Best Practices Guide: Incentives & Contests

Dejan Bizinger
filed under "Marketing"

Incentives and contests are popular ways to get new members for your web site or email newsletter. Let's face it - we all like to get something free or with some discount. These techniques offers to your subscribers exactly that. There are many email newsletters. How can you stand out from a crowd? You can have a web site full of quality content so that your visitors can easily decide to subscribe to your email newsletter. However, you can increase your subscription rate by giving stimulation to your visitors to become your subscribers. Let's compare these two ads: 1) Subscribe to our Best Practices Guide Newsletter and read useful articles about email marketing! 2) Subscribe to our Best Practices Guide Newsletter, read useful articles about email marketing and save on our products up to 40%! I think that many of you agree that the 2nd ad will have better results. Companies who know to use email marketing effectively offer exclusively to their subscribers to buy their product on discount. Usually they have already implemented a coupon field in their shopping cart or they send the special link in the email newsletter. In our Best Practices Guide Newsletter example coupon name can be something like this bpg090905. As you can realize, first letters are acronyms for the newsletter name and numbers represent a date. They can include a link that can be something like this: http://www.yourcompanyname.com/index.asp?c=bpg090905 This way you can easily track how many subscribers bought using this link and this way you will be able to give them a discount. It is best to make it like a limited time offer, so you say that this offer is valid until September, 20. You don't have to give incentives using only coupons. Another incentive example can be: "Subscribe to our Email Marketing Articles Newsletter and get beautiful mouse pad". Of course, you can make mouse pads with your company name and logo. When we talk about contests we can say that there are two types of it. You can offer contest based on drawing. You can get email address submissions and choose the winner. After that, sometimes you can send them announcements if you improve your product. Of course, you will need their permission to do that. Example: "Subscribe to our Best Practices Guide Newsletter and every month one lucky winner will get our award-winning desktop email marketing software!" In the second type of contest you have to do something to maybe get the prize. You should have certain skills. For example, email marketing software company wants to make a logo and slogan and they announce that the one who will make the best logo will get the prize, for example software. The first type of contest is interesting for people who want something for free. Second type is interested also for those and for people who like challenges. The second type of contest is very useful for company. They'll get the logo and slogan and also advertise their products, in this case their list hosting services. If you want to have many people who will take part in contest you have to register your contest on as many places as possible and to advertise it on your web site and in your email newsletter. You can find some other companies which have contests and ask them to exchange links with you. The good thing is to send press releases to some popular online and offline magazines which are similar to your business. These are good ways to promote your contest. About the author: Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com