How This Scratch & Win Giveaway Earned an 81% Conversion Rate

COVID-19 has shut down most of the world and forced everyone to stay home. In such despairing times, it's inspiring to see how businesses and communities have rallied together to help each other out.Here at ShortStack, we’re humbled by those who have pivoted their businesses to produce hand sanitizer, sew masks, or offer free home delivery. As a small contribution to the cause, we felt a giveaway was in order to spread a little joy. This, coupled with the trial of one of our latest features - Scratch & Win - resulted in the Scratch & Grin Giveaway, offering a chance to win 100 prizes plus a $100 Visa gift card grand prize.

ShortStack's Scratch & Grin GiveawayNo matter our mission, the experience wasn’t short of learning opportunities which we’re excited to share here. Read on to learn about this unique giveaway, the features we used, results we saw, and how running a Scratch & Win giveaway may work for your company.

Contest Basics

As previously mentioned, one of the reasons we chose to run a Scratch & Win giveaway was to spread a little joy during these tough times. This giveaway also allowed us to achieve a few periphery goals. These included:

• test driving our new Scratch & Win feature in a live setting,
• highlighting our unique prize codes feature, and
• collecting user-generated content for our gallery of brand loyalists.

We awarded 101 winners. 100 people won smaller prizes and one lucky participant won the grand prize.

Scratch & Grin prizesEach winner received a postcard asking them to post and hashtag their selfie wearing or using their new ShortStack swag so we can collect the content and display the posts in one impactful gallery.

Campaign Elements

The star of this giveaway was the Scratch & Win feature, mostly because of its cool factor. Like an instant win, this giveaway offered participants excitement and instant gratification after they “scratched off” an area with their mouse cursor (or their finger if they were on a mobile device).

This giveaway was interactive, asking participants to actually scratch to see if they wonAnother perk of the scratch and win feature is being able to automate it. Within the Instant Win setup menu in ShortStack, we indicated the number of prizes to be awarded and the timeframe to award them and ShortStack took care of the rest. Winners were chosen at random by our system during the duration of the campaign.Offering multiple prizes, especially when they’re awarded instantly, is a great way to boost participation. This strategy proved effective with this giveaway, giving us over 2,000 entries in just 10 days. The smaller prizes consisted of ShortStack swag. Instant winners might have won a keychain, a t-shirt, or a sticker and pin prize pack. The prize was indicated to the winner using ShortStack’s unique prize codes feature in both the campaign and in an automated email.After each entry submission, ShortStack would send an autoresponder email to the participant. The content included in the email was based on whether they had won or not, using liquid logic to display the correct content to each recipient.

The autoresponder used Liquid logic to send messages based on if an entrant won or lostTo help us get the word out about this giveaway, we implemented a clever strategy that ShortStack users have been leaning on for years. Our Refer-a-Friend feature incentivizes sharing by offering extra chances to win to those who can attract referral entrants. In this giveaway, we made the referral reward pretty hefty by offering 10 extra chances to win the grand prize.Refer-a-Friend is a great way to promote a contest or giveaway, but we also employed some “old fashioned” promotion methods. We sent an email to our mailing list as well as created several posts and stories across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.Winners were encouraged to show off their new swag by posting a selfie with the hashtag #ShortStackSwag. A feed was set up within ShortStack to collect these hashtagged posts and display them in a gallery. If the selfies can be used in future marketing for our company, we’ll simply reach out to the post’s owner using ShortStack’s rights management tools to obtain permission.

The Results

Before I jump into the good stuff, among the noteworthy results of this giveaway was the type of data we were able to collect. Although we don’t plan to use it for anything other than mailing prizes, this giveaway allowed us to incentivize the collection of physical mailing addresses. For many businesses, this is highly guarded personal info that potential future customers rarely want to part with. We were able to collect 100 mailing addresses simply by offering that many prizes.

Addresses were collected for winnersA more than noteworthy result of this giveaway was the total entries we were able to collect. Although our goals weren’t aimed at maximizing entry collection, we managed to collect more entries than many of our previous giveaways. The final, total entries for this campaign were 2,048.Now, hold on to your hat. The truly spectacular revelation this giveaway unfolded is this: ShortStack’s analytics recorded 2,517 unique views for this landing page. When you calculate the percentage of conversions (entries) to unique views, it's an astounding 81%. To put this in perspective, a benchmark conversion rate for lead-collecting landing pages across all industries is less than 12%.As a software company specializing in contest and giveaway marketing, we already knew that digital, interactive content (i.e.contests, giveaways, quizzes, etc.) is a great way to collect qualified leads and build a customer base, but an 81% conversion rate just goes to show that digital, interactive marketing is the most effective way to generate leads by far.

How to run your own

If you’re looking to run a giveaway with a unique flare, use the element of excitement that an instant win provides with the added fun factor of a Scratch & Win. Then,

• Always remember to start by outlining a goal and keep your goal in mind when designing the rest of your giveaway.
• Consider offering multiple prizes with a grand prize.
• Automate all of the elements you can including the giveaway itself, any promotional content such as emails, social media posts and follow up emails.
• Encourage winners to post on social media using a branded hashtag. Display the user-generated content in a gallery.

The Scratch & Win feature is currently being baked into a template to be made available to ShortStack users, but until that template is ready, our Custom Services team can build you a Scratch & Win giveaway to your specifications. Get in touch with us to find out more.

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