How do you keep your brand top of mind, boost customer engagement and strengthen customer loyalty?
One way you can achieve those goals is by using Chance-to-Win incentives, which spark interest among your best customers in pursuit of prizes.
Chance-to-Win incentives help your brand reach your marketing goals, including data acquisition, customer acquisition, social media followers and enhancing customer loyalty.
When consumers register for your brand promotion, you’re collecting valuable zero-party data which can help you gain key insights. Each Chance-to-Win incentive you run helps you build an incremental 360-degree profile of your customers.
And sweepstakes can be tailored to meet various marketing objectives, including brand awareness, data acquisition, customer acquisition, email subscribers, social media followers, mobile app downloads and sales and traffic generation.
Let’s dig deeper into a few different types of Chance-to-Win incentives.
Sweepstakes
Customer acquisition and zero-party data are two of the main objectives for any sweepstakes your brand runs.
Sweepstakes entrants register to earn chances to win various prizes either during the promotion or at the end of it. With a sweepstakes campaign, you can integrate the experience across multiple channels, including social hashtags and text-to-enter promotions.
Tying an acquisition element to any sweepstakes you run is always recommended.
Consider the the Hilton Honors Pick Your Paradise Giveaway Referral Program. Its main objective was to increase acquisition by incentivizing Hilton Honors Members to invite friends and family to join.
Hilton Honors Members received a personalized referral link they could use to refer friends to the loyalty program via email, Facebook or Twitter.
For each friend who signed up via their personal link, the referring member received 10 sweepstakes entries for a chance to win a trip of their choice to a Hilton property in either Hawaii, China or Italy. Each new member also received one sweepstakes entry just for signing up through the program and could refer friends for more chances to win.
Instant Win Incentives
Instant Win incentives are tailored around engagement and repeat visits.
An instant gratification component within an Instant Win incentive will drive more engagement than a grand prize sweepstakes. Many smaller prizes seem more attainable to more people.
Instant Win games include turnkey games like spin-to-win, or scratch-to-reveal, animated reveals and video-based engagements.
Adding a sales component to any Chance-to-Win incentive is also recommended. This could include things like purchase validation, unique packaging codes, receipt uploads and soft purchase validation (photo with the product).
Ally Bank’s chance-to-win incentive, Ally Bank + Monopoly Grow Your Fortune, focused on financial literacy in a fun and engaging way.
Ally Bank turned six major metro areas into giant augmented reality Monopoly boards, challenging consumers to find hidden property squares using online and social clues. When participants found a property, they scanned it with their phone to earn a virtual game piece and an Instant Win play.
After collecting a Monopoly, participants were entered into the $50,000 cash drawing. The experience featured additional game elements like “Community Chest” and passing “Go” for even more ways to win. For players outside the six cities, the brand launched a national “Where’s Waldo” version of the game.
You can also add a Trivia element and ask your customers things about your brand. Also, using a personality profiler will help you with customer segmentation.
For example, White Castle celebrated its 100th birthday in style. Participants used combined purchase and non-purchase entries for ways to win prizes that included trivia to engage users on the history of the brand.
The engagement tactic included the Craver Time Machine that transported participants through time with a trivia challenge that focused on a different decade each week to test their White Castle knowledge and win exciting prizes.
Participants were encouraged to upload restaurant and retail receipts to increase their chances of winning prizes like booths named in their honor, a personalized voicemail greeting from CEO Lisa Ingram and the grand prize of $100,000.
AMC Theatres leveraged a unique incentive, “AMC Jumanji: The Next Level,” which combined sweepstakes and Instant Win into a gamified experience to engage with the movie trailer and drive ticket pre-sales.
Leading up to the release of the film, AMC Theatres transformed the passive trailer-viewing experience into an interactive board game. Players unlocked exclusive movie content and chances to win throughout the game. To complete the full experience—and earn a chance to win a real-life Jumanji adventure—moviegoers had to pre-order their Jumanji ticket from AMC Theatres.
Real-time Engagement
Referred to as a “Fire Drill,” this type of Chance-to-Win engagement tactic creates a sense of urgency.
Participants in these incentives can be engaged by anything ranging from sports events, weather milestones or holidays. It’s a real-time program where participants follow a particular brand, wait for an alert and be one of the first 100 people to respond after that alert goes out.
Reese’s “Go For Two” was a real-time “fire drill” Chance-to-Win engagement tactic.
This focused on integrating a real-time sporting event with brand awareness.
Reese’s “Go For Two” played off the brand’s famous dual peanut butter cup packaging with a strategy to sponsor 2-point conversions.
When a team went for a 2-point conversion, an alert was sent out. This was a great example of owning the moment.
If you’re a brand that wants to “own a moment,” sponsoring an event or creating real-time engagement with your loyal customers is a great vehicle to elevate engagement and gain insights from participants.
Advocacy as an objective is another key type of real-time engagement.
Starbucks launched a successful #SAVOURYOURWEEKEND campaign. The objective was to leverage brand advocates to promote new menu items and an Ace Bakery partnership.
Customers shared their favorite Starbucks drink and Ace Bakery brunch item pairings on Instagram with #SavourYourWeekend for a chance to win a weekend resort getaway.
Some Steps to Remember When Using Chance-to-Win Incentives
When you use any Chance-to-Win, remember these steps:
- Start with your program goals and objectives and decide which program mechanic to use.
- And then determine your brand voice and what incentive makes sense to use to spark engagement.
- Make sure your incentive is in line with your brand persona or brand promise and will be compelling to your customers.
- Customize the incentive to support your brand promise and consider your audience. Be true to your brand.
Chance-to-Win incentives build interest and excitement among your customers and help you collect valuable insights.
They’re a great way to keep your brand top-of-mind and elevate the engagement levels of your best customers.
If you want to talk about incentives or any engagement tactics to boost customer loyalty, reach out to our experts here any time.
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ebbo helps brands achieve their customer loyalty goals with full-service, end-to-end solutions and also creates original educational content straight from the experts to help loyalty marketers stay on the cutting edge of customer engagement.