How to Grow Your Email List by Running a Contest

营销人员经常想到诸如品牌，客户喜悦和粉丝参与之类的竞赛竞赛 - 但这并不是他们的一切。创建某种方式，比赛还可以帮助您填补漏斗，使观众andyour boss happy at the same time.

将更多的访客转换为潜在客户。在此处尝试HubSpot的免费电子邮件捕获软件。bob电竞官方下载

我们已经在HubSpot看到了这一事件。去年12月，我的团队有一个想法参加比赛，但想看看是否有办法将其更紧密地与业务目标联系起来。Our idea? Run a holiday-themed contest and give away eighteen $100 Visa gift cards, one for each winner and an additional gift card for one of their colleagues.

比赛的目的是使客户满意，增加参与度并提高品牌知名度……同时还产生了实际的电子邮件联系人。它可以工作吗？我会为您破坏结局：确实如此。为了为您提供想法，如果您想参加类似的比赛，我已经分解了我们参加比赛的下面的方法。

How to Run a Contest

1）选择平台

虽然你不一定needa platform to run a contest, I would highly recommend shopping around for a platform built explicitly for such a purpose. Contest platforms provide functionality that you wouldn’t necessarily think you need at the beginning of your contest (but will appreciate later). For example, it was extremely helpful to have certain features built in from the start, such as multiple types of contest entries, quick tallies of the entries, and random selection of the winners.

您正在进行的比赛类型通常会决定您发现的功能以及您需要什么功能，但是所有竞赛平台都应具有一个关键功能：社交共享集成。让比赛传播是使其比最初想象的更好，更好的最好方法 - 在平台中拥有某些社交共享功能将使变得更加容易。因此，当您考虑平台时，请考虑您希望参赛者要做什么样的社交媒体活动。

In our contest, we primarily wanted people to enter with an email address (it was designed to help us build our database, after all). We also wanted to get a larger reach from our contest, meaning we counted the following actions as extra entries:

• Following HubSpot on Twitter
• 在推特上链接到比赛
• Sharing via email
• 通过Facebook共享

After perusing a few of the major platforms I settled on usingGleambecause it allowed me to directly integrate with HubSpot, entering contestants into a list automatically. Most platforms require you to export contacts from the contest platform and into your database (one extra step that I’d rather avoid). Gleam also has functionality to disqualify people if their email address doesn’t exist, and it won’t let them enter the contest if they are outside of the U.S. and you’ve selected U.S. only.

2）设置您的比赛

Deciding how many winners there will be, how long your contest will run, and where to promote it are often the biggest items on your to-do list when you are just getting started -- but that's not actually the best place to start.

取而代之的是，考虑一下您希望实现的最终，底线目标，并从那里回溯到特定的竞赛目标。因此，如果您希望从比赛中产生100个潜在客户，并且您知道您的典型访问对铅转化率为10％，那么您知道您需要1,000次访问（至少）参加比赛。并且知道这一访问目标可以帮助您塑造您如何促进比赛（以及竞赛中的其他项目待办事项清单）。

当我们举办假日英雄竞赛时，我们的目标是净新电子邮件地址，每个频道的股票数（电子邮件，Twitter，Facebook）和选定获奖者的数量。概述这些目标有助于保持我们的期望既现实又可以实现，并且还为这场比赛（以及未来的比赛）的成功提供了一个基准。

3) Run the Contest (But Make Sure to Check on It)

现在是您梦dream以求的部分：实际上将比赛推广，推广并获得参赛作品。您的工作方式如何取决于您的竞赛目标，但是如果您需要一些有关如何促进比赛的想法，check out this free resource.

To generate interest, my team shared the contest across multiple channels: We created a dedicated landing page for our contest, then blogged about it, emailed it to our database, put together specific Pinterest boards, and shared that landing page all over social media. Since the contest was only available in the U.S., we made sure to share it with that audience.

Throughout the promotion cycle you’ll also want to “take the temperature” of your contest. Are your promotions successful? How is your contest doing across various platforms? Is your technology working the way you expect? Are contacts being properly fed from the contest app into your database? Are contestants getting a follow-up email about their entries?

These are all questions that can only be answered by frequently checking on your contest settings. I would recommend checking these settings every day or every other day just to ensure that if you do run into any hiccups, you can quickly address them.

4) Choose Your Winners

So now that you've gotten all of your entries, you've got to select your winners and let them know they've won.

如果你的平台让你随机选择一个赢家, we'd highly recommend using that (unless your contest rules say otherwise). Once they're selected, it's up to you to do the reaching out.

In our contest, we chose to email the winners to let them know. We also emailed the rest of the entrants to let them know that winners had been chosen, as one big complaints about contests is the mistrust as to whether anyone actually received the prize.

参加比赛的最好的部分是人们赢得胜利时感到高兴。这与其他任何事情都是无与伦比的 - 如果您很幸运，有时赢家会与您分享有关他们获胜的故事。（我很幸运收到这样的电子邮件...我仍然把它藏在我的收件箱中！）

5) Analyze Your Results

Like you would with any other marketing campaign, you should always analyze the results of your contest. Which channels drove the best results in terms of traffic, entries, and new contacts? Did certain promotions and/or messaging get better results? What would you try differently next time? Taking the time to look in your marketing analytics and analyze your results will ensure you are setting your next contest up for success.

All in all, I’d say our contest went really well -- we had hundreds of new participants each day and over 20% of the total entrants were new to our database. While there are definitely things we'd change for next time around, we were proud with how this contest turned out.

3 Lessons Learned From Running Our Contest

Now that the contest is over, there are some general things I learned that other companies should keep in mind when running a contest:

1. 计划竞赛时，请确保您的奖品与公司的工作和受众所需的需求有关。bob全站app如果您提供模糊或随机的促销项目，那么您就不太可能获得合格的线索。
2. Before creating your contest, check in with your company’s legal departmentto make sure terms and conditions are properly stated.
3. 设定特定于病毒性的目标，以帮助您实现底线目标。Just because you're ultimately aiming to drive bottom-line growth doesn't mean you can ignore top-line goals. It’s really good to know how many shares you are hoping for on each social media platform so that you can better analyze your promotional strategy at the end of the contest.

Have you run a contest before? What tips would you suggest to marketers who've never run one?