Online competitions: easily grow your email lists and customer databases
Resources
Email lists are extremely important whatever your industry and whatever your niche. Staying in touch with customers, and maintaining that channel through which you can always connect and influence your audience through content is frankly vital for businesses to succeed. It might be repeated ad nauseum that it’s easier to retain an existing customer than it is to attract a new one, but it’s true. So if someone’s purchased with you before, and you can get them to subscribe to your newsletter or marketing email content, and you can add enough value through that channel, you can retain that customer and build loyalty.
The hard truth? These email lists dwindle over time. People lose access to personal and work email addresses, the latter when they move jobs, retire, and quit, and sometimes they just unsubscribe during a particularly thorough purging of their inbox. Some people even have email addresses that purely exist to take on the magnitude of marketing emails and content they’re subscribed to for various perks and incentives. Essentially, that email list depreciates in value over time. You need to pay your email list attention and put in the work to grow it.
But how do you grow an email list? People can be incredibly reluctant to submit email addresses, and even more so to opt-in to newsletters and marketing content because they’re constantly being bombarded by this business’s emails, that company’s emails, and the others, and the rest. Among other techniques, well thought out, successfully implemented online marketing contests can be incredibly effective at boosting email lists.
The importance of email lists and databases to businesses
There was perhaps no greater illustration of how essential email lists and databases are than during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Numerous retailers were suddenly left with their bricks and mortar stores closed, and reliant on their online channels. Suddenly, the true value of email lists and marketing newsletters was highlighted. While numbers will have varied from business to business, significant percentages of that lockdown trade will have come from promotions and offers marketed through email lists linking to online baskets.
For marketing
The primary reason most businesses make and grow email lists is to help market their products. Email newsletters are an effective way to add value to the customer experience, such as by providing helpful articles, podcasts, or videos, and to sprinkle in commercial incentives to purchase too, such as an exclusive offer, or a promotion, that targets a need or a want.
Through email newsletters you can tell product stories, and match goods or services to common customer pain points. It’s a place to show that you have the solution to your customer’s problem and that you can help.
For research
Email marketing databases are a great way to deliver marketing material and content to influence your audience and encourage purchases and loyalty, but communication is a 2-way street, and having access to your customer-base digitally means you can use them for market research.
For example, you could customise a Survey to gauge your existing customer base’s thoughts around new products and services, and even tailor the questions to get suggestions about what they might want. Brands they’re interested in, services there is demand for, and pain points that aren’t being met.
If you find a Survey fails to get much traction, and you can see that a lot of the measurables aren’t being delivered through your email campaigns, it could be an indication that your subscriber base has depreciated and needs invigorating. A way to do this would be to launch an opt-in campaign, where you send out emails to your existing list asking them to re-opt-in, and saying you’ll remove all contacts who don’t respond by a defined date. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it will ensure that the subscriber base you do have is legitimately engaged with your output, and gives you a starting point for strategising further list growth.
How online contests and competitions effectively obtain customer information
Let’s say you’re already putting out an industry or niche-specific podcast, as well as helpful articles and other resources to help grow your email list and subscribers. Let’s assume you have segmented your email lists by customer persona, so the actual marketing content being sent out is more tailored to the individual’s tastes and preferences. Let’s say that all your employees already have an opt-in link in their email signatures, and you have similar call-to-action (CTA) links all over your social media profiles and accounts, and it’s promoted all over your Youtube presence and LinkedIn profiles.
These are all great things to do, but perhaps nothing is more effective for boosting that emailing list than an online marketing competition.
Incentivise engagement by offering an experience and an opportunity to win something
Online marketing contests aren’t necessarily a silver bullet when it comes to increasing the number of email subscribers you have, nothing is – the process and the mechanisms are far more nuanced than hunting monsters, however, whether it’s a game to support your eCommerce business, or a competition to generate awareness around a new service you’re offering, there are few digital tools more effective for growing subscriber bases and augmenting email lists than marketing contests.
When people interested in the niche or industry you cater for see a competition with an opportunity to win an exciting prize that they might want, but might not be able to justify just purchasing, it’s really not a great cost to submit email details and to opt-in to a newsletter. If there’s some extra incentive to opting in to email marketing, such as birthday discounts, or promotional codes for all subscribers, and this is made clear in the contest’s contact form, participants will be all the more likely to opt-in and become a subscriber.
Where creating online contests can really demonstrate their value when it comes to growing email lists, is when they’re shared and actively promoted on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Given that every possible target customer in today’s hyper-connected world will be engaged on some combination of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc., you can guarantee that an effective contest with an enticing prize giveaway will generate shares, engagement, and growth. You may choose to specify subscribing to your email list as a condition of entry, or you might just make it an option, but either way, the online contest is a great way to maximise visibility and encourage people to subscribe.
Want to know more?
