How to Run a Contest That Grows Your Email List

By: Irene Byvalkevych
Date: Feb 26, 2019
Comment: 0
Category: Abstract Management, Awards Marketing

Do you wonder how to grow your email list? Judgify provides contests as a powerful marketing tool to enlarge your email list, engage a new audience, establish successful email campaigns, and further sales and promotion purposes. So how should you run a contest to grow your email database?

Reasons to run a contest

Here are the main reasons why you should run a contest:

Contests or competitions that determine the best contestants among participants are one of the best ways to grow your marketing email list.
Contests could be a part of your marketing plan to promote a certain product. For example, you may ask buyers to publish their photos with your products. The best photo or the highest voted photo wins. With the help of the contest, you can increase product awareness and boost your product sales.
Online competitions can increase the popularity of your pages on social networks and attract loyal customers.
You can collect information about new users and form a list of potential buyers for further marketing.

Running an online contest is quite easy if you use platforms like Judgify. Such applications allow event coordinators, sales professionals, and customer success representatives to manage event attendees, enable more efficiency at awards events, and drive more traffic.

Types of contests to run

There are many interesting and engaging contest types:

Grant contests
Non-profit contests
Photo contests
Video contests
Essay contests
Caption contests, etc.

You can always grow your email list using a contest. Your contest may also be completely random and based on luck. Even so, these attract attention to your brand, and participants will leave their contact data.

How to create a contest & set it up

To properly organise a competition, you will need to come up with a name. The platform you choose allows you to easily name your contest, plan and publish your award categories, define the competition rules and submission requirements, and set up payment methods. You will have control over every single contest detail with a unique submission and judging module.

You can use Judgify.me for managing all your entries. Here’s what you can do:

View, track, and filter entrants by status, company name, or category.
Track the payment status of each submission if there is a participation fee.
Invite judges easily.
Export the filtered list of entrants in an Excel file so judges can store the relevant data in one place.
Keep your submissions constantly updated, etc.

To complete your platform setups and grow your email list by running a contest, you also need to decide when to run the competition as well as what particular information you need to collect or exclude, etc.

How a participant can actually take part in the competition

To encourage participants to take part in your contest and grow your email list, you should come up with a clear contest registration process. Determine what a person needs to do to become a participant in your competition. If this is your first competition and you still don’t know how the audience will react to such a proposal, the terms and conditions should be as simple as possible.

For example, like or repost. Furthermore, define which platform you will use (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, your own website, your blog, a real venue, etc.) and how the competition will end.

Basically, you should create clear contest terms and conditions, and participants should submit on the platform you choose to announce the contest.

Prizes for winners

If you know your target audience and its needs, desires, and problems, it will be easier for you to decide what kind of prize your audience would be interested in, what the winner’s nomination will look like, and what the scheme of the competition should be. Here are some prize goals that can be achieved:

Make it useful. If you provide products, choose something from your line as a prize. With the right contest promotion, excitement is guaranteed. Who doesn’t want to get a cool product or service by making just a couple of clicks?
Link your competition with an event that your target audience is waiting for. This may be ticketing to a conference, concert, movie or theater, etc. The main condition is that your potential customers should want to go there.
Include a new product that is not yet on the market, one that your target audience is waiting for. A good discount will do, for example, 50% off.

Offer prizes that are truly valuable to your potential customers. Only then will people want to compete for them.

Common contest promotion methods

Tell your audience about the upcoming event in your email newsletter, on social networks, or in a PR for media. Go wherever there are clusters of your potential customers.

You can create several different publications to test different formats. You can also try different triggers, headers, promotion settings, designs, and paid ads. This will help you find the best option for cost and audience involvement.

Try influence marketing to involve opinion leaders and industry tycoons in your event and to create a buzz around your contest.

After five days, if there are no registrations, send a new letter with a post from your blog or a link to a video on your YouTube channel, etc. Next, set up the newsletter so that participants regularly receive useful and tempting offers.

How to judge

The modern-day event industry provides several ways to judge contests easily:

Via online platforms
Via event apps
On site
Through an event judging module
All of the above-mentioned ways simultaneously

Thus, you can easily create an invitation letter or email asking potential judges to preside at your awards or judge contests.

How to collect subscribers and emails

If you organise a contest to grow your email list, you should include certain elements in your contest. Use popular hashtags or invent your own to attract attendees. Research the pages of your subscribers and competitors on social media. Select those who correspond to your target audience as good examples. Learn the tactics they use, and add them to your posts.

Again, use an online contest platform and other useful event marketing tools to register, collect, and store the data.

Contest ideas

Try to say what kind of prize the winner will receive in the name of the post. That way, you quickly hook the attention of potential participants because people will immediately understand what they are competing for.
Be sure to highlight the value of the prize. You can specify its price or significance, if any.
Make participation conditions as simple as possible. Do not demand too much information from participants. Email addresses and their name is enough. Note that with each new field that needs to be filled in, the conversion rate falls.
Add a countdown timer to activate the urgency trigger and push people to participate more actively.
Grow your email list by running a contest that fits your company goals.

Tips on how to get the most out of a contest

Set the goal.

Like any marketing activity, a competition needs a goal. More precisely, the competition should be a way to achieve a specific goal.

Plan your contest.

There are different types of contest marketing, and the type of competition you choose varies depending on your goals.

Develop clear terms and conditions.

When planning a competition, you will need to develop a set of conditions and clear rules that will help you accomplish three tasks:

Ensure that the competition meets the requirements of current legislation
Make sure the participants understand how their information will be used
Create conditions for fair and transparent judging and choosing the winner

Create a promo.

You already have your goals and a plan. Now you need to prepare for the contest promotion. The generally accepted approach is to use a combination of email marketing, paid advertising on social networks, digital advertising, and even traditional media. In marketing, promotional channels will vary depending on your budget and goals. Of course, the results of promotion will be different on different channels.

Choose a winner.

An online judging panel allows you to organise a transparent judging process and pick a winner based on the scoring results.

Announce the winner.

Once the winner is selected, the participants must find out the results. At this point, you can send everyone an email with the name of the lucky winner, thank everyone for their participation, and, for example, offer a coupon for the next purchase/event, etc. Publish the name of the winner on the platform you’ve used to conduct the contest.

Measure its efficiency.

Although the contest is over, your work is not finished. Look at the results and determine if this marketing campaign was successful. Did you achieve your goals? Is there anything you can improve for next time?

Conclusion

This type of contest marketing at an online contest platfom for subscribers will help you to attract new customers, collect information about them via email, and earn the right to marketing communication with them after the end of the competition. In addition, holding a competition online is a great way to stir up existing customers and create a bit of noise, making your business even more popular.

Are you ready to organise your first contest and give your subscribers some excitement? Register right away, and we’ll help you make it happen. Good luck!