Why Do Companies Hold Sweepstakes and Contest

Recently more and more companies or businesses use sweepstakes or contests as a useful promotion way to enlarge the Popularity of their products and services. sweepstakes and contests are really win-win situation for both sponsors and entrants: sponsors can get more customers and of course gain more profit, while entrants can get various prizes even for free. Usually sweepstakes and contest can help companies in the following ways:

Create “buzz” about a product or service: Behind every customer, there may stand hundreds or even thousands of potential customers. The most effective way of promoting a product or service is by word of mouth. So sweepstakes and contests can encourage people to talk about the sponsors and their products.

Bring traffic to the website: Online sweepstakes and contests can help the sponsors to gain much more traffic to their websites. You will never have the chance to sell your product to someone who even doesn’t know your product existence. So as long as the visitors know your products or service, they may become your clients in some day.

Build an email list for the company: Usually all the online sweepstakes and contest ask the entrants to leave their email addresses, which will be valuable resources for the sponsor to use in the future. With the email list, the company can easily promote its new products and services, in forms of newsletters, for example.

Provide market research result: Many sweepstakes and contest will require the entrants to answer optional or survey questions. Thus, the sponsor can get the information about how its potential customers think or what they need. This can help them take action more efficiently.

Anyhow, sweepstakes and contests are good ways for companies to promote themselves.

Sweepstakes and Contest

Both sweepstakes and contest are the important ways for promotion. Comparatively speaking, these two ways have their own advantages.

The advantages of sweepstakes: The first one is that sweepstakes attract more entrants than contests. Secondly, participants don’t need to have special skills for sweepstakes and it is much easier for them to enter. What’s more, contest usually target a narrow sense of consumers, so the prize they give is no as large as sweepstakes.

However, that is not to say, contest is not as efficient as sweepstakes. Contests have their own advantages.

Most people enter once or a few times as contests require specific skills. However, sweepstakes contestants often send in many entries. So it takes some time for the companies to select the right one to make sure on duplicates are received.

Although contest attract fewer visits than sweepstakes, the consumer is high concentrated once they choose contest as they feel they have some control over the outcome of contest. Relatively, sweepstakes often provoke a low level of involvement among the participants.