How to Elevate Your Marketing Strategy with Integrated Sweepstakes

In the busy and ever-changing climate of marketing, it takes more than just creativity to stand out among your competitors. It takes strategic planning and thoughtful marketing initiatives. One way to push your customer loyalty program to the next level is to integrate sweepstakes promotions into your marketing strategy. This tool will not only drive engagement with your current customers but also attract potential new members. Here’s how you can elevate not only your loyalty program but also your entire marketing strategy through these sweepstakes games.

It is easy and very common to group sweepstakes, contests, and instant wins together, but each offers separate advantages to your program. Offering sweepstakes introduces a dynamic and engaging way to grab the customer's attention and interest while also encouraging participation. By implementing sweepstakes into your loyalty program, you make it easy for your members to join in on the fun while also keeping them engaged with your brand and providing useful information for future use.

By integrating this into your loyalty program, you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and learn more about their habits. Here are just 3 things your brand can gain from this integration:

• Increased Member Engagement
• New Customer Data
• Higher Participation Rates

There are multiple ways to integrate sweepstakes into your marketing strategy to ensure that you reap the benefits all year round. Use this as a chance to have fun with your customers and create excitement around these sweepstakes when they are coming up. This is an easy way for your brand to build visibility, member engagement, and customer data. Running the same sweepstakes throughout the year can become repetitive, so consider different types of games to keep engagement and retention high! 

Key Elements to a Successful Sweepstakes Integration

Modular Design: Throughout the year, you will run and launch different campaigns and sweepstakes. It’s important to create a modular design that allows you to adapt and personalize each sweepstake to fit each campaign. With this flexibility, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly, but can you ensure that each promotion feels fresh and relevant, maintaining high customer engagement and participation.

Seamless Implementation: In this fast-paced market, it is important to quickly launch a new campaign without disrupting your customers' experience with your program. Making these implementations seamless allows you to make adjustments post-launch, respond to member feedback quickly, and see what is working and what isn’t in real-time.

Interesting Prizes: No one wants to enter a sweepstakes that doesn't offer something enticing or desirable. You should work to offer prizes that are relevant to your audience or the type of promotion you are running. Switch up the types of rewards, whether they are gift cards, free products, experience opportunities, or early access to new products. Look at what motivates your customers to make purchases, and go off that information. The more personalized your rewards are, the more engagement you will see.

Types of Sweepstakes

Omnichannel Sweepstakes: Making interactions with your members as simple and seamless as possible is what all brands should strive to achieve. Creating omnichannel sweepstakes is a great way to get everyone engaged, no matter their preferred channel of communication. While it is easy to think everyone wants to do everything digitally, utilizing other channels of communication opens up your target audience. Here are some channels that offer an omnichannel approach:

• In-store: Encourages engagement and participation through QR codes, receipt validation, or UGC.
• Online: Promote your sweepstakes through your website, email/newsletters, and loyalty platform.
• Social Media: Use the power of social media such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok to broaden your target audience.
• Mobile: Use text messages and your mobile app to keep members up to date about the sweepstakes and other messaging they don’t want to miss.

Having these different avenues for members to participate allows more engagement and helps you collect more data useful for future promotions.

Purchase-to-Enter Sweepstakes: Combining a sweepstake with receipt validation is a very effective way to drive sales while also encouraging engagement among customers. With this type of sweepstake, customers are asked to upload a picture of their receipt as their entry for a chance to win the grand prize. This is a great way to build a relationship and trust with current buying customers. It is also a low-maintenance entry that won’t cause them unnecessary hassle. By uploading a receipt, you receive first-party data collected either through a form or their program account, which can be used to personalize loyalty opportunities in the future.

However, there are few important details to remember when it comes to running this type of sweepstake. There are a number of ways participants can enter, but you can’t ‘require’ a purchase in order to enter. This can be put towards an additional entry, but you must offer an AMOE, or Alternate Method of Entry that’s free for participants. With these multiple entry methods, each entry is given equal weight. This means that if a participant completes an online entry form, submits a proof of purchase, and creates a social post, they will have three entries. However, no single entry increases their chances of winning over the others.

Ongoing Sweepstakes Campaign: Many brands already running a loyalty program might not realize the additional opportunities they can add to connect more with their customers. Brandmovers teamed up with Nestlé to do just that with their 150th Anniversary Sweepstakes! A 9-month promotion program was designed to connect Nestlé with their consumers while driving social awareness and loyalty engagement. A daily hashtag-based promotion allowed customers to upload pictures of their family enjoying various Nestlé products for a chance to win daily prizes. Additionally, Nestlé offered a weekly grand prize through a receipt upload sweepstakes that provided $15,000 for a family reunion. This example showcases a brand using a sweepstakes promotion to its full potential, adding different elements throughout its running time to keep customers engaged.

Integrating sweepstakes into your customer loyalty marketing strategy is a great tool to enhance customer engagement, gather new data, and boost participation rates. This powerful method builds brand loyalty in a fun and exciting way. Launching these promotions through your loyalty program ensures a seamless experience for your customers, encouraging continuous engagement with your brand. Elevate your marketing strategy all year long with integrated sweepstakes, and watch your customer engagement and brand loyalty rise.