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Discover how to use email marketing and sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways to increase sales. Companies need to meet their sales goals, especially during holiday periods.
Whether you’re just getting started or you are revamping your existing sweepstakes marketing strategy, these tips will help you to increase sales. By leveraging the power of email marketing, you can engage with customers, share content, send offers, and ask for the sale.
The options are virtually endless when it comes to promotional email marketing techniques. However, giveaways are a unique opportunity to deploy some specific email marketing techniques that you should be aware.
In this guide, we’ll give you an overview of how to do email marketing effectively for a giveaway, some giveaway email examples, and how to get a strategy going that will boost sales.
Article Contents
IN THIS ARTICLE:
- How do you do email marketing for a giveaway?
- What type of emails perform best with sweepstakes participants?
- How does email marketing to increase sales?
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How Does Sweepstakes Marketing Grow Your Email List?
A sweepstakes automatically builds a list of email subscribers. That is because participants have to enter their email addresses on sign up.
Sweepstakes participants are typically required to provide this information so that you can have an easier time of notifying them if they’ve won or of the sweepstakes winners announcement.
Depending on your official rules (and yes you must define how you plan to use the email addresses you collect from your sweepstakes participants), you should be able to use these emails to send follow-up messages during and after your sweepstakes.
The email list is built from the sweepstakes entry form and users must opt-in to receive emails from your company.
Why Are Email Open Rates Higher During a Giveaway?
Part of the reason why it’s essential to do email marketing during a sweepstakes is because you’ll have a captive audience. Your participants will be waiting to see what surprises your campaign has in store and to see if they won.
As a result, they will check and read your emails frequently throughout the campaign. This is unlike a traditional email campaign where the user has little incentive outside of your email subject line to open the email.
Loyal Customers Are Sweepstakes Participants Too and Are
Loyal customers are right there already signed up as participants in your sweepstakes or social media contest. So the next step is easy: just use email marketing to reach out to them and ask them for the sale.
In fact, running giveaways is one of the best ways to create a bond with customers that keeps them loyal to the brand.
What Are Types of Email Marketing Messages Are Effective for Giveaways?
Before we get to the giveaway email marketing examples, it’s important to consider what types of emails perform best. By organizing the email marketing messages that you send by type, you’ll be able to effectively determine if you have created enough content to achieve your giveaway campaign sales KPIs.
Not only do the emails need to perform in terms of opens and clicks, you also need to make sure that they actually convert to sales.
Here are some examples to help you get started:
Giveaway Email Marketing Examples
Most sweepstakes platforms have built-in email templates that you can use to generate emails for your campaign. Typically, the sweepstakes email templates that are included are designed to notify participants of important events during the sweepstakes, such as entry success, winner notification, non-winner notification, and more.
However, in addition to these default emails, you’ll also want to use an email marketing platform to generate additional emails that will help you to convert participants to paying customers.
Here are a few examples of emails to send during a giveaway.
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1. Welcome Emails
You shouldn’t only be welcoming participants to your sweepstakes, you should also welcome them to your brand. Invite them to make an account on your brand website and introduce them to your products and services.
Welcome emails not only get great open rates, they also set the precedent for the rest of your giveaway and future communications with email subscribers after the campaign ends.
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When you welcome new customers to your brand:
- Offer them a promotional offer on their first order
- Showcase reviews, press, and awards for the brand
- Invite customers to tell their friends
2. Remind Sweepstakes Participants to Claim Their Additional Giveaway Entries Emails
You’ll be able to encourage your customers to follow you on all social media platforms by giving them additional entries. Send an email that lets participants know that all they have to do is complete the additional steps to follow you on social media via your sweepstakes entry form and you can award them with additional entries for the sweepstakes.
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3. Product Catalog and Latest Update Emails
If the brand has recently launched a new product line or has updated the services available, use your giveaway as an opportunity to introduce potential customers to the changes.
Loyal customers will be excited to see the updates that you have made and you can always personalize the products that you showcase based on past purchase behavior for existing customers. For personalizing emails for potential customers, showcase your best selling products.
4. Share This Sweepstakes Emails
You can also give participants additional entries for sharing your sweepstakes. Encourage customers to post your sweepstakes to their websites if they are influencers.
WOM is one of the best ways to get sweepstakes participants. When your participants share your sweepstakes or social media directly to their friends, those friends are much more likely to enter thanks to the personal recommendations.
Share this sweepstakes emails encourage participants to not only share your campaign, but your brand and products with their network and get themselves additional sweepstakes entries in the process.
When these new participants are introduced to your brand, you can use the other types of email marketing messages given above to convert them to customers right away.
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5. Follow-up Emails
Incentive emails with special offers, post-sweepstakes feedback emails, discount reminder emails are just a few of the emails that you can send to customers after your sweepstakes ends.
Incentive emails are designed to help you get repeat customers. If you want to turn your sweepstakes participants into loyal customers, you need to get them to continue to invest in your brand.
Post-sweepstakes feedback emails can be useful especially if it is your first time running a sweepstakes or social media contest. It could also help you gauge who you should reach out to first to promote your sweepstakes for new participants to next time you run a giveaway.
Discount reminder emails are useful to send after your sweepstakes ends if you offered participants a special offer during the sweepstakes to buy and they didn’t convert to sales. It’s possible that the special offer could have been overlooked, especially by participants who enter multiple sweepstakes at a time.
By doing so, you could potentially catch them at a time that they would be willing to give the brand and its offerings another look.
6. Video Tutorial Emails
If the brand’s flagship product or service takes a bit of explanation, consider making a video that explains things in more detail and send it to them in an email. This will help to build trust with your audience as they will get the important information they need to know to make a purchase.
Make sure that you link to the product page for instant sales.
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Use Paid Ads to Get Leads for Your Sweepstakes Campaign
As a final tip to boost sales from your sweepstakes, use paid ads to get sweepstakes participants and build your email list.
This is the easiest way to load your sweepstakes campaign with targeted buyers. While you should not get all of your participants this way due to the cost, it can help you kick start the sharing of your sweepstakes to help it go viral to skyrocket your sales.
Furthermore, you can fine tune your targeting for paid ads so that you can get the same traffic that you would otherwise send directly to product and service pages.
Next Steps: Start by Planning Your Sweepstakes Marketing
Email marketing is a careful combination of the right messaging at the right time. It’s essential that you get your sweepstakes participants to open and click your emails if you want to boost sales. If you want your campaign to perform at its best start with plan for your sweepstakes marketing.
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