Sweepstakes – guide to the world of promotion and why you should use them

Sweepstakes are one of the best verticals to start your affiliate marketing journey and gain experience. Let’s say that you have a new product and you need to promote it in the market. Sweepstake is the best way for that, and it is one of the best options for beginner affiliates as well as experienced marketers.

By definition, a sweepstake is a marketing or consumer sales promotion that involves offering prizes to participants, where winners are selected by chance and no consideration is required. This means that registered users can win a prize without making a single purchase. 

In affiliate marketing, sweepstake affiliate networks connect publishers with affiliate programs that allow them to promote sweepstake-related offers. The chance of winning top prizes means publishers can drive traffic through exciting sweepstake offers.

To participate in sweepstakes, the person needs to insert their name, email, phone numbers, etc. The affiliate marketer gets a commission when a user completes a sign-up process. Because it is free, you get paid by the merchant/advertiser for your services. Some of the most popular prizes to win from sweepstakes are Apple products, shopping gift cards, and travel offers. 

Now, your question probably is: do sweepstakes offers actually work, or are they just another marketing trick? Yes, they work, and most often, sweeps are very easy to convert. First, what you need to know is that there are three main types of sweepstakes: 

• SOI: It requires simple registration (you only need to specify your data). This is the easiest type of offer and has the lowest payout among sweepstakes.
• DOI: Sweepstakes with the need to confirm through your e-mail (follow the link from the letter that arrives after registration). This is a more difficult option to work with but the payouts are higher than in SOI.
• CC Submit: Here, the user needs to enter bank card data and subscribe through it. The user writes off a certain amount of money. This is the most difficult and not entirely legal option, so not all affiliate programs work with this.

In CC Submit you have two main types: payment and free trial. For payment, visitors need to submit their credit card details. They will be charged a small amount directly after submission and then, after a week or two, the full amount is charged. In a free trial, visitors are asked to submit their credit card info to get access to a service for a limited time. If during that time they do not opt out of the subscription before the end of the trial period, then the full subscription amount will be charged.

Next, you probably know that hype is very important when it comes to selling a product. You probably found yourself in a situation where you buy some product not because you need it, but because you think you need it. That is all because of the hype. You need to be very strategic about the type of sweep you want to run. This is because the GEO and the audience will also vary and be affected. For your sweepstakes campaign to be successful, you need to offer something that your target audience wants. The best example is iPhone or Samsung because that is very popular. 

When it comes to sweepstakes marketing, you need to choose your traffic source. E-mail is one of the most important sources in this field. It needs to be at the core of any promotions strategy. According to eMarketer, 91% of American adults check their email at least once a day, so it is not hard to realize why e-mail promotions are so important. One of the best ways to grow your email list and ensure that your messages are reaching the broadest possible audience is by running simple enter-to-win sweepstakes contests and including an email opt-in checkbox on every single entry form. 

There are many good sides of sweepstakes that you need to consider:

• Encouraging social sharing – To broaden your reach and attract even more entries (and email addresses!), give people extra chances to win for every friend they refer to the contest;
• Low barrier to entry – Since there is no registration page, all that your customers need to do to enter sweepstakes is fill out one simple entry form. The time and effort involved are minimal. which is perfect for building up your database;
• Easy to set up and run – Each sweepstake consists of two things – the prize and the entry form. It’s simple to create a standard sweepstakes template, so all you’ll need to do before you can launch your sweeps is edit the copy and update the image of the prize;
• You can run as many as you want at a time – sweepstakes is a promotion that you could run every single week of the year. You could even run multiple giveaways in a single week;
• Your audience will never get bored of them – Everyone loves free stuff and everyone loves a chance to win, so your audience is never going to get tired of your giveaways.

Sweepstakes are easy and affordable to run, and they help to quickly build an audience. You can get a whole bunch of awesome results from your sweepstakes: more email subscribers, new customers, a boost in sales, an increase in followers on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and greater brand exposure and awareness. All of this makes sweepstakes an ideal beginning for any affiliate marketer!