What are the main reasons for running your own prize competition online?

It is clear that as a webmaster, prize competitions can bring a number of benefits. You can drive more traffic to your website, run surveys to find out more about what people want, or even help promote a new product or website online. This can all be invaluable information if you want to improve your site and really understand what users want. After all, we all know that people are far more likely to fill in surveys if they have a chance of earning something in return.

So there you have it – prize competitions allow you not only to advertise a new product, your website, or even a special event, but also to better your understanding of your potential users and clients. Another reason you might want to run an online prize competition for free would be to gather user’s information in view of marketing something at a later stage – in other words, collecting email addresses of people that are likely to be interested in that product or sector.

There’s no doubt that some websites have become successful at increasing traffic to their website and collecting hits by regularly featuring prize competitions. Webmasters should see this as an additional, powerful marketing tool to use in the context of their broader strategy and in combination with other more traditional forms of advertising.

What are the different types of competitions you can run?

Ultimately, the type of competition that will be most suited to your business or website will depend on what you’re trying to achieve through this marketing initiative. Let’s run through the main types of prize competitions you can consider online, and what they achieve for you as a webmaster.

Prize draws and sweepstakes are a great way of bringing attention to your site for free. In the UK, these are usually free entry to remain unregulated. These are either based on a simple question (to ensure that a large number of people register their details) or require users to fill in a registration form or a short survey. This tends to be a very effective way of building an email list for your site or can bring new visitors to a part of your site you want to promote.

Other popular types of online competition are tiebreakers and slogan competitions. These require users to come up with a clever or innovative caption or slogan based on whatever you wish. Ultimately, if this is also a free competition for users, you can even extend the scope of what they are required to do an ask users to provide ideas for new products, changes to your website, based on a picture or a theme for example. Given that this takes a bit more initiative on behalf of users, you will usually find that the quality of feedback will be greater, but you may find that fewer people participate than in simple sweepstakes or draws. Companies often use this as a way of promoting or launching a new product for example, or get new users to their site.

Given that it is becoming increasingly easy to design games online, another great form of competitions is to base it off a simple game that anyone can play for free. We’ve all seen the popularity of games like Sudoku, crosswords and even car races. You can be sure if people enjoy the competition more because there is more of a fun element, you stand the chance of having return visitors. Even better, if you manage to really amuse users, there is a good chance they will forward the game around to friends – thereby increasing traffic to your site. If there’s a small prize at the outset of the game for the best player, that will ensure that people remain interested. You need to balance the value of the prize people can win – they might not bother for something really small and would rather opt for a free draw or sweepstake. You also have to consider how long the competition will last, because you want it to be long enough to attract as many people as possible, but not too long such that people don’t even try or lose interest along the way.

You can also combine different types of games to achieve more than one goal at a time. If you’re looking to build your email list, attract new users and even get users to visit new parts of your website, you could consider running some kind of treasure hunt. Here, users are given clues around the site, which allow them to go from page to page and ultimately find the solution to the game. This can be a popular competition format and some webmasters have taken this to the next level by asking users to go around the Net to other websites featuring different clues, to drive traffic to those sites as well (think the “Golden Jigsaw” earlier this year).

As we mentioned before, it really depends on your own goals with the competition. As a webmaster, you should first think carefully about your objectives and timeframe, and pick a competition format, prize and duration accordingly. Of course, these have to make sense in the context of your overall marketing and budget. And thinking about successfully converting the users you do manage to drive to your site thanks to your competitions is important – traffic is good, but not any kind of traffic.

So what are the best prizes to offer to attract users to your website?

The short answer is obviously that it depends on what your site is about, who you are marketing to, what you are trying to achieve, and what your marketing budget is! By and large, it is recommended to focus on prizes that have a close link with your own business or product so that you attract the right types of users (i.e. potential future customers) and that people recognise a clear link between the competition and your site. Otherwise, you risk spending money on a prize and getting very little return for the effort. You can gather large amounts of email addresses, but these will be of little value if nobody in that list is interested in your product.

 

All that being said, from time to time certain products will become very fashionable or desirable, so you may want to simply latch onto an exciting product launch to drive traffic to your site. For example, recently with the launch of the iPhone, a lot of people have looked for ways of winning an Apple iPhone online.

 

You can either source the prize through your usual channels if it is something you sell already or is closely linked to your activity. You can also consider joint ventures with other companies that can provide the prize or service if they benefit too. For example, you can approach suppliers of a product you’re thinking of as a prize and offer free advertising to them on your website in exchange for you running the competition yourself on your site. After all, this is what newspapers have been doing for years in the UK – it remains a very popular form of advertising.

Alternatively, you can look at the competition as part of your marketing budget for your website and simply devote some money to buying the prize yourself. It can seem a bit counter-intuitive at first but if you set things up correctly and carry out good online marketing for your competition throughout the duration, it can be a worthwhile investment. Of course, not everyone can afford to offer a car online, the prize has to be suited to how deep your pocket is! But rest assured all types of prizes can attract interest from users if the competition is free and you market it correctly. Instead of simply buying a prize, you can also design something specifically for the competition, such as a T-shirt with your logo on it, or a pen for example. That way, you can get more long-term benefit from the prize. These days, producing a design for a T-shirt need not cost an arm and a leg. Make sure the design is attractive though!

Finally, one good way of saving time in not having to pick the prize yourself (and therefore also risking limiting the potential appeal to users) is to offer gift vouchers to other popular websites. This can be a good way of ensuring men and women, young and old will find something they like. Although it is less exciting perhaps than a designated prize (and feels less personal), you can be sure that you won’t miss out on someone just because they have no interest in what you picked. So for the same prize value you can attract more people that way. For example, you could consider Red Letter Days or Argos or some other big website that allows you to buy remotely and have it sent to you. Discounts are another matter and people can find these less interesting than a real prize. The perception that they have to buy something in order to benefit from the prize itself simply isn’t very attractive and you risk having less success. Discounts can be a great incentive to users but are perhaps best used outside of the context of a competition – they simply don’t give users the sense of anticipation they can get from a prize.

 

 

And finally: rules and regulations

Make sure the rules of the competition are very clear and easy to access for all users. Take care, because the law for running competitions online has changed in the UK recently so it’s worth doing a bit of research before you go ahead to make sure your competition is legal and that your terms and conditions are written correctly. If you change rules during a competition, make sure you alert all the players that have participated. It’s very important to ensure that competitions are deemed fair by the players, otherwise you risk having complaints which may hurt your product sales and defeat the purpose. If you take care with this, you should be fine. Good luck with your competitions – you’ll find this is a fantastic way of generating additional traffic to your website and hopefully, this might become a regular feature of your marketing.

Remember, if you have a great competition or prize competition site to advertise, remember to post it on Prize Competitions as well! It’s free and could generate much more attention from people that are genuinely interested in finding new competitions to enter online.