How Sweepstakes Can Increase Engagement Among Loyalty Program Members

A loyalty program helps you build lasting relationships with your customers. But with countless options for consumers today, retaining them is challenging for all brands.

Adding a loyalty amplifier, like sweepstakes, can elevate your program to another level of engagement for your customers. A sweepstakes also helps you positively impact loyalty goals such as customer acquisition, increased sales, point burn and brand advocacy.

A sweepstakes offers your customers the chance to win prizes, helps you collect valuable zero- and first-party data and expands your social media presence.  

Here’s how sweepstakes can help your brand create long-term customer relationships.

What Is a Sweepstakes?

Sweepstakes remain one of the most popular ways to collect valuable zero-party data and opt-ins because of their versatility. Entrants register for a chance to win, with one or more winners selected at random either throughout or at the end of the incentive period.  

They provide you with an abundance of insights that help strengthen customer relationships and encourage more frequent engagement.

A sweepstakes allows you to integrate the experience in a variety of formats across multiple channels, including social hashtags and text-to-enter incentives.

Offering various sweepstakes and integrating the experience across various loyalty programs will elevate your customer engagement.

For example, consider 19 Crimes (an Australian wine brand) with its Infamous Insider Rewards loyalty program.  

Members can complete tasks mapped out in the dashboard to accrue points they could use to enter a sweepstakes to win prizes such as swag, VIP perks and chances to win exclusive prizes. 

This is a great way to have your loyalty program members use their points to enter a sweepstakes to win a prize or experience. 

How Sweepstakes Help Loyalty Program Members Burn Points

Getting your loyalty program members to earn points is one thing, but getting them to use them is another.

Point burn is a goal for brands with loyalty programs, but often it takes members too long to accumulate enough points to redeem a reward.

Sweepstakes help your members burn points when they are included as an option in the rewards catalog where they pay X points to get entries for the chance to win aspirational rewards.

It’s beneficial to the brand because they remove point liability from the books. It’s also beneficial to members because lower earners have something to redeem for and higher earners have the chance to redeem points for higher-value rewards vs. the collect-and-get options already within reach.

Part of the point burn goal is to: 

• Create attainable rewards
• Generate new reward excitement
• Limit financial liability

New data on increasing loyalty program engagement with amplifiers shows that 74% of consumers agree that loyalty program rewards often feel unattainable, they require making too many purchases, require too many points and take too long to earn. 

By offering more attainable rewards, you’ll generate more excitement and engagement and make it easier for loyalty program members to burn more of their points.

There are many ways to incorporate low-cost rewards to reduce your program rewards budget. Chance to win rewards efficiently drive point burn by offering an aspirational reward at a fixed cost. Additional low-cost reward options include digital assets, exclusive content and partner-provided rewards.

Energizer’s Go Rewards loyalty program encourages brand loyalty among Energizer Batteries and Lights shoppers, while collecting consumer insights and driving repeat purchases.

Sweepstakes change over time to create program news and give members new ways to spend their points.

Amplifying Your Sweepstakes 

If you use a sweepstakes to increase your loyalty program engagement, some other amplifiers can complement your efforts.

To amplify your sweepstakes, consider:

• Incorporating an instant win game to increase participation and encourage repeat engagement.  
• Adding trivia or a survey where participants answer a set of questions to earn a sweepstakes entry. This helps your brand capture more robust data from participants. 
• Including a dashboard. With a dashboard sweepstakes approach, entrants complete a series of additional activities to earn additional entries. For example, participants complete a survey and share it via social media and earn an entry for sharing. 
• Including daily or weekly drawings for smaller prizes to help drive more engagement and entries. 

AMC Theatres leveraged a unique loyalty amplifier, “AMC Jumanji: The Next Level,” which combined sweepstakes and instant win into a gamified experience to engage members 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 tickets from AMC Theatres. 

Sweepstakes Help Make Your Rewards Attainable for Your Members

Ninety percent of consumers agree they’re more likely to engage with a brand if it offers incentivized engagements, like a sweepstakes.

And more than half (57%) of consumers have made a first-time purchase with a brand after participating in an incentivized engagement.

Sweepstakes help your brand:

• Acquire more loyalty program members
• Improve onboarding and program education
• Burn loyalty points more efficiently
• Keep members engaged and having fun
• Boost brand advocacy

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Loyalty Amplifiers.

If you want to learn more about loyalty amplifiers, check out the previous article in the series, What Are Loyalty Amplifiers and How Do They Impact Consumer Behavior?, or the next article in the series, How Instant Wins Elevate Loyalty Program Engagement.