feel welcomed, the series of messages will "weed out" participants that were interested in the contest and the contest alone. This will also give subscribers the chance to opt out, so you can focus on those that are genuinely interested in your brand.
7. Monitor new subscribers. Keep a close eye on the results of your welcome messages. Track open and clickthrough rates, bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, and new subscriber inactivity levels. If there isn't any activity, you can try to re-engage subscribers with a re-engagement campaign or simply remove them from your list.
8. Get the legalities right. Before launching a sweepstakes, have your legal team or an attorney review all aspects of the campaign — the official rules, federal and state requirements for bonding and registration, tax documents, guidelines for winner selection, eligibility requirements, and so on.
Some successful sweepstakes have seen email lists grow by 20 percent or more in just a few days. Follow these tips and the same could happen for you!