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When businesses are looking for a fun, creative way to engage with customers, boost their sales and enhance their relationships with consumers, a digital promotional campaign is one marketing tactic that often ticks all the boxes.
As the online sector continues to grow, more creative concepts for digital promotions are being thought up and we’re seeing exciting new forms of instant wins, games, competitions, lucky draws, sweep stakes and rank and wins.
As with all marketing efforts, attempts to cut corners and costs can lead to an ineffective digital promotion, so if you’re considering such a campaign, it’s worth knowing where companies often go wrong
Mistake 1: Over complicating the message
K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Stupid!
Your customers don’t want to have to work too hard to win a prize. This is the key point to remember when implementing a digital promotions campaign, starting with the initial message you use to reach the consumer. Keep it simple! What are they going to win and how do they enter? If this information is lost in the flyer amongst detailed content, you will just as easily lose the customer’s interest.
A simple glance at the flyer should be enough to entice them to enter.
Mistake 2: Reinventing the wheel
Although for some companies, digital promotions are a new concept, they’ve actually been around long enough for a number of techniques and systems to be well and truly tried and tested. There is no reason for you to start from scratch; this is an easy way to make many of the most common mistakes.
Similarly, if you hire a team to run the promotions and they’re excited to create a new site or program that hasn’t been used before, you may get some innovative ideas but you’ll end up paying them for trial and error. Inject that energy into exciting creative but make sure the technical side of the campaign can run like clock-work.
Mistake 3: Too many barriers to entry
If you compare digital promotions to traditional competitions when people had to cut out a coupon, fill it in, buy a stamp and post the entry, you’ll understand how much easier the digital age is!
We like things to be easy, so by adding barriers of entry, for instance asking customers to purchase 20 of your product to make them eligible for entry; it’s just too much hard work! Even including a game of skill like making entrants write in 25 words or less why they deserve to win the major prize, automatically cuts a large number of possible entrants from your competition.
Not only do you lose the people who can’t be bothered to write an entry, there are also those who just believe someone will do a better job so they don’t bother trying. The best advice is to remove as many entry barriers as possible and open up the promotion to as many people as possible.
Mistake 4: Offer prizes customers don’t want
It’s like giving your dad socks for Xmas…
If you’re running a competition on a men’s razor packet, you’re not going to have the winning prize as a luxury spa treatment as this is not really going to interest your target audience. If the prize is totally irrelevant to your customer you’re going to find it very difficult to get people to enter.
The other mistake is not making the prize attractive enough or big enough to make it worth the customer’s time to enter. This mistake could be in the form of spending $5,000 on prizes compared to doing an underwritten promotion for a $1 million lucky dip at the same cost.
Mistake 5: Not storing data securely
With so many options now-days for people to enter competitions and sign up for mailing lists, consumers are becoming savvy about where they share their personal details. If you’re not storing your entrant data securely, you could be one step away from breaking privacy laws and seriously annoying your customers who suddenly end up with unsolicited marketing materials.
If you don’t have a way of storing sensitive data securely you increase the risk of data loss or manipulation which can damage your business’ credibility. Do it right the first time and treat your entrants’ personal information with the utmost respect.
Speak to the 3Di team for more information about the benefits of hosting a digital promotion and for ideas on interactive online promotions for your or your client’s brand.
1300 806 986
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About Great Promotions
Great Promotions is a comprehensive end to end digital promotions service build around a powerful digital promotions platform. The technology platform offers leading advertisers and promotion agencies a reliable, secure, flexible and proven platform to meet all their digital promotional needs. Available supporting services include promotion strategy, creative, development, media and campaign management. The platforms list of features is extensive including; Instant Win, Scratch Cards, Rank & Win, Q & A, Trivia, Leader Board, Sports Tipping, Interactive Games, Unique Entry Codes, Coupons, Tell a Friend and Social Media Integration supported by a powerful CMS & live reporting.
