Online retailers: Top 6 contest ideas to engage customers

For all the economies and positives that operating exclusively online can bring a business, online retailers face unique challenges in building brand loyalty and connecting with their customers. Unlike bricks-and-mortar retail stores, online retailers do not have the opportunity to truly be face-to-face with their customers, as their presence is limited to their eCommerce website and social media channels. There’s a trade-off between the convenience and savings you can offer customers through an online sales channel, but lacking the infrastructure and support that physical retailers can offer.

On a shop floor, particularly in more specialised industries, customers can pick the brains of experienced and expert team members who know a subject inside and out, and even form bonds with them over common interests. There’s also the potential for team members on a shop floor to more seemingly go above and beyond for a customer, which can in turn foster loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations. While eCommerce does involve an element of service, it’s more a case of picking a product and fulfilling orders, with personal interactions only really coming about when something goes wrong, or through live chat, which isn’t quite as personal, and lacks the opportunities to make add-on sales that shop floor colleagues have.

One particularly effective way online retail operations can overcome this challenge is through online contests and competitions. An online contest involving some sort of prize giveaway offers something that can create audience engagement on social media, motivate people to opt-in and subscribe to marketing newsletters and the content opportunities that come with that audience, and introduce an exciting symbiotic experience into the consumer-retailer relationship.

The challenge of being an online retailer

As already mentioned, one of the biggest challenges online retailers face is the lack of physical interaction with their customers. If you as a customer are not personally dealing with a salesperson or team member you’ve built a relationship with, it’s far harder to feel a connection to the ecommerce experience, and feel any obligation to return.

In fact, it’s easy to view an online retailer as purely trading on price, so while you might feel indebted to spend a little bit more on a product at your local independent store, your online retailers, independent or not, are more easily discounted as being variations of the same thing. With that being the case, if Amazon is selling a product at a better price, it’s just as easy to choose Amazon for what it means to the customer.

Another huge challenge for online retailers, related to the above issue, is the intense competition in the ecommerce marketplace. With so many ecommerce retailers battling and discounting for customer attention and sales, and promoting their offers all over their social media channels, it’s hard to offer a point of difference, or demonstrate added value, without just eating into margin. Online retailers need to find innovative and impactful ways to engage and convert their target customers, and promote repeat sales.

How to make connections with your brand

Despite these challenges, online retail operations can create meaningful connections with their customers and build brand loyalty. One of the most innovative and impactful ways to achieve this is through running different types of online contests and competitions alongside promotions, which can vary from instant winner games centred around a grand prize, to games themed around sports, or even customised Quizzes with leaderboards to add a more competitive, ability-based element to the experience.

An online contest created on the Drimify platform is easy to integrate and share on social media, so can be played on any modern device, and be distributed through Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, as well as TikTok and other social media platforms depending on your social media promotion strategy.

Online contests ideas

There are many different types of online contests and competitions that online retailers can use to engage their customers and drive traffic to their eCommerce website as part of their broader marketing strategy. The ones listed here can all be fully customised on the Drimify games creation platform, and tailored for various marketing purposes, although there are more game engines on the platform which may be more suitable for running your own successful contests.

All these contest ideas allow you to fully customise the visual elements, the copy, as well place a custom data-collection form with an opt-in tick box at whichever point in the experience you may choose.

1. Spin the Wheel, for an exciting game of chance

The Spin the Wheel contest idea allows you to customise images around a circle, which is then spun by the player – whatever image the cursor is pointing at when the wheel stops is the player’s prize.

This particular contest, much like a Wheel of fortune or a Scratch Card, is a highly visual instant winner game built around some sort of grand prize, or hierarchy of prizes. The higher ticket winning item is what encourages people to enter, and the visual nature of the game generates some excitement.

This sort of game could be used to generate shares and intrigue on social media, with calls-to-action (CTAs) asking for people to like, subscribe, and tag, or used as an exclusive reward or experience built into your marketing newsletter, depending on the objectives of your contest.

2. A Photo Contest, for a contest that perfectly lends itself to social media

Every member of any audience being targeted is super connected, and carrying a powerful camera attached to the back of their smartphone, and a lot of them document large portions of their lives.

Online retailers can tap into this by running Photo Contests. Here, users are encouraged to submit and caption photos to enter the competition. As a retailer, you could use this format to encourage your audience to create photos of themselves using your products to your own specific brief. You then run a Photo Gallery after the Photo Contest closes and invite people to once again interact with your brand and vote for the best images.

This particular contest allows you to appeal to your customers’ creativity. It can also generate useful user-generated content (UGC), provide you with extra material to promote your contest across social media, and gives you 2 chances to engage your audience and invite them to opt-in to your email marketing.

3. A Video Contest, to encourage maximum creativity and engagement

The advent of camera phones was a crazy time for technology, and the addition of video was an amazing step forward, but the footage sometimes looked like it had been filmed on a potato. Modern smartphones, by contrast, are practically a full-home studio to shoot and edit on the move.

All the advantages and possibilities of the Photo Contest apply to the Video Contest, except more so. Video is way more engaging, and given the quality of the equipment everyone’s carrying, and social cache of producing good video work, effectively utilising this kind of contest can deliver impressive engagement and interactions with your customers.

4. A challenging Quiz, to reward the knowledge of your customer base

In specialist retail, through the internet, the customer has never been better informed. There’s a level of social cache related to being an expert in your chosen field of recreation, whether that’s makeup, sports science, literature, movies, or comic books. If this social cache applies to your particular customer-base, why not embrace it with a challenging Quiz, and reward the highest scoring participant with a grand prize?

For example, let’s pretend you’re running an online comic book store. You could produce a Quiz with questions ranging from general knowledge-level through to stuff most people have to look up on IGN, and have a leaderboard function to recognise the highest scorers. The social cache of performing well will encourage people to share and show off their scores on social media. If it’s a hard Quiz, just getting on the leaderboard, or scoring higher than your immediate circle, will be enough of a flex to justify sharing.

Whether it’s comic books, a particular sport you retail around, or a clothing brand, if this style of contest works for your industry, getting people to sign up to your newsletter is a really effective way to foster loyalty. If you can get enough customers subscribed to your marketing, through your podcast and your blog, you can become their touchpoint for trusted information. When you’re their touchpoint for information, they’ll think of you first when they go to make a purchase.

5. Incorporate a sports game into your contest to appeal to sports fans

On the Drimify platform, you can throw free throws on the basketball court, convert rugby tries, get into a penalty shootout, or even play handball or American football. If you’re a retailer catering to a particular sporting niche, or there’s a major sporting event coming up and it’s relevant, you can use these game engines as the basis of an online contest or giveaway to appeal to sports fans.

This sort of contest can be used by retailers with any affiliation to a sports team or a sporting event, maybe if they’re a sponsor or an affiliate, or even if they just serve that particular crowd. This style of contest can be a great way to potentially appeal to another audience, and because it delivers a fun experience, it’s highly shareable on social media.

6. Create a calendar or series of online contests for multiple opportunities to engage your customers

By using the Dynamic Path™ format you can use any of the game engines on the Drimify platform to create a series of contests that give your audience multiple chances to win, and you as a business multiple chances to get across your message.

You could use this format to create an Advent Calendar of contests in the build up to Christmas, or even as a digital calendar in the build up to say, Cyber Monday or Black Friday, or some other major retailing event where you can maximise on high trade to encourage newsletter opt-ins.

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