Increase Ecommerce Sales With 10 Proven Online Sweepstakes Ideas & Tactics That Work

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To increase ecommerce sales, marketers need to deliver the right promotions to a brand’s audience at the right time. With online sweepstakes ideas, your brand gets to capture new customers while delighting your existing ones all without risking your brand’s reputation. Over time, social media giveaways are designed to improve customer relationships and build customer loyalty. In the short term, the result is a boost in ecommerce sales.

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Sweepstakes and Contests Increase Ecommerce Sales by Increasing Value

However, take care in designing your promotions. Promotion heavy ecommerce marketing can hurt your brand’s reputation through discounts. A sweepstakes or giveaway won’t rely on heavily on discounts that might cannibalizing your margins. R

Read on to learn how social media giveaways are designed to improve the perceived value of your brand and attract instant ecommerce sales. You’ll also learn about the social media contest ideas that make behavioral segmentation possible and ways to leverage this valuable customer data.

Increase Ecommerce Sales With 10 Proven Online Sweepstakes Ideas

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IN THIS ARTICLE:

• How do you increase ecommerce sales with sweepstakes?
• What are the best ecommerce giveaways to boost sales?
• What social media contest ideas work for online stores?

Here are 10 proven online social media contest and sweepstakes ideas and ecommerce sales boosting promotional tactics that work:

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How Do Creative Sweepstakes and Contest Ideas Drive Ecommerce Sales?

Highly targeted sweepstakes and contests that demonstrate a deep understanding of your brand’s audience help online giveaway participants become instant ecommerce sales. Not only do sweepstakes promotions boost sales, sweepstakes and contests help start conversations with your new customers helping to initiate a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Ecommerce Sweepstakes Sales ROI Depends on Market Data and Analytics

Of course, finding the right sweepstakes prize and design for your giveaway campaign that maximizes participation isn’t easy. You should really aim to get to know your customers on a deeper level first so that you fully understand why they shop at your online store website.

This is where target audience analysis and market research can help. We also recommend that you work with a sweepstakes company in order increase the odds that your ecommerce sweepstakes delivers ROI.

Now for the online social media contest and sweepstakes ideas that will boost ecommerce sales, you should do the following:

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1. Leverage Trends and Popular Events for Ecommerce Social Media Contest Ideas

Most ecommerce brands find sweepstakes success by leveraging the latest trends and popular events. By running an ecommerce social media contests and associating it with a trend or event, you can help customers feelings about the event to transfer to your brand. In this way, your online store will become part of the conversation about that trend or event. In this way, a sweepstakes or contest can help you generate personalized offers based on customer intent that likely don’t need any discount at all.

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2. VIP Sweepstakes Ideas Make Ecommerce Customers Feel Valued

While many customers will appreciate a discount or coupon, it’s not enough to get them to convert to a sale, especially if it’s the first time that they have encountered your brand. Use your sweepstakes or contest to make customers feel like they are part of an exclusive club, such as with a VIP discount that you can use to drive sales from specific segments of your customer base.

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3. Early Access Ecommerce Social Media Contests Increase Pre-launch Sales

Creating exclusivity with an early access deal works well, especially for new product launches. This is the perfect occasion for a sweepstakes or contest promotion because it is a promotion that no other brands will be able to duplicate, especially if your ecommerce store is an OEM or distributor for the latest products.

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Similar to flash sales, an early access sweepstakes idea rewards customers for acting right away and creates a sense of urgency that is bound to attract participants. In addition, it will give your brand the extra online store website traffic boost that you need to sell as many units as possible as soon as the pre-launch sales and later the actual product offers go live on your brand’s ecommerce website.

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4. Online Sweepstakes Games Increase Onsite Engagement for Stores

If you use a sweepstakes platform or contest company to launch your giveaway, you’ll easily be able to create interactive games, such as a spin to win that gives customers a discount. Online spin-the-wheel and scratch-off games are popular among ecommerce brands because they engage customers and encourage them to act on the discounts they win through the game immediately.

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5. Increase Ecom Customer Average Order Value With BOGO Offers

Running buy-one-get-one (BOGO) free or for a reduced price offers will help increase the average order value for your customers. When combined with a sweepstakes or contest, BOGO offers can create a sense of urgency because customers know that the deals will end when your social media contest ends. This will help your ecommerce brand to clear out more inventory faster and help your customers feel like they a good deal from your store.

To get even more buzz going, consider running the BOGO promotion as a surprise perk for social media contest participants. A surprise discount can spark some serious FOMO among your fans and customers. This will remind them not to skip participating in your sweepstakes or contest next time you run one because they will miss out on perks that can save them money.

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6. Boost Social Proof by Running UGC Contests

A social media contest that is designed to generate branded user-generated content (UGC) are super popular. This is because they boost social proof for your brand by showing that your ecommerce store has verified, real customers who are satisfied with the products and support that you provide.

In addition, customers will be more than happy to exchange a review, testimonial, feedback, or photo/video in exchange for a chance to win a prize for free. Plus the social proof helps lower the risk for new customers who are engaging with your brand for the first time as a result of participating in your social media contest.

You can also land some powerful word-of-mouth marketing by getting your participants to refer more friends and family to enter your sweepstakes. They will spread the news about their positive customer experiences with your brand as their friends view the UGC they created for your contest.

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7. Invite Existing Customers to Your Social Media Contest for Instant Sales

Just like free gifts with a minimum purchase work well, giveaways also attract your most loyal customers. Everybody loves freebies. If you run a giveaway make sure that you reach out directly to your existing customers and invite them to participate personally. Emphasize that your social media contest is free to enter to remove any objections from them about participating.

This method can help them to feed valued and build excitement as they participate to win a prize. In addition to giveaways for your customers, advertising your giveaway to a lookalike audience that matches the demographics of your customers can help you to introduce new customers to your brand while also increasing the chances of converting them to first-time customers immediately.

8. Add Live Chat to Your Ecommerce Website Before Your Sweepstakes or Contest

Adding live chat is another means of collecting feedback from your ecommerce customers and brand fans. While a certain percentage of participants will answer contest survey questions to participate your sweepstakes, the majority of respondents may not necessarily be interested in making a purchase. Having a live chat feature for your online store not only delivers a high customer satisfaction rate, it can also help you identify customers that are most likely to convert immediately.

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Boost Sales from Ecommerce Customers Demonstrating Buyer Intent

These prospects are people who request support with questions about ordering or need help understanding your product or service. A simple live chat widget with chat bot features can help to ensure that important FAQ information is immediately available to all shoppers.

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9. Turn on Upselling, Use Ecommerce Giveaways to Educate and Increase Order Value

If a customer comes to your ecommerce site are they getting personalized recommendations? Don’t forget to upsell customers to increase order value from a customer base that already knows you. Existing customers account for the largest segment of participants for a social media giveaway so it’s only natural that they will probably make a purchase while browsing your online store website. It’s also a great way to reintroduce old ecommerce customers to what is new and updates on your website if you are trying to reduce cart abandonment and churn.

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Educate Fans About How Your Product or Service Works

If you sell a base product with a number of optional upgrades, you can use a sweepstakes or contest to introduce new customers to your base product as a part of the creative design for your giveaway. Then use upsells once the customer has completed the sales funnel for the base product to encourage them to enhance the value of their purchase.

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10. Make It Easy for Ecommerce Customers With Personalized Social Media Contest Design

When a visitor comes to your ecommerce site, give them virtually no choice but to enter your giveaway promotion. Not only will this help to maximize participation in your sweepstakes, it also makes it easy for ecommerce customers to participate. Make sure that making things easy also extends to optimizing your ecommerce sales funnels for all customer segments, but namely sweepstakes participants turned first-time customers. The easier it is to navigate your ecommerce store, the more likely your giveaway will boost sales.

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Helpful Social Media Contest Ideas for Ecommerce Brands

Another option to consider is the idea of the easy button as an ecommerce social media contest idea. Many ecommerce customers prefer certain brands because they deliver a more convenient shopping experience than the competitors.

Help to instill the feeling among your customers that your ecommerce brand makes their lives better and more convenient through a helpful sweepstakes prize. A voucher for beauty makeover, a holiday meal kit, a vacation or other travel prize, a home cleaning service visit or $500 gift card are some examples of helpful ecommerce giveaway prizes that your customers would like to win.

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Next Tips: Boost Ecommerce Sales With Sweepstakes and Contests

Now that you know how to boost ecommerce sales with sweepstakes and contests, the next step is planning. Make sure that you:

✅ Define and track KPIs. It’s essential that you define and track ecommerce KPIs and social media marketing KPIs in order to determine how well your promotion is doing. From boosting average order value and revenue per visitor, to introducing customers to new products and improving margins, an ecommerce giveaway can deliver ROI only if you plan for it specifically. Start by finding a sweepstakes or contest company to help you with your promotion.

✅ Ensure consistent messaging throughout. Make sure that your social media contest marketing extends through all areas of your ecommerce website and brand social profiles. The more places you can reach your target audience, the better chance to increase participation and increase ecommerce sales.

✅ Build your email list. Some participants that are future customers are not likely to convert right away. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t convert at all. Instead, make sure that your ecommerce social media contest is set up to collect email marketing and mobile marketing subscribers so that you can follow up via marketing automation-powered nurturing campaigns.

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