Last week, I have suggested that contests and giveaways may be one of the most effective ways to build leads and drive signups for new daily deal websites. While it is becoming an increasingly common tactic, running your own contest or giveaway can still help you collect email addresses, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers, if you can sufficiently differentiate your marketing campaign to make it engaging and inherently viral (we will talk more about virality). Today we should be focusing on sweepstakes/lucky draw contests, because they are relatively cheap to run and easy to manage; plus, they are also the most eye-catching form of contest and most easily understandable at first glance.

The keys to running a successful sweepstakes/lucky draw contest are 1) a prize people would otherwise purchase with money if not presented with an opportunity to win it for free and 2) rules and parameters that are in line with your business objective – to drive signups and enhance brand awareness. Without further ado, let us get down to the best practices:

1. Big prize(s) with smaller chances to win trumps small prize(s) with bigger chances to win
If I offered you two opportunities: a 5% chance to win $10 or a 50% chance to win $1, which would you choose? Most people would likely go for the former (do not just take my word for it – Wikipedia says so too), because the initial investments for both cases are equal (no risk) yet the potential returns are much bigger in the former; the risk-reward ratio is much lower in the former. Big prizes are always more eye-catching anyway – in a contest, the magnitude of the prize is the focal point, the odds of winning are often treated as some form of fine print, thus big prizes encourage both sharing and participation. If you are unconvinced with the big-prizes-small-odds approach, you can certainly try the hybrid approach.

2. Have a built-in viral loop for your contest
To run a successful sweepstakes/lucky draw contest requires mass participation, and mass participation is only possible if participants themselves are incentivized to share your contest with others, be it directly or indirectly. All online contests and related marketing gimmicks require some form of viral marketing to keep awareness high after the initial marketing push by the contest purveyor. One popular method that we have come across in the network of daily deal websites that we host is to tie draw events to a minimum number of participants or Facebook Likes: e.g. “10 iPhone 4Ss to be given out. There will be 1 draw for each 100 participants (or 100 fans on our Facebook Page) achieved before the deadline. Limited to the first 1,000 participants only!” Participants have the incentive to share contest to increase the chances of a next draw event, driving signups and participation.

3. Facebook Likes as a method of participation
A related tactic that you can use with tactic 2. above is to say that winners for your big prize will be drawn from the pool of last 1,000 people who have Liked your Facebook Page (a chronological order of people who Liked your Facebook Page is visible from your administrative dashboard of your Facebook Page). This parameter will ensure that sharing is compulsory and that sharing and participation go hand-in-hand. An added bonus is that some people may be perceptive enough to Like and Unlike your Page frequently in order to always end up as one of the latest fans, ensuring that a post about your Facebook Page stays fresh and high up on those people’s friends’ News Feeds.

4. Conduct draws at regular intervals
Instead of saying that a draw will be conducted at random once a certain number of participants or Facebook Likes is reached, say that a draw will be conducted for the exact 100th, 200th, 500th, or 1,000th participant or Facebook fan. Crafting the rule this way may not encourage participants to join in when they are far from the draw interval, but it will definitely drive people to share your contest and your brand so that they have a chance at using other participants to get closer to the draw interval, at which point they themselves would opportunistically put in an entry. However, when hundreds or thousands of people think this way, interesting things happen.

5. “Last participant at closing time wins the grand prize”
This parameter should only apply to sweepstakes/lucky draw contests where multiple participations are allowed. Of course, you would need to craft the rules in such a way that their last entry can only count if it is separated from their second last entry by, say, 5 entries not belonging to them – otherwise, their last entry will be bypassed in favor of the second last entry that fulfills the rule. This rule will not only increase participation but also somewhat force sharing.

As with all marketing tactics out there, your mileage may vary. You should be able to craft contests for your intended or existing audience to match their expected behaviors in terms of the prizes that they care about, their level of adventure, their Facebook savvy, their Twitter savvy, etc. Of course, never forget that you need to give an initial marketing push to get the word out on your newly-made contests; nobody can participate unless people know about it. Give these tactics a try today!

P.S. If you want to start a daily deal website and conduct a sweepstakes/lucky draw contest right away to build leads, you can sign up for a free, no-credit-card-required, 15-day free trial account at our daily deal platform: http://www.zuupy.com. Have a good weekend!

...you cannot build a large, targeted subscriber list. The process of amassing a group of people interested in your business concept, whether they are email subscribers, Facebook fans, or Twitter followers, is non-negotiable and should always precede your launch. There are rarely any effective shortcuts for this process, including importing a list of email address from elsewhere, buying Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and promoting your new daily deal website to an existing community in which you already wield influence. Nothing beats building an opt-in subscriber list from the ground up.

The reason that most of the abovementioned shortcuts fail in converting “leads” into buyers is simple: a betrayal of expectations. No doubt you may be importing an email list that is an “opt-in” list, but consider the fact that one man’s opt-in list is another man’s bulk mailing list. If I opted in for newsletters from Her World magazine, I am not expecting (and would be quite furious) to receive offerings from Cleo magazine. Buying Facebook fans and Twitter followers to look credible is simply wasteful, because: 1) it is way too easy to spot fake fans and followers, and 2) nobody actually cares about the number – what they really want to see is that the brand owner is willing to and constantly engages her brand enthusiasts; the fan or follower count is a mere symptom of responsible brand ownership.

Occasionally, “expectation betrayal” applies to promoting deals to an existing community in which you wield influence, e.g. promoting make-up deals to your make-up tips blog readers, though we have seen mixed results when this type of promotion is done. One of our customers did very well with this (this one, in particular), but others have only seen mediocre results. If you already have access to an existing community that trusts and likes you, this tactic is worth a shot.

However, a genuine opt-in list almost always results in good sales, assuming that you have been talking to them personally and getting to know what deals they would want to buy. The biggest mistake when deciding what deals to sell is possibly selling deals based on what merchant-supplier relationships that you have (vendor convenience) rather than what deals your subscribers say they would buy (demand fulfillment).

How important is lead acquisition anyway?

As a growing daily deal platform that hosts hundreds of daily deal websites, we have witnessed time and time again how daily deal websites usually fail, mostly because of marketing failure, or, more specifically, failure in lead acquisition. Acquiring leads is hard. There are many products in the market that cost a bomb targeted at just acquiring leads using gimmicks like social media contests, e.g. Wildfire, Offerpop, etc. – people not only pay money but also pay good money to acquire genuine leads. (Coincidetally, our daily deal platform, Zuupy CrowdDeals, also offers this feature in the form of a free deal/lucky draw, which has already proven to be effective in acquiring leads in a fraction of the usual cost – a real-life case study will be coming very soon.)

So what is the right way to acquire leads for new daily deal websites?

As implied by the above paragraph, I am inclined to say that contests, lucky draws, and giveways are almost the quickest and most effective way to build leads for a new daily deal website. Invest some money into crafting an attractive lucky draw offering (like this one), and post it on Facebook, Twitter, forums, and blog comments regularly, and you should do rather well. As long as your offering is something relevant to the audience that you are targeting (e.g. shopping vouchers for women), your subscriber count should start to authentically go up, and so should your sales.

Marketing is possibly the hardest part of running a daily deal website. There are two parts to marketing a daily deal website: 1) sourcing for merchants/deals and 2) getting subscribers and social media followers in order to build traffic. A great deal of the daily deal sites that we host are operated by owners who are aware that differentiating themselves from Groupon and LivingSocial is a business priority – and they are right. Marketing may be a good place to start differentiating.

The key idea that I am putting forth in this article is to market through channels that are less utilized by your established competition. The most obvious tactic is to use offline marketing more where online marketing has been used to death, and vice-versa. In other words, start thinking of ways to use offline marketing to reach your end consumers and online marketing to reach your merchant suppliers.

Using offline marketing tactics with your end consumers make sense, because, at any given time, a bigger proportion of them are likely to be at eateries, supermarkets, shopping malls, the streets, bars, etc. than behind a computer burning hours online. The product that you are selling is to be consumed offline anyway (by the way, the “product” is the voucher, not the underlying goods or services). So going directly to them may be an opportunity to see what they are like in real life, so that you can source for deals based on their consumption patterns. Heck, you can even talk to them to understand what they are like. That is something valuable that online marketing cannot offer.

Here are some offline marketing tactics that you can use with end consumers: http://www.bootstrappingblog.com/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/.

As for online marketing with merchant suppliers, one possible way to do it is to put up a page on your daily deal website that shows off your past successes in bringing in customers through the door by the dozens as well as the burgeoning size of your subscriber list. Selling to merchants is a B2B affair, thus ROI marketing needs to be your core strategy. You can then promote your page in forums in which your merchants participate, which would be easy to identify if you begin with a niche. If you do not begin with a niche, you are possibly committing a fatal mistake already.

What if you are new and you do not have past success stories on which to leverage (yet)? There is no silver bullet here, but working from within your current network may be a good idea. Offering a limited-time substantial discount may be another, sprinkled with the sweet promise that your subscriber base is “healthily growing.” Call me radical, but being a decent human being and asking nicely for a pilot deal may also be a viable strategy to employ.

As the saying goes, “marketing is a tax you pay for being unexceptional.” The fact is that marketing becomes a whole lot easier when you start with a compelling idea that it sells itself, i.e. niche targeting. When you claim to focus only on a certain geographical area, interest group, age group, or gender group, people within that niche feel special and are more likely to be captivated by your basic premise. The belief that niches are limiting is false and silly – nothing stops you from leveraging upon the success within your initial niche to enter another niche market.

Ultimately, marketing tactics may allow people to know about your business; getting people to care about it, however, starts earlier – much earlier. It begins at the conception phase of your business.