Top 6 online contest ideas for January sales and winter sales
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January would be a tough old month for businesses if it wasn’t for the winter sales.
Most people will have spent a lot over Christmas – on presents, on food, on travel, and going to see shows and other festivities – the last thing they’re looking for is another reason to go spending money…
But then someone came up with January sales, or winter sales, or however it’s referred to by your company.
In baseball terms, this is the relief hitter, coming in to clean up the bases – or in business terms, clean up on any misjudgements made through the preceding “golden quarter of sales” – if promotion or pricing strategies have been off, or sales traffic’s been lower than expected, or anticipated hero items have underperformed.
Except now it’s such an established event, people look forward to it and even budget for it, and every business goes into the winter sales period with a plan and a strategy, so competition can be ferocious!
This is where marketing games and online contests come into play – an invitation out of the overstimulating bombardment of advertising, and into your branded arena, where you can connect them to the deal that’s right for them. (AKA the one you’re offering.)
Here are our top concepts using Drimify game mechanics to serve as inspiration for your own campaigns.
1. Sales Ahoy! (Pacman)
Sails-sales… any excuse to bust out the Pacman game mechanics and tweak them to tell your branded story.
Make Pacman a boat, set the backdrop to blue, and have it sail around collecting your branded icons and dodging pirate ships (or sending them to the bottom of the sea after sailing through a power-up item).
This is a fun and entertaining casual marketing game coded to your brand, that promotes your winter sales through intermediate screens, and leads them to your winter sale landing page on your eComm site.
Make it a contest: Enable the leaderboard, host it on your website, and have a secondary instant win game open to all the participants who make the top 50.
Phygify as you gamify: If you have stores, make Sales Ahoy! Available on a custom touch screen terminal and through QR codes across signage, and host the leaderboard on a TV screen to create a fun atmosphere.
2. Deal-er’s Choice (Personality Test)
Remember what we said about connecting the customer to the deal that’s right for them? Let’s hedge our bets a bit and say deals that are right for them instead.
Winter sales can be straight up chaotic in terms of what’s on offer, as it’s so dependent on how the previous “golden quarter of sales” has gone, and what stock is left over and available.
If everything in your sale stock is curated into different categories, and you can create a landing page for each one on your eComm site, then each one can be linked to through a call to action button (CTA) at the end of Deal-er’s Choice.
You just need to match a persona to each collection, then connect the answers to each persona.
Simplified for easier implementation: Use the Product Recommendation Quiz and tie it to specific individual products that are being promoted, either because you have them in abundance or a discount has been agreed with suppliers.
This is exactly the same principle, but on a more granular level. Which approach you take depends on your target audience and the variety of products you’re looking to have on offer.
3. Deal-a-Day (Dynamic Path™)
A great way to approach your winter sales is to stagger the promotion through a gamified digital calendar.
Using the Dynamic Path™, you can release marketing games, either day after day, or week after week, with each one promoting a specific offer or product through intermediate screens or the release of a promotional code.
Who does this work for? This would be a killer for brands like Amazon or Target with large product offerings and lots of deals to communicate with different segments of their audience.
It would also work well for brands with large product offerings that cater to a very niche audience. Think about brands like Wiggle targeting triathletes, hardware brands targeting DIY enthusiasts, or arts and crafts stores appealing to hobbyists.
4. Snow Easy Way Out! (Match 3)
Everyone loved the Candy Crush Saga and Bejewelled Blitz, so take that concept and turn it into a marketing game easily on Drimify, with your own branded Match 3.
Set a wintery, blizzardy backdrop, load up your brand-coded items, and your explosive item, and invite participants to clear the grid.
Streaming platform? Create “Avatar Atomiser” – as the different character profile options form the candies or jewels as the basis of your game, and use the intermediate screens to advertise your winter sales/ start of year offers. (Sales aren’t just for retailers.)
Charms brands like Pandora or Swarovski? Your products won’t be hard for a good graphic designer to adapt to fit your Match 3 marketing game. It’ll practically make itself!
Enable the leaderboard to make it a contest: This is a points-based game, so enable a top 50 and have a prize draw for everyone who manages to crack the top 50 to increase engagement and participation. (But obviously don’t go neglecting those intermediate screens to keep the focus on your winter sales.)
5. Feel the Deal! (Media Contest)
This is a strong gamification idea for high street fashion and “ready-to-wear” fashion brands during sales. (The name will require some work on your end.)
Essentially, it’s a challenge you can issue to your customers to put together the strongest looks from all of your sales items, and capture it in a photo.
You customise the Media Contest game engine with copy dictating that looks/ pictures must use X numbers of pieces from your sale, and ask participants to list them in the captions, with the highest rated entry receiving a gift card. (This is to encourage initial sales and creativity.)
Connect a Voting Gallery: Then invite your audience to re-engage to vote for the winner.
A lot more people will vote than will participate, but the initial contest encourages people to check out the sale to build looks, and the voting encourages a second segment of your audience to engage with your brand and potentially be inspired.
More winners are better than one: You can enable categories in your contest and then have even more winners, dividing the overall prizes, but potentially appealing to a much broader selection of your audience.
6. Sale Skipper the Whale Saver (Whack a Mole)
The world is a much more environmentally and socially conscious place than it used to be, and as much as anything else, winter sales are the start of a new year.
Almost in response to heightened corporate and commercial activity, there is, among some segments, a vocalised appetite for energy and resources to go into more altruistic means.
This is where nonprofits and corporate social responsibility initiatives can gain traction, and a marketing game coded to a cause can go a long way to amplify the message.
For example, pretend you’re Adidas X Parlay – one of the biggest sports manufacturers in the world and their partner in combating ocean plastics.
Trash monsters, sentient smog clouds, old-fashioned plastic six-pack rings and similar “bad guys” could keep popping up on a digital Whack a Mole board to represent unsustainable manufacturing processes – these need to be whacked. Meanwhile a whale will occasionally appear which participants must spare (or lose points if they accidentally whack them).
This puts a spotlight more on sustainable products and goodwill towards the brand more than just the deal, which in this day and age, resonates with a much higher percentage of the population.
Expert advice
Winter sales are a big opportunity to clear through old stock for quarter one, and to effectively start the year with big sales.
However, like all these big marketing calendar occasions, competition is fierce to both cut through the marketing noise and meet customer expectations.
This is where gamification can really have an impact, to connect your promotions to the right audience; to create engagement and excitement around your sale; and potentially, even to highlight other messages in response to your sale.
The ideas listed here can serve as jumping off points to your own marketing games for your winter sales campaigns.
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