Making These 11 Mistakes with Your Giveaways, Sweepstakes and Contests?

Exploring and receiving opportunities is great. Some marketers want to invest it through sweepstakes, giveaways and contests to make the business easily grow and develop. Business owner always think that giving something away will do a great result to their company.

This is not really the case. There are still businesses who run sweepstakes and giving something away didn’t exceed their expectations because some are giving them a bad result which leads them to have a bad taste in their mouth.

To run a successful promotion, here are some tips or 11 ways to increase a chance after failing a marketing campaign.

1. Importance in signing a form

Signing up a form is important especially if they are not yet familiar about the business they run through even if it is the thing that most people hate. This work can be done correctly and smoothly.

If you want to throw a giveaway to people for some reason, be sure that they follow the rules and they filled out the forms correctly to see how it performs. Send a 50/50 percent each version (A/B) for people to enter the giveaway.

Or if you want, there is another way, make a version C where you can only send directly to people the giveaway and not requiring them to sign up the site at all. Compare those 3 versions and see which is better.

2. Entering a Promotion

Entry processing is important and confusion also a main reason why your promotion may fail at the same time. You didn’t notice but it is really the main reason, lot of people don’t have any ideas about this. Always bear it in your mind that if you want to have a good promotion, then you must understand and know how to enter. If people won’t understand, then your entries might drop.

If you don’t want to be confused, send your promotions with people who you trust to avoid confusion before sending it live. If there will be no clarifications from people, then you did a great work. But if people are asking you and keep nagging you then there must be a big problem that needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

Example of a great promotion where people tend to be confused when entering a promotion. It requires steps that needs to be completed before entering. No need to worry because it does not need any further information about yourself, only the rules and the winner to be pick out. After completing the task to enter, how would you know if you are already entered?

There are ways to make your promotion to be more effective. You can use an application like Pinterest. This can help to make your promotion easy and effective. Though, it also requires to sign up for some information like name and email address. This few info can increase the rate and prevent confusion of your promotion.

Be sure that your page for your promotion is clean and it should be accessible to make it easier to complete by the end user. If it not clears enough for them, it can cause confusion and it can give a possibility that your page will be closed.

It is good to receive a feedback from someone to know that you did good for your promotion. If people review your promotion, and it is clear enough for them to understand what is your page is all about, then it has a chance that your promotion will easily to enter. If it is hard to understand, then you need to make an adjustment to gain good reviews.

3. Promotion Barrier

If the barrier is too high, it gives a chance that your promotion won’t exceed from the expectations. This is a main reason why some promotions fail. If your promotion is way too long then it gives a chance to take the process longer and it’ll take too much time to finish.

For example: Nowadays in any social media accounts, there are lots of people always giving away things. But before giving it away, they need to have rules to follow and to be completed. After announcing the winners, they asked some info like name, address and mobile numbers. Actually, you don’t need to ask too much information of someone because it will take too much time and it can lead to fail the promotion. Just keep it simple so that you can gain lot of entries!

Think about more content that is easy to make and can gain a lot of entries. Example; a video contest, think about that creating video takes too much time to shoot and edit so it can gain only few entries but if the prize is good enough and worth of time, then it’ll gain a lot of entries unlike doing sweepstakes, it can surely gain lot of entries.

Facebook is another barrier or hindrance. Most people don’t use Facebook as an access of all the information. If you want to use Facebook for your promotion then you should use it appropriately and always ensure the safety of your information.

If people really need to sign up a lot of information, try to find a way to break it in different variations in order for them not to be confused and not to take too much time to fill out the information provided. Here are some examples:

After filling out the names and other information, it needs to be completed in order to enter.

What makes this thing great is that, people who are signing out the entry and didn’t get any chance to be selected, the email address that they gave will still be collected so they can contact them again and give a second chance.

A large majority of time is too hassle and it can surely take too long. Name and email address is enough, if you need shipping address, then you can ask the winner for some details.

4. Giving a right prize

The prizes that have been given can give a big impact to your business and promotion. The prizes should be aligned to the winners so it can be useful. Do you think someone will be happy if the prize is not aligned with their needs?  

When it comes to choosing a prize, think about it first if the prize is useful and if it is a great thing to giveaway. If the prize isn’t that attractive for people, then you can’t get any entries and your promotion won’t increase, to have a good rate depends the value of your prize. It is important because it is where your business or promotion receives good rates. 

In conclusion, your prize needs to be fitted to your business and always think about it first if it is valuable enough and if it is a great help to increase and to have a good result of your business or promotion.

This is a great post to come up with a good conclusion.

5. Inappropriate Marketing Strategy

Sweepstakes contest is like building a good image to your promotion, just like a seasoning that you add to the food to make it delicious. The reason also why promotion may fail because of the not-well planned promotion. If you plan to post on your Facebook and other social media sites, tell you it is not enough. You need to send emails for everyone.

Look for a good target market, because it is where you make your promotion successful and grow your business. Only if you don’t want to be stucked with a business without promotion. Let anyone to enter, the more entries, the more you can gain promotion.

It is always a good idea to have a goal and you planned it well, not all people cares about the business you run or work for, want they want to have are the prizes, the freebies, who would’ve not go for freebies right? So, the final and last thing you need to do is to make a thousand lists for the freebie seeker.

6. Bad timing of launching an event

Before doing the giveaway event, check the calendar first if it is a good timing to launch the event. Don’t set a date for the giveaway event if there is a conflict for your promotion.

Avoid setting the giveaway event if there will be a major event to happen such as: Thanks giving event, Christening, Birthday, Anniversaries and etc.

7. Contradictory of different platforms

Before doing anything else for your promotion, is you need to test it first to avoid errors or etc.

This means that try it first in any different social media sites or any websites like: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and etc. that you have on your devices. Do not just test the page on how good they look instead, test the entire on how they will work to avoid failure of your promotion. No one wants to have a failure promotion so test the whole thing if it will work well or not so that you can make some adjustments.

Also, do not reject the promotion on your mobile devices because people nowadays are using mobile phones rather than other devices because it is more convenient for them so focus on promotion using mobile devices.

8. Defective follow-ups of email entries

You received a lot of email entries from people. While receiving it, you need to have a follow-up each email if you want to have a good contact with people who entered, because if you won’t follow them up, it can result to spam complaints. In this way, this cannot fail your promotion. 

The first thing to do after receiving the email entries is to thank them for entering and for signing it up. Also, announcing the winners and giving a consolation prize for those who didn’t win. The main goal here is to have a good relationship with the people who are customers.

9. Set goals

Even your promotion has a good result, you cannot still avoid the fact in your mind that it may still fail if the goal you set didn’t work well. A goal is really necessary for it can make you motivate and move forward what things may happen.

If you want to run a small business, think about a realistic goal to have a good result and good rating of your promotion. Do not set an unrealistic goal because it may cause to fail your promotion. First time experiencing of doing a giveaway will always be a good one than the second or third, so think about a good and realistic one.

10. Creating a wrong platform

Setting goal is important so that you are motivated to do good to your promotion. Hosting a location to set your goals is also necessary so take your goals into consideration. It has a big impact to your business or promotion. If you don’t take it seriously, then it can have a negative impact to your promotion.

Hosting a promotion in social media is a good decision, it’s a good thing because it can also help you grow and promote all your social media accounts and channels. Always choose a best platform hosting that is best to your goals for your promotion.

11. Choosing a right duration

Choosing a time duration when to start and end is a good decision for your promotion. Most especially if you want to have many entries, aside from giving rules, give also a time interval so that you can estimate how many people can enter the giveaway. 

Estimate the length of a promotion. It is good to have enough time so that you can prepare enough something for your promotion. Weeks may do but don’t make it too long, because people might complain because it took too much time for them to wait for the result, people don’t want to wait especially if it will take too much time to wait.