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I wanted to give a little behind the scenes look at a contest we recently launched over on our Londontopia site.
Contests are one of the best ways to quickly build up an email list, and we’ve had a lot of success building our email lists through contests over the years. Almost a decade ago, we gave away a trip to London and received over 15,000 entries. Just this year, we gave away a year’s supply of tea back in January and got over 9,000 entries! Many of those who entered these contests have become longtime Anglotopia subscribers.
As part of our plans to reboot Anglotopia in 2024, I wanted to approach our next contest a little more deliberately. I knew the prize we wanted to offer – I wanted to giveaway the new Lego London Phone Box set (along with their other London sets). I decided to focus the promotion on Londontopia as that email list needs some serious growth this year as we expand with an events guide and attraction review directory.
But as I was thinking about it, I also wanted to kill two birds with one stone and still encourage sign-up for the Anglotopia email list. How can I do both?
Enter a fantastic new tool we’re using for the contest. Called Rafflepress, it’s a WordPress plugin that manages a contest for you. It handles entries, but it also allows users to gain ‘extra’ entries and chances to win by doing additional things to enter. So, you get one entry for subscribing to Londontopia, but you can also opt to get one extra entry if you subscribe to Anglotopia. The tool also allows many other ways to enter, and it tracks everything.
We used to use Google Forms to collect contest entries, but this was very limited in that it just gives you a raw list of entries – and it doesn’t validate them in any way. So, then you have cheeky people entering the contest 42 times. It takes work to filter those entries out. This new tool gives entrants the option to enter more than once and then tracks everything. And makes picking the winner super easy. It also integrates nicely with our email list manager – every entry is sent directly to our live mailing lists, so they immediately get a welcome email and will get the next newsletter. Very slick.
Over 24 hours, I’m very pleased with how the plugin is performing. Almost 1,000 entries so far, with 300 new email subscribers. This is only from us promoting the contest lightly. That’s just stage one. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a major marketing campaign and partnering with several other websites to get this contest in front of as many people as possible.
For British companies looking to enter the North American market, we highly recommend running a sweepstakes of some kind. It doesn’t have to be a high-value prize, but you would definitely get more interest in a higher-value prize.
Many marketers would argue that ‘sweepers’ – the slang term for people whose hobby it is to enter contests – are not quality subscribers. That’s partly true, but those who are really interested will simply unsubscribe in the first few weeks, and those who never open can be filtered out long-term by most email software. Those that stick around have immense value to your brand.
If you’re looking to run a sweepstakes, we can help you with that. Anglotopia has deep experience in marketing and contests, and a big contest will help you make a big splash in the North American market. Get in touch with us!
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