Online travel giveaways and contests are a game-changing strategy. You can raise your profile, attract online followers, and tell the world about your destination. Run seasonal campaigns, or mark special dates, such as World Tourism Day on 27 September. You can even target your campaign to focus on a particular audience or tourism type. Whether you’re promoting domestic, international, cultural, eco or agri-tourism, choosing the right kind of contest is key. In this post, we’ll share our top five recommendations for contests to promote tourism.

We’ve illustrated each idea with real examples made with Easypromos. We’ve also included some general guidelines, and information about useful Easypromos features for tourism promoters.

Travel Giveaway Ideas to Promote a Tourist Destination

• Digital marketing is very visual. And so is tourism! More than 40% of Millenials choose a holiday destination based on its Instagram potential. So make sure your promotion is beautifully presented. Use attractive images, videos, and sleek design.
• Holidays are social occasions. And we use social media to research, plan, and post about our vacations. So when you promote tourism online, make sure you share on all your social media channels too.
• The success of a promotion depends on the prize. Choose something that’s relevant to your branding and destination. It should be attractive to your target audience, too. For example, if you want to attract partygoers, don’t give away museum tickets! Pick out an exciting prize that will motivate your followers to take part.
• Keep it simple. Encourage followers to join the promotion by making it easy. Don’t ask them to follow a complicated or lengthy process. With the Easypromos platform, you can set up a contest and collect customer information with minimum effort.

Promote travel and tourism with giveaways

Just getting started with online giveaways? Then an Entry Form Giveaway is a popular, easy option.  Simply ask users to register their contact details for the chance to win an attractive prize. We love this promotion from the tourism board OnlyLyon, which offered a luxurious weekend away for two.

This is a great example of how to promote tourism with a cultural focus. The prize included access to gourmet restaurants, galleries, and museums too. It also subtly advertised tourist services, such as Lyon City Cards and City Experts. Of course, not every participant could win a prize. But through the promotion, they all got some ideas and advice for their next visit to Lyon.

Travel Giveaway to promote a resort chain

In the following example, the Australian resort chain Dreamtime Resorts launched a series of Entry Form giveaways consisting of three-night stays at several of their beach resorts. The organizers used Easyromos’ customizable entry forms to create a straightforward registration form which also provided the organizers with the user data they were interested in.

Vacation Giveaway to promote a tourist destination

Nothing draws attention like a giveaway with a prize involving a holiday. Take a look at this giveaway that the tourism board of the Caribbean island of Anguilla has launched to promote the island as a tourist destination. The organizers shared a link to the giveaway’s microsite on all their social media channels as well on the official website of the island’s Board of tourism. By clicking on the link, users were automatically redirected to the giveaway’s registration form.

Online photo and video contests to promote travel

We’ve said before that modern marketing, and modern holidays, are all about photos. Tourists can’t wait to share photographs, videos, and Stories from their time on holiday! So you can tap into this trend to get more online engagement for your brand.

In this example, a holiday resort offered a range of exciting prizes in a photo competition. Participants just had to share photos on vacation with the resort’s adorable octopus mascot. They could also share on both Facebook and Instagram, which boosted the brand’s online profile.

The number of votes from viewers would then decide who won the contest. So even more followers joined the contest, in order to cast their votes.

Travel quizzes and surveys

A quiz or survey online is a fun way to challenge your followers. Use the opportunity to find out more about your target audience! How do they plan their holidays? What do they like to do on vacation? And how much do they know about your destination? You can take the chance to inform them about your brand, too.

Here’s a cute example from a travel agency. The brand created a group of promotions. A series of quizzes asked followers about their likes and dislikes. Depending on the answers, participants then received travel tips and holiday recommendations.

Travel Writing contests

Encourage your followers to express themselves with a Writing Contest. Just like surveys and quizzes, this is a great way to hear about customers’ opinions and experiences. But a writing contest offers even more space for participants to share their ideas. You can collect contributions from Facebook and Twitter, too.

Here’s a great example from a Spanish tourism promoter. They reached out to would-be travel writers and bloggers with a writing contest. To enter, users had to describe their favorite place in Spain. And the prize was perfect, combining the destination with a writing-themed reward: travel guides for five different regions of Spain.

Promote tourism with Refer-a-Friend Travel Giveaways and Contests

You’ve probably heard of online influencers, who advertize products to their followers in exchange for free trips and gifts. Maybe some have already contacted you! But for many promoters, influencers are too expensive, or don’t offer a clear return on investment.

We’ve got good news. There is an alternative: a Refer-a-Friend Contest! Offer a prize just as you would for any other giveaway. The trick? For every follower that participants recruit, they get one more entry in the prize draw. This is social media influencing on an affordable scale, and it works.

Here’s a great example to explain how Recruiters contests work. This regional board wanted to promote tourism to the Costa Cálida. So they offered a super-powered adventure camera as the prize. It was the perfect gift to take on holiday! But users had to recruit at least two friends to the promotion, in order to have a chance to win.

Special features for tourism and travel promoters

Let’s finish by highlighting some extra-useful features of the Easypromos platform. Here are four tools to help you promote tourism with style:

• Create multi-language promotions. Are your promotions are aimed at an international audience? Then make sure that you’re speaking their language. You can create promotions in whatever language you choose. You can also create promotions with multi-language support.
• Country restrictions. Sometimes you have a very specific target market in mind! So you can choose to limit promotions to a single country or a list of selected countries.
• Age restrictions. Depending on the type of tourism you’re promoting, you may want to focus on a specific age range. Use this tool to set minimum age requirements and restrictions. Then you can be sure that your promotion reaches the right people.
• White Label. We know how important branding is to promote tourism. Choose the White Label platform to customize promotions with your own branding and CSS.

Learn how the town of Leavenworth, Washington launched a Digital Advent Calendar to cope with the impact of the pandemic with such success that it has now become a yearly tradition, and not only for Christmas!

We hope you find these travel giveaway ideas useful and inspiring to get your campaign going. Need more information? Request a personalized DEMO and discover all that Easypromos can do for you!

• Accessing the internet.
• Entertainment (especially taking photos or recording videos).
• Taking part in social networks.

These three changes in trends provide us with the perfect environment to ensure that contests, sweepstakes or promotions that contain videos now work better than ever. Additionally, most-viewed videos are not those produced by professionals, but those created by ordinary internet users.

Below we suggest a series of ideas to help you run successful video contests:

Talent video contest

Video is the perfect form of media for staging a talent contest, enabling users to upload videos of themselves performing acrobatics, dancing ballet, singing, doing impressions and so on. There are plenty of people out there who are eager to share their talent with the world, especially if there is a prize at the end of it as well as fame to be found.

In the example below, the Weekend Beach Festival Torre del Mar organized a Video Contest to promote and support young talent. Participants had to upload their set directly to the contest app using a YouTube or Vimeo link and share their participation to get votes. The winning DJ got to play on the 2023 edition of the festival and a scholarship for a master in music production, mixing, and mastering.

Sporting events video contest

Make the most of any sporting event. Sport can capture the public’s imagination. Use an appropriate “call to action” that encourages people to show their support for their favorite team or sports personality.

We’re not referring only to the Olympics, the World Cup, Wimbledon or Formula One, which are international events. If you wish to capture the attention of people in a specific geographic location, you can also take advantage of events such as marathons, smaller tennis tournaments or minor soccer league games with local teams.

You can propose a dynamic in which participants have to celebrate a goal in the most original way they can think of; or shout out words of support to their team; upload a video of themselves crossing the finishing line of a local marathon; or simply film themselves showing what tricks they can do with a soccer ball.

“Say it with a video” contest

Video is the only media in which images and sound can be combined with text. Without a doubt it’s the form of media which can best move or thrill people. This kind of video contest is an easy way of encouraging people to really get involved. Ask them to participate with a message to a family member who lives far away. The message could include a song too. Suggest actions that include a second person; for example, create a dynamic that involves the entrant naming someone in the video (challenging a friend to do something). This person will almost certainly take part, but they will also share the video, boosting the virality and helping the contest to work better.

“Holiday Greetings” video contest

Similar to “Say it with a video” contest, but focused on specific holidays celebrated all over the world. Organize a contest asking entrants to provide gift ideas for Fathers’ or Mothers’ Day. How about a Christmas decoration contest or a tree decorating contest? An option for Easter could be to ask users to submit the most original Easter egg design. If you would like to limit these contests to a specific area you could use local festivals such as Fallas in Valencia, Spain; or country-specific ones like Bonfire Night in the UK or Diwali in India. For these types of contests you could ask participants to make a video showing their favorite aspects of their festival.

Seasons

A common practice in traditional marketing is that known as “seasonal strategies.” This is an effective technique which encourages you to create contests which make the most of the current season.

Some examples: You can carry out a social media video contest at the start of summer in which users must offer tips for taking care of the skin in the sun. This could be a good way for a sun cream manufacturer to boost interest in their product. While a Cava producer could find a date near December for promoting their product by organizing a contest in which users upload photos of themselves raising a glass of cava at parties or family gatherings.

Keep up with the trends

Keeping up with trends ensures a greater level of virality. Users filming themselves dancing or singing along to the latest hit song can become viral. It’s also fashionable to post positive quotes. Another option could be to take advantage of the blogger movement by encouraging users to create a video of this summer’s latest fashion trends.

Raise awareness through a video contest

Campaigns to raise awareness are a good way to rally the community and increase engagement around a positive objective. These campaigns also provide a setting for your brand to “give back” to the community and to promote your corporate social responsibility. With topics ranging from environment to support groups, it shouldn’t be too hard to fin one that aligns with your brand’s values.

Learn about the International Osteoporosis Foundation organized a successful video contest to raise awareness about the disease, educate the public, and give patients a voice to share their experience.

Hobbies and interests

It’s also possible to organize a contest related to hobbies and interests or to entertainment generally. Without a doubt, the success of certain YouTube users stems from their sharing of experiences with other people who have the same interests. Create a contest in which users propose season endings for a successful TV series; or one in which contestants film themselves playing their favorite videogame. Another option could be a video contest of pets showing their abilities.

Video contest as part of a conference or seminar

Social networks are changing the way we communicate. Thanks to them we are capable of interacting instantly with people from all over the world. This means we can give an event both national and international visibility.

Do you want to broadcast an event in real time? Find a hashtag and encourage everyone attending the event to promote it by uploading a video of the event, or of themselves explaining one of the themes of the lecture or summing up the conclusions of the speakers. In this way, the information can reach people who are interested in the subject but weren’t able to come to the event.

In the following example, the California based University program MESA organized a video contest as part of their 2021 Leadership conference. Participating students had to upload a video outlining their engineering project. The participating videos were displayed in a gallery and the winning projects chosen by popular vote.

Use a video contest to promote your product or service

Make the most of these types of actions for promoting your products or services by encouraging people to come to your online or brick-and-mortar shop. You can organize am unboxing video contest or ask users to share a video using your product for a chance to win a credit voucher for your shop.

You can also take advantage of visits to your restaurant or hotel by incentivizing customers to record videos of themselves recommending your establishment to others.

Video Contest to build customer loyalty and promote your brand

Nowadays, customer loyalty is very important. With so many brands on the market and online shopping, the competition is higher than ever, and it’s harder to keep customers coming back to your business. Your occasional clients become loyal customers as a result of positive customer experience and satisfaction. So why don’t you look up to Quark Expeditions that organized a Video Contest as a customer retention idea, and target your previous clients?

The company launched a promotion targeting past passengers of one of their expeditions to Antarctica. The participants were asked to share their footage from the trip for a chance to win another voyage for two… This time to East Greenland!

Advantages of using video

Gather User-Generated Content.

UCG has become the most reliable and valuable content to promote your brand as the internet community trusts it more than professionally produced content.

Accessibility and immediacy.

Almost everyone now has the knowledge and resources to film a video. As we’ve already mentioned, the use of smartphones allows users to record high-quality videos. More and more apps for editing and adding filters to videos are coming on to the market, giving the videos an ever more professional finish. Contests carried out with Easypromos are totally responsive, meaning that taking part in contests with a smartphone is both quick and convenient.

Virality.

Social networks are a great ally of videos. Images and videos are the most-shared and most-commented type of content on the social networks. And it is often the more spontaneous and least-professional videos that achieve the greatest level of virality.

Versatility.

It is the only type of media capable of combining texts, images and sound, allowing for a wide range of possibilities and permitting more creative actions.

Convenience and simplicity.

It’s far more convenient to watch a video than to read a text, especially from a smartphone. The same is true when taking part in a contest: it’s easier to upload a video than to type in a text even if a user has a computer in front of him or her. Who hasn’t looked for a video with instructions for using a product to avoid having to read the manual?

Effectiveness.

Online videos generate approximately twice the impact of other formats. 80% of Internet users would rather click on a video than any other type of link. Video is also the form of media that connects with the public best; it enables emotions to be conveyed simply and directly to the public.

Build trust.

If it is the participants themselves who present the videos, the perception of the viewers will be more likely to be one of trust. The less professional videos will give a greater impression of truth and reality.

What to consider when organizing sweepstakes

Deciding to include sweepstakes in your marketing strategy is but the first step. Next you will have to decide how, when, and where. What will the mechanic and format of the sweepstakes be? What’s its timing? Where and how will the participants access it? The answers to all of these questions depend on what your marketing objectives are, the characteristics of your target audience, and the nature of your business and the prize.

Whether you are looking into generating leads, gathering information on user segmentation, collecting User-Generated Content (UGC), creating engagement, boosting brand awareness, or simply generating a buzz around your brand, your objectives will determine the most appropriate sweepstakes format for your marketing action. Having a clear answer to these questions, sharing the sweepstake efficiently, and offering a prize that will make potential participants decide that the exchange is worth their investment, will determine the level of success of any sweepstakes.

How to organize online sweepstakes

Broadly speaking, there are three distinctive stages when setting up online sweepstakes. 

Stage 1 User Registration

To participate, users need to register, and it’s the organizer’s job to provide a method to do it. The most straightforward way of doing it is to ask participants to fill out a registration form. The importance of a well-thought-out registration form cannot be understated. We can divide the registration into two well-defined groups:

• The information you provide about the sweepstakes: Clearly state who is eligible to enter the sweepstakes and the start and finish dates, prize details, terms and conditions, and privacy policy. 
• The information you want to collect from participants: This is directly linked with your marketing objectives and will allow you to segment your audience, nurture your email marketing database, collect UCG, etc.

Both of these areas can be seamlessly integrated into one single registration form by using a tool that allows for the customization of the registry form. With the Easypromos Entry Form Giveaway App, you can customize all the fields in the form, add opt-in or opt-out boxes, and include links to your terms and conditions and privacy policy in full compliance with data privacy protection rules and regulations.

Stage 2 Participation Flow

Given the possibilities of the digital world, this is where things can really get interesting and where the decisions you make will determine how appealing or engaging your sweepstakes can be. Sweepstakes can be as simple as filling out a registry form and just waiting to see if you have won, but they can be so much more than that. You can gamify your promotion by including a digital game or challenge that users must complete to be eligible for the final prize draw or distribute coupon codes or discounts to drive traffic to your website or shop. We’ll delve into that later.

Stage 3 Picking a winner

This stage can make or break not only your sweepstakes but also your entire brand’s reputation. This is why we cannot understate the importance of picking a winner in a completely reliable and transparent way AND making sure that ALL participants know that you are doing so. The best, and we’d say the only, way of doing this, is using a reputable and certified platform that offers a tool to pick winners randomly. Easypromos provides both a random winner picker and a notarized certificate of validity to insure the reliability and fairness of your sweepstakes. Last but not least, make sure you communicate the winners and that you have enough alternates.

The Easypromos Sweepstakes app allows you to manage prizes and winners easily and reliably. Assign alternates, notify winners individually, and provide them with an option to claim their prize automatically.

How to share your online sweepstakes

This might seem a bit too obvious but, the more people know about your sweepstakes, the more participants it will have and the more successful it will be. That’s why choosing the right channel to promote your sweepstakes is essential to achieve the reach you’re aiming for.

When creating a sweepstakes promotion with Easypromos, a microsite will be created to host it with a URL of its own that you can then share on your social media profiles. This will provide your audience with the sweepstakes information and a gateway to access it by clicking on the link.

Create some buzz and anticipation by sharing posts announcing the sweepstakes on your social media accounts. Don’t forget to show the prize attractively and if you want to make sure that it reaches a certain demographic you can use Facebook ads to promote it on Facebook and Instagram

If you already have an email database for your email marketing campaigns, a newsletter is a good way to communicate the promotion with your subscribers. Easypromos also provides a widget so you can embed the sweepstakes microsite directly into your website for easy access. And if you are looking to promote your sweepstakes directly in your brick-and-mortar shop, simply print out a QR code and display it somewhere visible so potential participants can scan it and access the registration form. Lastly, encourage participants to share the sweepstakes with their friends and family using the “share” feature of the Easypromos platform

Choose the right platform to manage your sweepstakes

The days when picking sweepstakes winners consisted of “blindly” picking a ball or piece of paper from a basket or bowl are long gone. In this day and age using a third-party service provider that ensures the safe management of user data and a reliable and transparent tool to pick winners is a must. This not only reassures participants of the fairness and legality of your giveaway but also protects you from blunders that could put your brand at risk. 

Some of the most important features that a giveaway app should provide include: 

• Automated and secure collection of participants and their information
• User management capabilities i.e, exclude blacklisted users, repeat participants, and former winners, or filter users
• Allow participants to register using their social media accounts
• Random winner-picking tool
• A certificate of validity for every sweepstake
• Terms and conditions and privacy policy generator or templates
• ISO certification for information security and full compliance with GDPR

Now that we’ve covered the technical side of online sweepstakes, let’s take a look at some real-life examples. Here are some successful and well-planned, and executed sweepstakes to help let your creative juices flow!

Creating your Easypomos account is free and requires no payment information. Create and test your promotion for free, payment is only necessary when you activate your promotion.

Sweepstakes Examples: Online Giveaway to boost brand awareness

If what you’re looking for is to position your brand top-of-mind among your audience, a simple giveaway with attractive prizes will do the trick. In this example, Nine West Australia organized a sweepstake for its Easter campaign and shared it on its social media accounts. The post included a link to the sweepstakes microsite where participants registered for the chance to win gift cards to spend in the brand’s shops.

Over 2,500 participants signed up for the promotion with over 5,500 visits to the microsite and more than 300 shares through instant messaging apps. Registration was kept simple allowing users to register using their Facebook or Google accounts.

Sweepstakes Examples: to promoting a product and gathering user segmentation data

The baby formula Capricare wanted to promote its product and gather user segmentation data to get to know its customers better. To do so, they launched a promotion to reach parents with babies who were transitioning to baby formula. The brand included a questionnaire in the registration form consisting of multiple option questions that provided the brand with valuable information on their target audience’s habits and preferences.

Upon completion of the registration process users would receive a sample of the brand’s products in line with their answers to the questionnaire. The promotion had over 1,500 visits mostly originating from Facebook and a partner website.

Sweepstakes Examples: Gamified promotion to build customer loyalty

As marketers we are always eager to attract new customers. But we often forget the “Pareto Principle” which states that 80% of our marketing efforts should go to retain existing customers and build loyalty. This is what Malaysian developer Seri Pajam did with a gamified online promotion. The organizers shared with its customers as part of their email marketing campaign. The promotion consisted of a Word Search game that once completed, would allow participants to claim a prize.

Sweepstakes Examples: Show your customers you care for them

When it comes to showing your customers, existing and potential, how much you care for them, nothing beats a giveaway with great prizes. Eastwood is an American hardware shop that specializes in car restoration. Every year the brand launches its Customer Appreciation Day Giveaway. Participants who register for the promotion stand the chance to win one of several high-value prizes that appeal to their target audience.

Sweepstakes Examples: Promoting a tourist destination

Since we’ve mentioned the value of high-value prizes, take a look at these sweepstakes organized by the Anguilla tourism board to promote the island as a tourist destination. The Anguilla Ultimate Getaway Luxury Giveaway gave participants the chance to win a luxury weekend escapade for two.

With such an attractive prize, it’s no surprise that the promotion drew over 8,000 participants and was shared over 600 times.

We hope you find these tips and ideas useful for your next promotion. If you need more information, don’t hesitate to contact our customer support team via live chat. We will be happy to help.

This said we propose taking advantage of holidays or season changes to promote a store window contest with online voting. Ask your local establishments to sign up for the contest, choose a theme or products to display in the windows and let customers decide and vote on which one is the most appealing. Easy!

Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of store window contests and the prizes that both establishments and customers won.

Show the new collection or products with a window decorating contest

Red Point came up with a very original way of promoting their new ECO swimsuit collection, and simultaneously promoting their shops. The brand did it with a Voting contest app, and posting them on a public online gallery where users could vote for the one they liked the most. To promote participation, the brand offered the winners a swimsuit of their choosing as a prize. This action achieved a high level of engagement as it gathered over 2,000 votes and 100,000 visits to the website.

The public gallery can be displayed in two ways: Vertical gallery, which shows the options in a column. Ot tile mode, which shows several options per row.

Two-phase store window decorating contest of a local business association

The local business association La Via T from the Spanish city of Tarragona organized a flower decoration contest to celebrate the arrival of spring. The action consisted of two stages: In the first stage, local establishments decorated their shops or streets. The second stage consisted of popular voting to determine the most liked decoration.

There are several kinds of contests in which users can upload their photos, videos, or texts. The gallery is configured to support all these formats and to optimize visualization on any kind of device.

Store window contest organized by the City Hall

The City Hall of the city of Navas in Spain, organized a store window contest to promote and increase the visibility of local shops. The organizers created a survey-mode contest in which participants had to answer a question mentioning their favorite store window. To promote participation, participants entered a final prize draw of 10 credit vouchers worth €100 to be spent on participating shops, which in turn contributed to their sales figures.

Customize the survey using the questionnaire editor. Include as many questions as needed, choose a layout, and customize the buttons’ colors. All changes in the design are immediately visible in the editor.

B2B Store Window decoration contest in the pharma sector

B2B (business-to-business) promotional actions are becoming increasingly popular. They generate sales for the organizers and provide advantages to the brands that benefit from them. Let’s take a look at an example for a better understanding. Heel Spain launched a store window photo contest among pharmacies to promote its products among pharmacists. Pharmacies would participate with a photo of their window display using Heel products to get votes. The winners won a course in Visual Merchandising, Sellout, and Display Windows. Additionally, in return for casting their vote, participants participated in a final prize draw of a Heel product bundle.

Feature participating photos in a public gallery. Choose a template to showcase the photos, customize the color palette, draft the message to share the photos, and activate the voting system to viralize the action. Tools to moderate and control the content are available to administrators.

Here’s another example of a store window contest for pharmacies by Neopeques. In this case, the brand took advantage of the back-to-school campaign to promote its products in pharmacies’ windows. The dynamic was similar to the previous example: every pharmacy submitted a photo of its window decorated with Neopeques products in hopes of getting the most votes.

The platform offers tools to filter, moderate, and choose the contest finalists, assign additional participations depending on the number of votes, and select winners either by popular vote, jury vote, or random prize draw that includes a certificate of validity.

Generating engagement among local businesses or a chain of your product vendors is always a good idea to help achieve your marketing objectives. Offer prizes both to the participating establishments and to voters to ensure your action goes viral.

If you’re thinking of launching a store window contest and need additional advice or have any doubts, contact us via live chat. Our customer support team will be happy to help.

The tournament attracts 68 teams from across the country for a series of games over three weeks. The winner of each game advances to the next round until only one team is left standing as the national champion. One of the unique features of March Madness is the unpredictability of the results. With so many talented teams and players participating, upsets are a common occurrence and add to the excitement of the tournament. This has made March Madness hugely popular with fans and has created a unique opportunity for digital marketing and online promotions.

Let’s take a look at some ideas for digital marketing and gamified promotions to help your brand boost engagement and brand awareness, collect leads, and increase sales.

March Madness Instagram Giveaway

Social media has greatly impacted how sports are consumed, covered, and discussed. If you’re looking into increasing your follower base and boosting brand awareness, Instagram giveaways are the way to go.

Here’s an idea for an Instagram giveaway. Ask participants to predict the winner of a game, and users who make the right prediction enter a giveaway for the chance to win a prize. Limiting the giveaway participation to only the followers who predict the winner correctly will add an extra layer of excitement and engagement. With Easypromos you can filter participants to run the final prize draw only among those who used a specific hashtag, define the number of winners and alternates, and get a certificate of validity for your giveaway.

Want to take advantage of Instagram Stories’ engagement potential? Easypromos offers the only available tool in the market to run fully automated and reliable Giveaways on Instagram Stories!

March Madness Lucky Spin

If you’re looking for a simple, yet engaging promotion to reward your audience, a Prize Wheel will do the trick perfectly. Get on the March Madness bandwagon by offering exclusive discounts or prizes on game days. The Easypromos Spin the Wheel app can easily be embedded on your website or shared via social media or newsletter. You can also offer your brick-and-mortar shop clients a chance to spin the wheel with a tablet at your establishment or by asking them to scan a QR code displayed in your shop.

March Madness Tournament Bracket

A tournament bracket promotion is the all-time all-star dynamic for an event like this one, it’s engaging, exciting, and visually appealing. However, launching a tournament bracket digital promotion might come with some technical and logistic challenges. Hence it is essential to choose an app or platform that will help you keep everything simple, user-friendly, and easy to manage. 

The first issue to tackle is defining participation dynamics and the kind of prizes you are going to give away and how. Keeping a score based on users’ correct predictions is a clear and easy strategy. Participants collect points as they proceed through the tournament rounds. The overall ranking page allows them to look for other participants and compare the scores of each round. Thus, generating rivalry which encourages repeat participation. At the end of the tournament, you can pick a winner randomly among the top-ranked players.

Try our March Madness Bracket DEMO to get a feel of the user experience.

Celebrate Armchair Coaches with a Build your Team Promotion

Let the armchair coaches take over with a Build your Team promotion. One of the main conversation starters and analysis topics in sports is related to the teams’ starting line-ups. Ask your audience to come up with what they think will be the starting line-up of their team and reward those who get it right. You can distribute coupon codes or discounts, or run a final prize draw among users who guessed the line-up correctly. The easypromos Build your Team app is fully customizable with text and images of the participating teams, you can even include sponsors banners on the sidelines of the court!

Try our Basketball version DEMO of Build your Team to see what the user experience is like, then download the ready-made template and get your promotion ready in no time!

March Madness Multi-Stage Prediction Promotion

The multi-round predictions app is similar to the tournament bracket, but instead of showing the full bracket, users participate one round at a time. After registering for the promotion, users have to make their predictions for the winners of each game of the round. Once all the games in one round have been played, a new round opens for the users to predict the teams that will move on to the next round.

Participants are awarded points according to their correct predictions and tallied up in the overall ranking. As an organizer, you can decide how to distribute the prizes: rewarding the top-ranked players, a prize draw among the top X players or all participants. The choice is yours!

Are you in the hospitality business and would like to get some ideas on how to take advantage of sporting events to promote your business? Here’s an article with some useful ideas and tips.

March Madness Gamified Promotion

If you’re looking for something simple but entertaining, try a branded mini-game. You could try a simple Memory game with the participating teams and challenge participants to complete the game in the shortest time possible. The game includes a ranking to foster competitiveness among participants and you can distribute prizes to the top players or run a final prize draw among all registered participants, the choice is yours!

Another option is a Match It game where users have to match pairs. You can configure it to match players with their teams, numbers, or positions. All of the Easypromos game apps include a fully customizable registration form so you can choose the user information that is relevant to you. Additionally, you can configure the promotion so that participants register before or after playing the game, which helps bring down participation barriers. And if you wish to simply entertain your audience, you can eliminate the registration altogether.

We hope you find these ideas useful and inspiring for your March Madness campaign. If you have any question or would like to know more about how to set up your own promotion or about our apps’ features and possibilities, you can contact us via live chat or request a DEMO, we will be happy to help.

Let’s take a look at 5 examples of Blue Monday Giveaways to cheer up your audience!

Blue Monday Giveaways on Social Media

Social Media provides the biggest platform to interact with your audience and start a conversation. Social Media Giveaways give participants and brands the chance of communicating directly and can potentially have a very wide reach as participants themselves share the giveaway with their own community.

A comment-based giveaway on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter is always a good idea. Take a look at these three examples of social media giveaways.

SPC is a company that develops home technology solutions. The used Blue Monday to launch an Instagram Giveaway aimed at drawing traffic to their website and to promote their products. To participate, users had to visit the website, choose the product they would like to win, and mention it on the giveaway post on Instagram.

The home paint brand Principado, also thought of engaging their audience with a Blue Monday Giveaway on social media. To participate, users had to comment and tag a friend. This participation dynamic is useful to make your giveaway go viral.

In this example, the brand Mole Valley Farmers, offered its followers the chance to win a hamper of their products to make Blue Monday a happy day simply by liking and commenting on the post.

Want to set up and launch a Blue Monday giveaway in minutes? Use our ready-made templates for Instagram and Facebook and be done in minutes.

Gamified promotion with a final prize draw

Nothing like a fun game to cheer up and engage your audience. With Easypromos you can choose from 9 different fun and engaging games to captivate your audience. Challenge your audience to be the top ranked players by offering a prize to the players with the highest scores or simply carry out a final prize draw among all registered participants and leave no one out.

All the Easypromos game apps can be fully customized in appearance and functionality. You can use your brand image, colors, or products to customize how the games look. Additionally, you can configure the registration form to include the information fields that you want and set the configuration of the game to show the registration form before playing, after playing, or if your aim is to simply entertain your audience, with no registration needed at all.

Here’s an example of a Blue Monday Entry Form Giveaway. In the registration form, the brand asked their audience which books would cheer them up on Blue Monday. In doing so, the brand gathered high quality leads and information on their audience’s reading preferences.

Distribute coupon codes or instant win prizes associated with a purchase

Shopping is a definite mood lifter, so why not add a little extra excitement to the shopping experience by giving customers a chance to win a discount for their next purchase or a prize. Our Spin the Wheel app is an all-time favorite, but certainly not the only one. A digital Scratch&Win or a game of Reveal&Win are as exciting and fun. Check out all of our apps to distribute Instant Win prizes here.

¿Quieres ver un ejemplo de este tipo de promoción? A continuación puedes ver una promoción internacional donde el premio directo que recibían para participar era un vale para la siguiente compra.

Here’s an example of a promotion that rewarded participants with a coupon for their next purchase.

We hope you find these examples useful and inspiring for your Blue Monday promotion. If you have any questions or doubts, contact us via live chat. We will be happy to help.

With the Easypromos’ “Build your team” app it’s possible to draw up a team’s lineup on a fully customized and shareable image. Challenge your friends and contacts to participate and come up with their lineup, each correct guess scores a point in the public participants’ ranking.

Take a look at these 3 ways to make the best of your “Build your team” promotions.

Create the lineup of one team

The most straightforward and quickest way to use the “Build your team” app, is to create a promotion asking participants to guess the starting lineup of their team for the next match.

The organizer can manage and customize all the elements regarding the looks and functionality of the promotion, namely:

1. Choosing the sport. The system includes two preconfigured templates, one for football and another one for basketball. However, it is possible to create a template for any other sport.
2. Using the players’ pictures provided that the organizer has permission to do so. Otherwise, a jersey template is available to customize with the team’s colors and players’ numbers. .
3. Configuring the playing positions and number of players per position. E.g., in the case of football, there are four positions to configure: goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders, and strikers. This feature is fully customizable. 
4. Configuring the playing field. The organizer can upload the background image where the players will be positioned. E.g., a football pitch, basketball court, hockey rink, etc. Moreover, the sidelines can be customized to include sponsors’ imagery. 
5. Choosing the playing modality. There are two participation modes: guessing the starting players and guessing the starting players and their positions. In the later case, participants score one point for guessing the player and one more for getting the position right as well.

The participation flow is quite straightforward. Once participants log in, a screen with the available players and positions will come up. The system will make sure that the total number of players selected and their position on the field is within the limits previously set by the organizer. Easypromos will then generate an image. The participant will then be able to move the players around to make the lineup more realistic. The participants can then download and share the final image of the team’s lineup on social media and messaging apps.

Once the real starting lineup is made public, the organizer will update this information on the promotion editor and, depending on the participation mode, participants will receive the corresponding points for guessing the players and their positions on the playing field.

If you would like to challenge your followers and clients with a similar promotion, try our DEMO here. And if you like it, download the ready-made template to create a promotion for your brand.

Create two teams

The second participation mode is similar to the previous one, only with double stakes. This time, participants have to come up with the lineups of the two opposing teams.

From the control panel, the organizer creates two teams and the user will have to come up with the lineups of both the home and the visiting teams. The final score will take into account the players for both teams.

Since there will be more players to show on the playing field, the images of the players, or jerseys, will be shown in a smaller size. The final image will look like this:

Create a winners’ podium

Using the “Build your team” app, you can create promotions like the following:

• Who will make it to the podium of a cycling race?
• What will be the starting grid of the next F1 race?
• Which teams will play the World Cup final?

Try this Qatar 2020 Create your team DEMO and if you like it download the ready-made template to create your own.

The general idea is as follows:

1. The organizer creates a list of potential winners in the same way as in the case of a sports team and uploads the images of the potential winners. These images could be an athlete’s picture, a driver’s helmet, or a national team’s flag.
2. Once all the candidates have been uploaded, it’s time to configure the positions. This can include a podium with first, second, and third places, or gold, silver, and bronze medals. In the case of a starting grid for a race, the organizer has to create as many starting slots as pilots in the race.
3. The third step consists of uploading the background image corresponding to the sport or competition. Creativity plays an important role at this point. The objective is to create a final image that is appealing and well branded. Thus, increasing brand awareness and visibility when the participants share the final image.

A key issue to keep in mind in this configuration is to set the position in the background image where the candidates chosen by the user will be shown, and to not allow the users to manually position their candidates. In short, when the user selects a candidate for a given position, the system will automatically place it in the slot previously set by the organizer.

We hope you find these examples of our “Build your team” app useful and motivating to create a promotion of your own. If you have any questions, you can contact the Easypromos support team, we will be happy to help. You can also contact our commercial team to try a DEMO live or to get advice, recommendations, and best practices.

We’re not saying that photos or videos are not of high value, but by all means, they are not the only ones, in fact, by curbing the UGC alternatives to only these formats, we might well be missing out on a whole lot of possibilities. What is it, you may ask, that we’ve forgotten in favor of the pics and videos? That is, good old, reliable, been-around-for-ages written-text.

Gather UGC with an online writing competition

Think about it for a moment, how many times have we referred to user reviews when we’re trying to decide which gadget to buy or where to go out for that special dinner occasion? As much as pictures provide visually appealing images, we are still hardwired to rely on words more than on anything else.

So if you’re looking to gather UGC or engage your audience, get feedback, or start a conversation with your followers – why not organize a Writing Contest? Bear with us for a moment here. A writing contest doesn’t mean you are going to ask your audience to write an essay (although you can if that’s what you’re after). It simply means that you will ask your audience to write something, anything, to participate.

So let us delve no more into the value of the written word and let’s dive into some ideas and examples of Writing Contests that can help you engage your audience, interact with them, and gather UGC.

Choose the right format for the right audience

Certain audiences will respond better to certain formats. A photo or video contest might be an easy choice for a Millenial or Gen Z audience, whereas a Writing Context may well be the best choice for a Gen X or even a Boomers audience.

Use the right holidays to say it with words

While Halloween might be the perfect setting for a Photo Contest (we’re thinking spooky costumes), other holidays are better suited to express feelings with words. Namely Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and St. Valentine’s. You see where we’re going with this, right? These are all holidays that inspire us to share our feelings with our dear ones and that is always best to do with words.

Example of Writing Contest to Celebrate Mother’s Day

Few holidays on the calendar are better suited for a writing contest than Mother’s Day, and nothing evokes mom like mom’s cooking. So, why not put two and two together in a Mother’s Day writing contest? Well, that is exactly what the folks at Lucky Nuts did. For their promotion, they asked participants to share, in 25 words or less, their favorite memory of cooking in the kitchen with them.

The registration form included a field where the participants had to mention which of the brand’s products was their favorite. This provided them with valuable market research as well as user data to use in later campaigns.

Writing Competition Idea for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is traditionally an American holiday that has slowly but surely been making its way into other English-speaking countries. For marketers, it also signals the “official” start of the Christmas or Holiday season and we all know how important that is. But most importantly, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take a break from the rat race and take a moment to reflect on what we are thankful for.

Let’s take a look at what Yankee Candle’s Thanksgiving promotion. The brand organized a writing contest and asked participants to write a message saying what they were grateful for and to share it with a special someone. These kinds of promotions will not only engage your audience but will also spark an emotional reaction that will strengthen their connection to your brand.

An Online Writing Competition to Share Participants’ Stories

A writing contest is a perfect way to allow your audience to share their story with the world. No moment is happier than welcoming a baby into a family, so Baricentro shopping center organized a writing contest on that topic. The idea was as simple as it was emotional. Participants had to describe the moment they first met their child. The prize consisted of a professional photo session for the family.

Writing Contest Example to share stories and strengthen your B2B network

In this example, the National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America (NAVTA) together with Rescue Disinfectants organized a Writing Contest among their members. NAVTA asked them to share funny, memorable, and -why not- smelly stories they had lived on the job. Sharing experiences among colleagues is always a good way to strengthen links with your audience and to keep your brand top-of-mind among professionals.

The Easypromos Writing Contest app allows you to display writing contest entries in a public gallery, with a customizable design.

Promote a product or a service with a writing contest

Rueda is a wine-making region in the Spanish province of Valladolid. “Rueda Ruta del Vino” is an association that promotes the region and local products through cultural and wine-tasting tours. As part of their marketing plan, they organized a short story contest and featured it on their website. Participants uploaded their stories to the contest’s microsite where the general public could read them and vote for their favorite.

The stories had to revolve around wine, gastronomy and rural life. There were two kinds of winners. The first consisted of a first, second and third place winners were chosen by a jury and awarded a cash prize. The second kind was the story that received the most votes by the general public. The contest received around 150 stories and almost 3000 votes.

Besides featuring the stories in a public gallery, you can also enable public voting for people to vote for their favorite story. Additionally, you can include “share” buttons so participants and voters can share the promotion on their social networks and instant messaging apps. It is up to you to decide how to choose the winners: jury’s decision, popular vote, or a combination of vote. However you decide to select the winners, the Easypromos app includes a comprehensive fraud control system with 11 security controls to monitor the writing contest and prevent invalid votes and a Fraud Index to evaluate individual participants.

Writing Contest Idea to Promote a Brand: Cooking Recipes

In this example, Barraza, an Argentinian cheese brand, organized a recipe contest to celebrate “Mozzarella Day”. Participants had to submit a recipe that included their mozzarella cheese for the chance of winning a bundle of the brand’s products. The organizer promoted and shared the contest on their social media profiles and received over a hundred recipes.

Promotions such as this one will provide your brand with a very valuable marketing asset. The validation and promotion of your product or service by the consumers themselves.

Writing contests can also be a powerful means to raise awareness on social issues. In this success case, Cinfa and Malas Madres teamed up to support mothers facing life struggles and allowed them to share their stories.

So you see, the saying “an image tells a thousand words” is not always true. Some things we can only say with words and we often forgot that UGC does not only consists of photos and videos. The written word is a powerful tool and as such, it needs a powerful app to make the most of it. Try our Writing Contest app and discover all of its possibilities.

If you have any questions or doubt about how to set up your own writing contest, contact our customer support team via live-chat. We will be happy to help.

• They gather many people in one location: stadiums, clubs, and courts.
• The viewers have common interests, for example, tennis matches unite tennis fans.
• The audience has a short attention span as they’re most interested in the athletes or competition.

Having all three aspects in mind, you have plenty of options for launching promotional initiatives at sports events, always focusing on the objectives that you want to achieve.

Promotions that generate brand or product awareness

Launch a Survey to promote a new protein bar at a marathon

Imagine that marathon participants receive a goodie bag with product samples, one of them being a new protein bar. A great idea would be to throw in a small flyer pointing out all the product characteristics and nutritional information. You could also add a QR code taking users to an online survey. By doing so, you get to promote your product, collect contact details for your CRM and get to know users’ preferences and opinions.

Direct prizes for purchasing a new padel racket at a padel tournament

In this case scenario, we focus on a padel tournament, in which racket manufacturers set up stands outside the courts. If you want to increase sales of a specific product, what would be the best way to do so?You could launch a prize wheel for all the clients that purchase the racket you’re promoting. Customers scan a QR code that takes them to an online roulette, in which they upload a picture of their receipt before participating. In this participation flow, there’s no need for the organizer’s or seller’s intervention; the participation process is automatic, just like the ticket validation system.

Generate engagement and leads during a sporting event

Interactive games during the breaks

Imagine being at a basketball game and seeing a QR code displayed on the venue screens during a break. The QR code redirects event attendees to an online game, and dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of attendees play the game within seconds. One idea would be to launch a Timed Quiz game with questions about the teams. You could reward the top five participants with a winning team’s jersey or free entry tickets to the next match. You could even integrate the game into your team’s app to activate users and prompt more downloads.

For example, the basketball club Basquet Girona often uses its mobile app as well as many different interactive dynamics to generate engagement and promote its sponsors. The following example shows the puzzle they launched in order to generate engagement and visibility for one of their sponsors.

Raffle a product bundle among all attendees

Organizing quick prize draws during the breaks of matches and tournaments is a popular tactic to wow the audience. Attendees buy participation tickets or get a unique number at the entrance. However, digitalizing the whole process can make it very simple. A great idea would be to announce a giveaway through the loudspeakers located in the stadium or arena, inviting all attendees to participate in the promotion. Everyone could participate by scanning a QR code displayed on a well-visible screen. Another way would be to use an easy-to-remember website link, for example, giveaway-name-of-the-club.com. In both cases, you’d be able to collect participants’ contact details. You could even sell advertising space to one of the local businesses (for example, giveaway sponsored by EasySport shops).

Foster customer loyalty at sporting events

Use race bibs to raffle prizes

When it comes to cycling races, triathlons, or marathons, participants must collect their race bibs prior to the race. Why not take advantage of the bibs and use them to give away prizes?

Put up posters saying “upload your race bib to win great prizes” in the pre-race area and wait to see what happens! Athletes would participate by scanning a QR code located on the posters, to then upload their racing number in order to gain access to an online prize wheel, virtual scratch card, or winning moments promotion. After winning a prize, the app would ask the participant to register in order to claim their prize. As the bib number is unique, you get to ensure that each runner/cyclist/triathlete can participate only once. With such a promotional dynamic you get to generate visibility for the sponsors and foster relationships with athletes.

The following example shows a very similar dynamic. Flowlife, a sports products brand often joins sporting events. They sometimes put up stands in which they offer recovery products for all participating athletes, or, like in the case of the Gothenburg marathon, they sponsor some races. At the Gothenburg marathon, Flowlife put up a stand in which they rewarded visitors with prizes and gifts distributed via a virtual prize wheel.

Satisfaction survey at the end of the race

Another way to generate loyalty and take care of race participants is to ask them to share their opinion about the experience. Encourage participation in your survey by throwing in some prizes, for example, offer a discount on the participation fee in the next edition of the race. You can also raffle bigger prizes that would definitely attract more entrants. As an organizer of a survey, all you have to do is set up the app with some questions. And in return, you get to show that the athletes’ opinion matters to you and that you strive to improve in order to offer a better experience.

If you’re the organizer or sponsor of a sporting event and you’d like to find out more about promotional dynamics, make sure to contact us! We’ll help you to generate leads, engagement, customer loyalty, as well as improve recall for your brand!

Before and after contests show real and inspirational stories and transformations that your online community members have gone through. They demonstrate how certain challenges or difficulties can be overcome, giving inspiration and ideas to your followers. Before and after competitions also tend to create emotional connections between your brand and its audience, as you show that you care about the stories of your followers or clients. 

By inviting users to share before and after photos of their metamorphosis or makeovers you collect social proof for your content calendar, as well as you get to:

• Foster customer relationships. Give visibility to your customers and their effort by showcasing their journey. It helps you tap into customer loyalty and trust. 
• Show the potential of your product or service. By sharing before and after pictures of transformations and makeovers you show your products in action. What better way to promote your offering?

And the good news is that you can now run before and after contests with Easypromos! Our Voting Contest app allows participants to upload multiple images to the contest app, making it possible to show the before and after pictures that they wish to share with your brand. 

How to organize a before and after photo contest with Easypromos?

The Voting Contest app allows users to upload several content pieces in one participation: photos, videos, PDFs, or audio files. The uploaded content is then uploaded as an album which the participants can name. Additionally, entrants can use a dedicated space to add a comment to each content piece, making it easier to provide additional information about their journeys. 

Apart from encouraging your online community to share their before and after photos, you can also invite your followers to vote for their favorite transformations or metamorphosis. This will definitely prompt social media sharing, as participants are more likely to share their participation with friends and family to ask for more votes. The good news is that each user that registers to vote automatically becomes a new member of your database, as they have to accept terms and conditions in order to submit their votes. 

Here’s an example of how a home improvement company could organize a contest for the best do-it-yourself home renovation. Users would participate by uploading a picture or video of, for example, their kitchen before the renovation and another photo showing the improvements. 

Let’s go back for a second to what we’ve already mentioned: votes. In the above image, you can clearly see that each user gets a total of three votes: giving one, two, and three points to their favorite entries.

Ideas for before and after photo contests

Would you like to launch a before and after photo contest for your audience? Here are just some ideas that you could go for: 

Restoration projects

Take a look at this virtual car show that the restoration product provider Eastwood organized to engage its audience, promote its products, and gather high-quality UGC. The brand asked participants to upload before and after photos and videos of their car restoration projects. The participating projects were displayed in public galleries and the winning project was selected by popular vote.

Home renovations or improvements

Just like we explained above! And here’s an example of how to show all the user-generated content on social media.

Garden revamps

Invite your followers to give a second life to their backyard garden, or ask them to share with you their completed projects. All the UGC that you collect you can then reshare on your social media channels to further promote your brand and products. By publishing photos of real customers and real projects, you reinforce customer loyalty and drive more potential customers to your business.

Body transformation

This is one of the most popular types of before and after photo contests. Give visibility to your customers and praise their achievements and effort by sharing pictures of their body transformations. Invite participants to upload snaps showing their pre- and after-transformation bodies and reward their hard work. This is especially popular with personal trainers, gyms, and course providers.

Are you ready to launch your before and after contest? Or maybe you already ran a successful competition that you would like to share with us! Make sure to chat with us!

A customized prize wheel online is a versatile tool that can help you achieve several marketing objectives. These are some of them:

• Brand exposure. Our Spin the Wheel app is 100% customizable. Use your brand image, colors, or products to create a fully personalized prize wheel.
• Capture leads. Users need to register to play for the chance of winning a prize. Whatsmore, you can configure the registry form to include any information field you’re interested in.
• Build customer loyalty. Use it as a fun way to reward your existing customers by offering prizes or rewards. 
• Promote your product. Display your product and offer discounts or the chance of winning samples of your products.
• Boost sales. Nudge customers to buy your products. Offer a code allowing them to spin the wheel for the chance to win a prize or discount for future purchases.
• Engage the community offline. Use a prize wheel on offline, live events. All you need is a tablet or mobile device to offer visitors the chance to participate.

We’ve gone over the potential benefits of an online prize wheel. Now let’s take a look at some examples that will shed some light on how such promotional action might look like.

Customized Prize Wheel Online as the centerpiece of a digital campaign

Being aware of the importance of reaching not only distributors but also final customers, confectionary company Vidal Golosinas launched its online shop. Since its inception, the company has launched several online actions to promote and boost the sales of its products.

The brand decided on a fully customized prize wheel to work on its brand exposure and promote its products. Take a look at how the company fully customized the sections of the wheel with texts and images of its products.

This prize wheel was the brand’s centerpiece in their summer campaign.

Users introduced their order number to spin the wheel for the chance to win a prize. This consequently boosted sales as customers had to make a purchase to participate. After spinning the wheel, users immediately knew if they had won a prize.

Promote your company in virtual or live events

Cisco Live is an internationally renowned IT networking event. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 edition was held virtually. Network visibility and traffic monitoring technology vendor Gigamon came up with a corporate prize wheel to promote its virtual booth and attract potential networking contacts.

To ensure that participants were attendees of the event, users registered with the same email address they used to register for the event and provide a shipping address to receive their prize.

Build customer loyalty and draw foot traffic

Singaporean fashion apparel iONA launched a Chinese New Year campaign aimed at building customer loyalty, boosting sales, and drawing foot traffic to their outlets. Furthermore, the brand used social media to promote the campaign and explain the participation requirements.

Customers who made a purchase for a minimum account in any of their outlets in Singapore got a chance to spin the wheel for the chance of winning store credit vouchers or cash prizes. Additionally to the aforementioned marketing objectives, the brand also nurtured its database with contacts for future email marketing campaigns.

Use a prize wheel to give away merchandising

If the idea is simply to pamper your customers and reward them for their loyalty, why not gamify the experience and make it even better? The Internet and phone service provider Yoigo did just that with a Spin the Wheel promotion to give away merchandising among their clients.

Thanks to the customization features of the Spin the Wheel app, the brand configured the prize odds so that the vast majority of participants won a prize.

Prize wheel to attract new clients and reward existing ones

This example takes us back to Singapore once again, where G-Force mobile phone service provider launched a campaign to both reward existing customers and attract new ones. To participate in the promotion users could either spend a minimum amount on their store or sign up for a phone plan. Prizes ranged from mobile phone accessories to a new mobile phone as the top prize.

An attractive prize is a key to capturing users’ attention, more so if the prize is appealing to your target audience. A wheel prize might seem more appropriate to distribute smaller prizes, but it doesn’t have to be so. The prize distribution can be configured by odds, by instant win, or a combination of both.

Prize wheel to distribute discounts and promote sales

Last but not least, a prize wheel is an efficient and fun way to encourage users to shop by offering discounts. Thus, allowing users to spin the wheel for the chance to win a discount might well just be the little nudge they need to go for the purchase.

Users can access the promotion in a variety of ways. Since the promotion has its own microsite and URL, it can be shared by email, social media, and instant messaging apps. It can also be embedded into your website using the widget feature. That’s just what Celtic Titles did as part of their St. Patrick’s campaign in our last example. By embedding the prize wheel widget in their website’s home page, they made it easy for users to see it and participate.

How to create a Spin the Wheel promotion with Easypromos

Now that we have gone through some examples of real promotions, let’s take a look at how you can create your own spin the wheel app using the Easypromos tool:

• Create your Easypromos account. Registering at Easypromos is the first step to start creating your promotion. Registration is free and it’s as simple as filling out a form.
• Start with a ready-made template. Once you have created your account, you have to create a new promotion and choose the Spin the Wheel option. In this section you can choose a ready-made template that fits your idea or campaign, or you can configure it from scratch. 
• Customize the prize wheel. All the elements in the promotion are fully customizable with your product or brand image. The editor will guide you through the customization process. If you have any doubt, you can refer to the tutorial that explains how to create a prize wheel step by step.
• Configure the wheel ‘s sections with images or emojis. Upload images of the prizes for each of the wheel ‘s sections, you can also personalize them with text or emojis.
• Define the prizes and odds. Prize distribution can be set in two ways: by odds or by instant win. When configuring the prizes for each section, you will have to define how many prizes are available and the odds for each one. Each prize can have a different probability of winning. In the case of “Instant win”, you can define a specific date and time when a determined prize will be awarded. The tool is intuitive and easy to use. 
•  Final messages, “Prize” or “No prize”. After spinning the wheel, users will immediately know if they have won or not. The message is displayed on a customized pop-up window.
• Link to the promotion. Once the prize wheel has been configured, tested, and activated, you can use the promotion’s URL to promote it and share it on social media. You can also use the widget to embed it on your website, blog, intranet, or app.

If you have any questions or doubts, contact our customer support team via live chat. We will be happy to help!

The Scratch & Win app is a versatile tool both in the way it’s presented and the marketing objectives you aim to achieve. On the one hand, the game can be fully customized with your brand colors, product images, or messages. On the other hand, it’s a good alternative if your objective is to reward existing customers, build customer loyalty, or gather Zero-Party data to nurture your database. Let’s not forget that ZPD is the future in the upcoming cookieless world, so you might as well get on with it. Remember, the early bird catches the worm!

How the Scratch & Win app works

Before we dive into the practical examples, let’s take a quick look at how the app works and its features. We have already mentioned that you can customize Scratch & Win, so why not take advantage of this feature and showcase your product’s image or brand on the scratchable surface? Always a good idea to work on increasing brand awareness.

Next, you have to set up the prize distribution. You can include as many different prizes as you want and also customize the image of the prize that the user will discover after scratching. How to distribute the prizes is entirely up to you. That is to say, you can define the odds of winning each individual prize. But that is not all, you can also preset a specific moment when certain prizes will be awarded (time and date) with the Instant Win feature. And of course, you can combine both!

Boost sales and reward customers with a Scratch & Win promotion

Let’s start with the promotion that G-Force Network organized in Singapore. The brand offered clients the opportunity to participate in a Scratch & Win and the chance to win some really juicy prizes.

To participate in this promotion users had two options. They could either spend $500 on Samsung products, or sign up for a mobile/internet plan. By offering these two possibilities, the brand achieved two main objectives: rewarding existing customers who bought their products and it attracted potential customers with the chance of winning a prize for signing up with them.

The result was a promotion that increased existing customers’ loyalty, attracted new clients, and allowed the brand to collect Zero-Party data.

Email marketing campaign for better customer segmentation using Scratch & Win

Our next example takes us to sunny California, where Lunasia Dim Sum House organized an email marketing campaign that helped better segment their audience for future campaigns. The restaurant group sent an email to their customers in their database with a link to participate in their Scratch & Win.

The prizes consisted of meals that could be redeemed in one of their restaurants. And here’s where the magic happens. Thanks to the customization capabilities of the app, the company included a couple of boxes in the registry form, one for each of their restaurants. Hence, users had to choose the restaurant where they wanted to claim their prize. As a result, the company obtained valuable information that they could later use to better segment their audience.

Want to know the user experience for a Scratch & Win promotion? Try out our DEMO and if you like it download the ready-made template to create your own in no time.

Use Scratch & Win to promote your product and drive traffic to your Social Media

Social Media is the marketplace to be, and if you are a gaming product shop like Newskill is, then there is little more to say. The brand organized a Scratch & Win promotion and posted it on its social media to engage its audience, build customer loyalty, and promote its products. 

Every promotion created with Easypromos has its own URL that can be included as a link on social media posts. This will not only provide your followers with easy access to the promotion but they can also share it on their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts for a wider reach. 

Reward and motivate your employees

In this example, we’re not looking into rewarding or engaging the people out there, that is, the clients or potential clients. Instead, we are looking inwards and focusing on those who make it all possible, your own employees. How? Using an employee engagement dynamic.

Let’s take a look at what the business services supplier Inspiro did to celebrate the Chinese New Year with its employees in the Philippines. The company organized a Scratch & Win promotion to reward and engage more than 2000 of their employees. The prizes consisted of cash and the promotion registered over 9000 participations!

Promote your product and grow your mailing list

Here’s an example from Edge Fitness, a South African gym that looked for a way to promote the gym and expand the mailing list at the same time. Apart from entering a grand giveaway in which Edge Fitness raffled a free year’s membership, each user that registered in the promotion received a 50% discount on a monthly membership.

This was a great tactic to not only promote the gym but to also collect new sales leads that could be targeted with future email marketing promotions.

Use Scratch & Win to distribute coupon codes

In our last example, we are going to take a look at one more useful feature of the Easypromos apps: The possibility to combine two apps in one promotion. This is precisely what the home appliance brand Moulinex did in this promotion the brand organized in Spain.

Distributing coupon codes might well be the most effective way to drive traffic to your online shop, add the possibility to win a nice prize to the mix, and watch the magic work! In this promotion, Moulinex used the Scratch & Win app as a means to distribute coupon codes among its audience while also giving them a chance to win a kitchen robot.

So now you see, the possibilities are wide and varied. From customizing the game with your image, to deciding how to distribute the prizes, to combining several apps in one promotion. With Easypromos you will always find the tools to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Still not sure how to proceed or have any questions? Contact our customer service team via live chat and we will be happy to help!

In this blog post, we take a look at the most popular photo contest ideas and we also explain what marketing objectives you can achieve with a simple picture competition. Let’s take a look! 

Photo contest for customers: thank your clients for choosing your brand

Branded photo contests are especially popular with brands looking to promote their products because having happy customers post about your brand online is a marketer’s dream come true! So imagine you want to advertise your newly launched product or a bestseller that’s been around for some time. The ideal scenario would be to collect hundreds and hundreds of user-generated content images showing your product in action.

Let’s start with an example of a fictional product promotion photo contest. Customers of a fictional potato chips company share pictures showing how they like to have their crisps: on a sandwich, with a sandwich, their favorite flavor on its own, etc. The picture with the most votes would win a year’s supply of potato chips.

But don’t just take our word for it. Give this Halloween Photo Contest DEMO a try to get a feel of the customer experience and see how easy it is to vote and/or submit an entry.

What’s in it for the brand? Besides quality UGC, the organizing brand also collects new contact details for their database. And by resharing the UGC on their social media channels, they get to boost brand authenticity and customer trust, as user-generated content serves as social proof for potential buyers.

Popular photo contest idea: company calendar 

Publishing a company calendar is a yearly tradition for many brands around the globe. Branded calendars not only boost visibility but also lead to increased customer engagement and loyalty because more often than not, the customers are the authors of the pictures published in company calendars. However, asking customers to email over their entries can generate some headaches for the organizers, especially if there are many participants – it’s a hard job to ensure that you haven’t missed out on any participating email. Luckily, there is now an easier way to collect calendar contest entries.

Take a look at how Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway turned their photo contest idea into reality. Users participated in their photo competition by filling out a short registration form and uploading an image that they wanted to participate with.

The organizers invited their audience to share their best shots for a chance to win a $300 Amazon gift card. Apart from the possibility of winning a gift card, contestants had a chance to have their pictures printed in the 2022 calendar, exactly as the participants of Good Boy Bakery’s calendar contest.

Good Boy Bakery also looked for photo contest ideas – and they opted for the same solution. We believe we don’t have to explain how popular pet photo contests are! Proud pet owners love to share snapshots of their puppies and kittens! Let’s just imagine how proud they’d be to see their favorite animal in a calendar. In this case, the organizers invited the public to vote for their favorite pictures.

Looking for photo contest ideas? Use a photo contest app that comes with a voting system. The Easypromos application has anti-fraud controls that detect any malpractice or manipulation with votes. 

Are you thinking about running a calendar photo contest? Discover how a small photography studio ran an online calendar contest.

Photo contest ideas for paying customers

Acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining existing clients. This is why fostering customer relationships and rewarding paying consumers is always a clever thing to do. It’s sometimes worth going beyond discount offers and loyalty programs. 

One way to do this is by organizing customer-exclusive contests, and photo contests happen to be a great idea. Why not invite paying clients or visitors to share their pictures for a chance to win freebies, product bundles, special discounts, or free updates on their accommodations? So if you’re looking for fun photo contest ideas for customers, take a look at the following example from Devonshire Hotels and Restaurants.

The hospitality group looked for a way to thank their clients. They also wanted to reinforce their existing relationships with customers. To do so, the brand launched a photo contest for anyone that had previously stayed in one of Devonshire’s locations. Interested participants shared their favorite moments of their stay for a chance to win a luxury getaway at one of the brand’s hotels or inns. 

Still not sure if online photo contests are a good idea to reward and retain existing customers? Here’s another example from a popular Golf & Country Club, Las Colinas. Just like in the previous example, the organizers looked for the best shots presenting their customers have a quality experience on their premises. The entry with the most votes won a dinner for two at the club’s restaurant. 

Tourism and travel: Run a photo competition to promote a location

The Spanish Institute of Tourism looked for a way to promote Spain as a holiday destination to their Scandinavian audience. However, it was aimed only at the users that had previously visited the Mediterranean coast.

Another photo contest was launched by the E3 Camping Association. As a way to promote their brand and attract more visibility to their camping sites, the organizers raffled cash prizes and free memberships. The winners were chosen by a public vote. This is a great photo contest idea for anyone looking to further expose their brand and boost visibility.

Ideas for attracting brand ambassadors: run photo contests

We’ve all witnessed our friends being advocates for their favorite brands. Chances are you’re a brand ambassador without even realizing it. Have you ever shared a picture of your new shoes on social media? Ever tagged an airline while going on holiday? You’re a brand ambassador too. Online users love to show off their new gadgets or show their favorite hotels. You can take advantage of how easy it is to snap a picture and invite your customers to promote your brand to their friends.

Your contest participants may share their entries with their friends in an attempt to obtain more votes, which will result in your contest – and brand – being seen by even more people. Here’s a great example of how photo contests can help in growing brand awareness and visibility on social media. 

Peli Products shared their photo contest on their social media channels, as they were looking for creative photographers with a passion for adventure. If you’re looking to reach a wide audience, make sure you disseminate your promotion on as many channels as possible – and social media is always a great place to start. Your photo contest might be seen by someone interested in participating, or by someone who knows someone interested in participating, and so on… Do you see how far it can go? 

Peli Products gave away $1000 in their products – that was a fantastic way to promote their brand and best-selling items. Wondering how to promote your products even further? Organize a contest where users must upload pictures with your products in the shot, or challenge them to decorate their pictures with frames and stickers with your logos or other elements that showcase your brand. Wondering how that’d work? For example, a hotel could invite its guests to share pictures accompanied by frames with the hotel’s logo. Apart from extra visibility, you will also attract new customers tempted by a chance to win. 

Do you have photo contest ideas that you’d like to share with us? Or maybe a question that hasn’t been answered in this blog post? Chat with us!

Prize calendars are gamified actions for your clients and fans. These actions are grouped in daily games or check-ins in a digital countdown towards a set date, event, or festivity.

Prize calendars are fully customizable and have a set duration. They help to foster engagement and brand recognition as users participate daily and keep track of the games’ final results. Additionally, calendars provide new leads for databases as users need to register to participate.

Easypromos’ Advent Calendar app has advanced features that make it easy to configure. Some of the main features are:

• They are created from a preconfigured template. 
• Multiple options to distribute prizes: final prize draw, top-ranked scores, prizes for all participants, daily prizes, and more.
• All the screens and participation dates in the calendar are customizable. 
• Single registration for seamless participation. Users only have to register once, with direct access in the following participations.
• Secure data storage. Possibility to link to a database or CRM, or download the data to an excel file.
• Technical support via live chat. Quick and personal support to answer any question or doubt.
• Every prize calendar has a dedicated URL to share on social networks, websites, blogs, newsletters, or instant messaging to promote participation and advertise the promotion.

Easypromos offers several ways to run prize calendars or countdowns, we can divide them into 3 categories:

Countdown to an event or preset date

Generating anticipation is a marketing technique to engage the users’ minds and feelings so that the desire to learn more about a product, brand, or service increases exponentially with every interaction that they have with the brand’s communications. 

Therefore, if you wish to generate anticipation toward an event, a date, or a celebration, the countdown calendar is the go-to choice. Besides promoting and giving visibility to the event, a countdown will capture the attention of your audience and extend your brand’s exposure through the users’ daily participation. Thus, the goal is to create a countdown where users participate regularly.

Celebrating a change of season could be a good reason to create an online calendar to promote the new season’s products. For instance, requiring users to check in daily for 5 days before a set date to have a chance to win a prize. With the calendar prize app, you can program daily participation dates.

Did you like this idea to give away prizes? Try our Spring countdown demo!

Another example of how to use this app is to promote an event and get more registrations. Attendees can check in online and sign up for the lectures they wish to attend. Consequently, the organizers are able to collect the participants’ data and information on the attendance to every lecture. Special prizes or discounts can also be included in the check-in process.

Want to check out how this online check-in works? Try this online check-in DEMO and download the ready-made template to create your own.

Multiple giveaways or games along a period of time.

You can create marketing actions that include multiple games with the prize calendar app. For instance, you can do this in a countdown format leading up to an event or with daily actions focused around a specific celebration.

These kinds of giveaways or game calendars will keep users engaged with the brand for a given time. Hence, making communication with audiences more effective

In this other example, Carrefour aimed at engaging its audience and building customer loyalty for a 30-day period. As a loyalty-building strategy, they carried out daily prize giveaways among the members of their Clients Club. They also used it to promote the advantages of being part of the Club and to motivate customers to join. To participate, users simply had to check in once a day to enter the daily prize draw.

How about a calendar with a daily game for Easter? This action will help you to boost your branding strategy since the games can be fully customized with your brand image and adapted to fit the promotion’s theme.

Users have to play a game or complete a challenge every day to be eligible for a prize. Prizes can then be awarded through a final draw among all participants or the top-ranked players, etc. You can also set it up so that every participant gets a discount code or reward. It is entirely up to you how to distribute the prizes!

Are you considering a Multi-Game calendar for Easter? Try this DEMO and if you like it download the template!

Christmas Advent Calendars

In this section, we will go over the best-known modality for online Prize Calendars: Christmas Advent Calendars.  These calendars can be set up as a countdown to Christmas. Likewise, they can consist of daily check-ins or challenges for the users, depending on the objectives of the marketing action. Generally, these actions allow to promote products or services, distribute coupon codes to boost sales or carry out giveaways. Let’s take a look at some examples.

The first one is a Check-in Advent Calendar organized by Anaya Publishing. This promotion gave away one book every day. Participants simply had to check in every day and they would instantly know if they had won a book. This kind of dynamic is highly engaging as it involves the surprise factor.

Use our ready-made template to create your own Check-In Advent Calendar easily and in minutes!

Next is Kitoons Multi-game Advent Calendar. Behind every window, users found a game or challenge that they had to complete in the shortest time possible to score points for the overall ranking. At the end of the promotion, the top 3 scoring players won a set of toys. The calendar was fully customized with the brand’s products and characters. Therefore, promoting them among their target audience.

Try the Multi-Game Calendar DEMO here and inspire to create one for your brand.

Lastly, let’s take a look at a calendar that combines daily check-in with descriptive content. The descriptive content redirects the user to an external URL or the last page of the promotion. This feature is ideal to drive traffic to a website and promote products or services, or simply to showcase a prize differently.

Participate in a Prize Calendar with descriptive content in this DEMO that we’ve put together for you!

We hope you find these examples of prize calendars useful and helpful in finding the promotional action that best fits your brand.

If you wish to reward customers with a winning ticket as part of your marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place. Using a Winning Ticket promotion to reward customers, the brand distributes a series of codes among clients who have made a purchase in a given time period. Clients then go on to a microsite to validate their winning ticket code online. Some of these codes have an associated prize and become winning codes. Codes can be alphanumeric, products’ serial number, or others.

Our “Redeem Codes App” is the most commonly used to manage promotions with winning tickets. The app not only allows to make the promotion exclusive to users that possess a valid code but also to reward users with instant wins depending on the code introduced when participating.

• Valid Code: any code that the brand has previously included in the platform. Allows the system to confirm that the code has been distributed among clients within the running campaign.
• Winning Ticket: a valid code that the organizer/brand has linked to a prize.

When the participant introduces a code that has no prize associated, a no-win message will come up in a pop-up window. From the promotion’s control panel, the organizer can-pre program which codes will be winning codes and the prize associated with them.

The following image is an example of several sets of winning tickets uploaded to the Validate Codes app. The app itself will inform the organizer which codes have been redeemed and which haven’t, the users associated with each code, participation dates, etc. 

Let’s take a look at some examples of how to reward users with a winning ticket:

Instant win codes

One of the most commonly used marketing techniques in e-commerce is to distribute codes among users that shop online. It is a good incentive for repeat purchases and to build customer loyalty by giving away prizes. 

A very effective way to distribute these codes is to include them in the product’s package that the customer will receive. This will add to the satisfaction as the customer will receive an extra prize along with the purchase. 

When receiving the package, the user will find a code and a set of simple instructions: go to the website, introduce your code to check in, and find out what you have won. This is the most common dynamic for winning codes.

If the user wins a prize when checking in, the prize will come up in a pop-up window along with the instructions to redeem it. By contrast, the code doesn’t have a prize, a “Thank you” message will come up.

Generally, this dynamic offers online shops a wide array of possibilities to manage codes and assign prizes:

• Define which codes have a prize and which don’t.
• Decide which prize to award for each kind of code. E.g. promotional packaging, product sample, special prize, etc.
• Customize the registration form where users validate the codes. el formulario donde los clientes tienen que validar el código con los campos que cada marca desee.
• Send segmented emails to users informing them of their prize, etc.

Winning codes + final prize draft

Large consumer goods companies face the challenge of knowing their clients’ profiles to build loyalty and acquire new customers. In this day and age highly competitive market, promotions can make the difference in the consumers’ choice for one product or another. The key issue is how to tip that balance in your favor. 

In order to meet these challenges, and considering the vast number of products in the market, international hair care products brand Revlon has found a solution. That is, managing promotions with codes and validation through registration forms.

So, what did such a well-known company in that field do to appeal to their buyer-persona? They did it by raffling a grand prize through their products’ sales. The brand distributes codes among its distributors. Later on, clients validate them online through a registration form and instantly know if they’ve won a small prize. To further enhance participation, users that validate their code, enter a raffle for a trip to New York. With this action, the brand builds customer loyalty, acquires new customers, and gets to know its community better. 

Here’s how Revlon organized the promotion in two: the set of instant prize-winning codes and all the validated codes that enter the grand prize draw.

Reward customers with Instant Win codes

If you want to have more control over when the prizes are given away, a good option is to award the prizes by Instant Win using the Redeem Codes app. In this scenario, the administrator decides in advance when to give away the prizes depending on several variables: dates, hours, minutes… The user experience is the same in terms of participation. However, the administrator will define the exact moment when users can win a prize. Thus only the users that validate a code at the time previously set by the administrator, will win a prize. However, the organizer has the possibility of handing out the prizes at specific times and dates. Hence, only the users that happen to validate their prizes at the moments preset by the organizer will win the prize.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Spanish shop El Rincón launched a winning codes campaign. Customers who bought certain products received a code. They would then access the online promotion to validate their codes and find out if they had won a prize.

Try our Winning Ticket DEMO with instant prizes to get a feel of the full user experience!

Redeeming winning codes at the point of sale

In our third example, we will discuss winning codes promotions that take place at the point of sale itself. We all have participated in promotion events where you can win a prize then and there. Or how about those pubs or festivals that gave away merchandising products when customers ordered something? The following dynamic is more or less the same, only that part of it takes place online.

Gambrinus brewery launched a winning codes promotion associated with its beer brand Cruzcampo. Customers received a code to redeem online after ordering a couple of beers and would instantly know if they had won a prize or not.

Generally speaking, users enjoy games of chance and promotional actions. Take advantage of this fact and offer rewards to your customers to increase your products’ sales. In the case of Gambrinus, participants had the chance of winning a trip.

This kind of promotion can have different configurations but the most common is to distribute different codes, some of which will have a prize.

Winning Codes + Scratch & Win

Many businesses still rely heavily on their brick-and-mortar sales while others don’t even have an online shop. Either way, not having an online presence doesn’t have to be a drawback. Alternatively, it must be seen as an opportunity to enhance the online channel while promoting the offline channel and drawing foot traffic to the shop. 

There are several formulas that combine offline and online actions. However, we will focus on redeeming a code online to drive sales in the brick-and-mortar shop. 

Supermarket chain Frioz created a promotional action like this. Customers that bought a pack of FEIRACO milk obtained a code that they could redeem online and get a scarf of their football team. Participants that had a winning code could choose the scarf model they preferred.

B2B winning codes: incentivize purchasing your products.

Winning code promotions are not limited to B2C (Business to Consumer), they can also be used in B2B (Business to business). The dynamic of the promotion is similar to the previous ones. That is to say, the organizer uploads the codes that customers will use to participate. The registration form can be customized to include the fields and information that the organizer wishes to collect. 

Let’s take a look at the promotional campaign that Hellman’sorganized to promote their products. 

To participate, every restaurant that bought Hellman’s products received a card with a code. The user then went online and found out if they had won any of the available prizes. If they did, the prize was announced immediately. The company distributed 264,000, some of which included the following prizes: 5 iPhones, 5 iPad Air, 10 SmartBoxes, double cinema tickets, and several other experiences and activities.

These are only some of many examples of promotions using winning codes. If you have any questions or need further information, contact our Live Chat team. We will be happy to help you!