How You Can Use a Simple Sweepstakes Promotion To Attract More Team Members & Customers to Your Business By Rene Banuelos

How You Can Use a Simple Sweepstakes Promotion To Attract More Team Members & Customers to Your Business

One of the biggest challenges to anyone in the direct sales industry is having enough leads after you have already contacted everyone in your warm market. The best kind of leads your business can get are those referred by others. What if I told you there is a way to have your current customers excited about referring you their friends? Yes, running a sweepstakes can make that happen. What’s also great is that these referrals are virtually free. You do not need to pay for these leads nor pay for any ads to acquire them. So how can you get more of these great free leads?

 Using an Ethical Bribe to Get People to Refer Friends.

So why are your happy clients or friends and family not referring your business to more of their friends? Let’s face it, these days everyone is busy. And even if they completely love your product or service, they will more than likely not take the time to message or call a friend to talk about your business.

Most times all they need is a little bit of encouragement, or how I like to call it, an ethical bribe. What if just by referring a friend, they got a chance to win something really cool, something they liked? And what if you made it so easy for them to refer that it only took a few clicks to get it done? I guarantee you that many more of your clients would refer their friends if there was potentially something for them.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to setup a sweepstakes online. Your clients or existing leads would sign up for a chance to win a prize. And once registered they would be asked to refer friends for more chances to win. This gives your sweepstakes the potential to go viral, which can result in a ton of free leads for you. As crazy as it may sound, people will promote your business without charging you a cent.

Different Ways to Structure The Sweepstakes

  1. Lucky Winner: You can randomly choose 1 or more lucky winners. Remember you must give a higher probability of winning to the ones who have more referrals.

  2. Competition: Give a prize to the top referrers. You will need to provide a leaderboard to encourage competition. You would be surprised how competitive some people can get once they see their name on the leaderboard.

  3. Friend Wins, You Win: Sometimes a prize can be so desirable that people may actually not share with their friends because they want to win and not their friends. A way to prevent this is to tell them that if someone they refer wins, they will also get a price.

  4. On-Going: The fun doesn’t have to end.  You can pick a new winner every week or month and just continue the sweepstakes. I recommend using a countdown timer till the day/time the next winner will be picked. That way people will have an urgency to get their friends to register before that time.

  5. Combination: You can also get creative and choose a combination of the options above. Just remember not to make it so complicated that people don’t refer their friends because they don’t understand the sweepstakes.

How to Choose the Prize

Choosing a good prize is essential to having a successful sweepstakes campaign. I am sure you have seen at least one ad online offering you a chance to win an iPad. These sweepstakes can generate a ton of leads. However, most of them are worthless because they are not targeted. We know these people want an iPad; but more than likely they are not people who are interested in your product or service.

You want to get leads who are likely to purchase what you are selling. I recommend choosing a prize that compliments your own product or service. That way people who are not in your target market will not sign up and you won’t end up with a list of worthless leads.

If you choose your own product as the prize, make sure your sweepstakes has an end date (not on-going ), otherwise some people will hold off from buying because they are hoping to win and get your product for free.

How a Sweepstakes Helps You Create Social Content.

One of the hardest things to do for most businesses is to create good social content. Well, announcing the winner(s) of your sweepstakes makes for a great story to share. And if you run an on-going sweepstakes, you will always have new stories. If you are a local business, you may want to ask the winner to come to your business and pick up the prize. You will have the opportunity to take a good picture and or video and share it.

Want to get more engagement to your announcement post? Start by posting to your public Fan Page. Then email everyone who entered announcing you have picked a winner. But don’t tell them who won, just give them a link to the post and ask them to click to find out if they won. You are going to get a lot of views on the post. And most people will comment congratulating the winner, which is great. The more activity on that post, the more likely it is to pick up traction and get exposure. And if you are running an on-going sweepstakes, that post should link back to your sweepstakes. If not, you should lead them to a page where they can learn more about your product. That way when other see the post, you’ll get more leads and/or sales.

Stay Legal. What Can Go Wrong!

Sorry, I have to give you a disclaimer here. I am not licensed to practice law in your state or country, or anywhere in the world for that matter. So, I do recommend you get legal advice from someone who is. That being said, I do want to give you a short (not exhaustive) list of things to watch out for.

  1. Use a Terms and Conditions: You need to place a link to the terms and conditions for your sweepstakes somewhere on the registration page. If using 22Social (see below), it must include a statement that says that your sweepstakes is not offered/sponsored by neither 22Social or Facebook and a complete release by entrants for both 22Social and Facebook.  I know there are sweepstakes terms and conditions generators online you can use. You may want to look these up. But, again, I am not an attorney. So don’t take my word for it.

  2. Don’t Require a Purchase: I know it is tempting to setup a sweepstakes that only your customers can enter as incentive to get more people to buy your product or service. However, that would look very much like you are selling lottery tickets, which is illegal in most places.

  3. Stay Away from Alcohol: I am not talking about consumption here. There are strict laws around giving away alcohol especially with age. Again, I am not your attorney; but I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble.

  4. Careful with other People’s Products: Make sure that the company is ok with you doing giving away products. Most companies are ok with this but it’s best to verify ahead of time.

What You Will Need

  1. Registration Page: This is the page you will be inviting people to and where you will be asking them to register for the sweepstakes. Make sure you don’t over complicate this page with too many details about the sweepstakes. You don’t need to confuse them by telling them to invite their friends for more chances to win. You can do that after they have registered. However, it is important that you not only pitch them on registering for a chance to win the prize, but also take advantage of the fact that you have their attention and talk about your business. This is especially important when your prize is not your product or service. You can build this page with only images and text, but a video tends to generate more registrations.

  2. Confirmation Page: The confirmation page is where people will be redirected to after they have registered. They are already a lead at this point, so the next step is to encourage them to refer friends for more chances to win. This is were you can get into more detail on how the sweepstakes is structured (see the options above). Again, you have their attention here, so don’t forget to mention your business or even give them a discount for your product or service.

  3. Referral Tracking: You will need a system to track referrals. This system should also help you pick a winner by giving a higher chance of winning to those who referred more people. To do this, you will need to give every person who registers a unique URL they can share with friends. Make sure they have a way to get their URL from the confirmation page.

  4. Leaderboard: If you are choosing to structure the sweepstakes as a competition (see above), then you will definitely need a leaderboard. Knowing how close they are to winning can definitely encourage people to start inviting more friends and try to win. It can’t get any better than having a few people competing to get you more leads that are not costing you anything.

  5. Some Traffic: What is exciting about a sweepstakes is getting free leads that are referred by people who have registered and getting those leads to refer more people. But, initially you won’t have anyone registered, so no one will be referring. You have to get the process started. If you have an exciting list of customers or an email list of leads from other campaigns, then you can get things going by inviting them to register. If you don’t have either, then I recommend that you run well targeted Facebook Ads.

READY TO GET STARTED? Check out our detailed tutorial note by clicking here.

Using 22Social is the Most Simple and Quickest Way to Launch Your Sweepstakes .

Building every item on the list that I mentioned above from scratch on your website can be a very long, expensive and/or painful process. I want to highly discourage going that route. And paying for systems that are nearly $100 a month doesn’t make sense either. Using 22Social you can launch your sweepstakes right inside your Facebook Fan Page in minutes without breaking the bank. See below how you can start for FREE!
Here is how 22Social app works:

  1. Registration Page:  With a few clicks you can install a 22Social app right on your Fan Page. The first part of it is what we call a “Gate,” which in this case will act as your Registration Page. You don’t need any programming or web development experience to quickly add your text, media like images, videos and event countdown timers and more.

  2. Facebook Login: Your Registration Page will have a built in button where your users can click to register and become a lead. 22Social uses Facebook Login to register and identify your customer. We have already done all the heavy lifting here, so there is nothing for your to program here. All you need to know is that the system will capturing their basic information from their profile (name, email, dob, location, etc.) in the background when they sign up. Why is this a big deal? Because you have a real person’s Facebook profile you can chat with on Facebook Messenger. You have the option to also get these leads automatically added to your favorite auto-responder/CRM.

  3. Confirmation Page: After the person has registered, they are sent to the what we call the“Main Content” of your 22Social app, which in this case will serve as a Confirmation Page. Just like on the “Gate”, you can easily add media and text to fit your needs.

  4. Leaderboard & Referral URL: You can easily add a button on your Confirmation page linking to a leaderboard. There is already one built for you as part of the 22Social app, so there is no work required on your part. The leaderboard prominently displays the person’s unique referral URL that they can easily copy, tweet, share or send via Facebook Messenger (see the images below). It also lists the top 10 referrers, which is critical for running your sweepstakes as a competition. They will also see a list of everyone they have referred.

  5. Customer List: Every 22Social app has a section we call the “SRM” (Social Relationships Manager). It has a list of everyone who has registered for the sweepstakes. For each person you will have access to their basic information (more than name and email) as well as a link to their Facebook Profile allowing you to quickly chat with them.

  6. Choose a Winner: The SRM also has a button for choosing a winner. It will randomly select a winner from the list, giving a higher probability to those who have referred more people. It uses the person’s Facebook Profile to generate a nice picture you can screen capture and use for a post. If the person was referred by someone, their picture will show up as well. This makes it easy to use the “Friend Wins, You Win” (see above) promotion.

  7. Bonus, Attaching a Facebook Group: 22Social gives you the option to attach a Facebook group. If this option is enabled, after a person registers, they will be directed to your Facebook Group to join your community. You can create a “pinned” post on the group that can serve as your confirmation message and link to the leaderboard that is part of your 22Social app.

  8. More: You can use 22Social to run a Hangout On Air live stream for those who have registered to close them on your product or service. And create multiple registration pages for your sweepstakes and much more .

Example of Sweepstakes using 22Social

HidrateMe ran a sweepstakes to promote the launch of their smart water bottles. They decided to give away 10 bottles as well as 3 apple watches. This helped them generate more than 4200 leads in less than 20 days. On the first image below you will see the “Gate” (or Registration Page), and the “Main Content” (or Confirmation Page). On the second diagram, you will see their leaderboard. Once you have the videos and/or images ready, you can launch your sweepstakes with 22Social in minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s how it looks when your participants share their referral link:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

READY TO GET STARTED? Check out our detailed tutorial note by clicking here.

? Try 22Social today with zero risk! Here’s how to sign up today and get all of this for free:

  1. Get a free 30 day trial of 22Social. This gives you ALL of our features, including unlimited leads and sales on up to 3 Facebook fan pages. No limits. No risk.

    ★ Start your trial here: www.22s.com/magtrial
    (You can skip this step if you already have a 22Social account.)

  2. Refer 3 friends to 22Social to earn your subscription for FREE!

    ★ Get your referral link here: http://bit.ly/2cIZO7P
    (Your subscription is free as long as you maintain 3 active referrals. Yep, totally free! Otherwise, you can get all the benefits and features of 22Social for only $29/mo.)

We look forward to helping you succeed!

Cheers!
– Rene Banuelos
CEO & Co-Founder of 22Social

 

 

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