Generating Sales Leads with an Online Contest
| Category: Online Promotion | Date: 2003-06-24 |
The key to success online is being able to generate a steady flow of new "qualified" prospects to deliver your sales message to. Running an online contest is one of the best ways to do this.
There are two things you can accomplish with your contest.
1) You can draw attention to your web site or product/service.
2) You can generate "qualified" sales leads that you can follow up on with your offer.
First, decide on your contest rules.
1) Decide what you want the contestant to do in order to enter your contest.
I will use our Spot the Double contest as an example. To enter the Spot the double contest, entrants must read our classifieds in the A.I.M. Ezine and find which classified has been posted twice.
This helps everyone of our advertisers because it GUARANTEES their ad will be read. Everyone who plays Spot the Double must scour through the classified section to find the double ad.
2) Decide how you find a winner. This can work two ways. You can run your contest over a certain time frame, like we do with Spot the Double. Every week, we choose a winner from all who have entered. Or, you can base your contest on a certain number of contestants. ie: "We need 1000 entrants then we choose our winner!" Running your contest based on the number of entrants is an ideal way to guarantee you will have a targeted group to follow up on.
3) Decide on your prize. A major consideration when deciding on your prize is that you want your prize to "qualify your entrant" for your product or service you wish to promote.
With Spot the Double, the prize is a free post of your classified ad in the A.I.M. Ezine for three issues. Chances are that if someone enters our contest, it is because the prize is something they want. So the "prize" has qualified the player as being interested in our service of placing ads in our ezine.
The important part of your contest is going to be your follow up after the contest draw date. You want to send everyone who played, an announcement congratulating the winner AND promoting your product or service. Do not leave out your product or service. This was the purpose of the contest, after all. You have gathered the qualified names and emails of your contestants so you can send them your very best offer on your product and service and convert them to a paying customer.
Prepare this offer with careful consideration because you often only get one chance at making a first impression.
To summarize:
The easiest way to receive your entries is with an autoresponder. We have just put one into action for our Spot the double contest. When a person enters, they send email to doubles@rapid-reply.com. The autoresponder sends the contestant a confirmation email, acknowledging their entry and it includes a powerful sales message so we get their attention right from the beginning. The autoresponder sends us the digest report daily, which is a collection of all entries. We then use this list of entrants to make our draw. We now have two great opportunities to convert a player to a customer.
But most importantly, we achieve our main objective: to increase the value of our advertising space. We want to have satisfied customers and the Spot the Double contest ensures that our subscribers read the classified ads very carefully!
Put your contest into play as soon as possible. It is a sure fire way to generate qualified sales leads.
Kevin Needham, Publisher, A.I.M. Ezine
About the Author
Kevin Needham Publisher of Active Internet Marketing. http://www.inetexchange.com/inet-mailer.htm Business Intelligence for Successful On-line Marketers Subscribe today to the free A.I.M Ezine. subscribe-Inet-Mailer@send.memail.com
kevin@inetexchange.com
http://www.inetexchange.com/inet-mailer.htm
There are two things you can accomplish with your contest.
1) You can draw attention to your web site or product/service.
2) You can generate "qualified" sales leads that you can follow up on with your offer.
First, decide on your contest rules.
1) Decide what you want the contestant to do in order to enter your contest.
I will use our Spot the Double contest as an example. To enter the Spot the double contest, entrants must read our classifieds in the A.I.M. Ezine and find which classified has been posted twice.
This helps everyone of our advertisers because it GUARANTEES their ad will be read. Everyone who plays Spot the Double must scour through the classified section to find the double ad.
2) Decide how you find a winner. This can work two ways. You can run your contest over a certain time frame, like we do with Spot the Double. Every week, we choose a winner from all who have entered. Or, you can base your contest on a certain number of contestants. ie: "We need 1000 entrants then we choose our winner!" Running your contest based on the number of entrants is an ideal way to guarantee you will have a targeted group to follow up on.
3) Decide on your prize. A major consideration when deciding on your prize is that you want your prize to "qualify your entrant" for your product or service you wish to promote.
With Spot the Double, the prize is a free post of your classified ad in the A.I.M. Ezine for three issues. Chances are that if someone enters our contest, it is because the prize is something they want. So the "prize" has qualified the player as being interested in our service of placing ads in our ezine.
The important part of your contest is going to be your follow up after the contest draw date. You want to send everyone who played, an announcement congratulating the winner AND promoting your product or service. Do not leave out your product or service. This was the purpose of the contest, after all. You have gathered the qualified names and emails of your contestants so you can send them your very best offer on your product and service and convert them to a paying customer.
Prepare this offer with careful consideration because you often only get one chance at making a first impression.
To summarize:
The easiest way to receive your entries is with an autoresponder. We have just put one into action for our Spot the double contest. When a person enters, they send email to doubles@rapid-reply.com. The autoresponder sends the contestant a confirmation email, acknowledging their entry and it includes a powerful sales message so we get their attention right from the beginning. The autoresponder sends us the digest report daily, which is a collection of all entries. We then use this list of entrants to make our draw. We now have two great opportunities to convert a player to a customer.
But most importantly, we achieve our main objective: to increase the value of our advertising space. We want to have satisfied customers and the Spot the Double contest ensures that our subscribers read the classified ads very carefully!
Put your contest into play as soon as possible. It is a sure fire way to generate qualified sales leads.
Kevin Needham, Publisher, A.I.M. Ezine
About the Author
Kevin Needham Publisher of Active Internet Marketing. http://www.inetexchange.com/inet-mailer.htm Business Intelligence for Successful On-line Marketers Subscribe today to the free A.I.M Ezine. subscribe-Inet-Mailer@send.memail.com
kevin@inetexchange.com
http://www.inetexchange.com/inet-mailer.htm
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