Hold An Online Contest And Expand Your Email List
A great way to expand your email list is to hold an online contest. Contests are a great way to engage with your audience and build your subscriber base. They allow you not only to create something useful and beneficial for your audience on a particular topic, but it creates more engagement, usually daily. Although engagement can be less frequent than everyday, it usually doesn’t work as well as daily.
You can create a competition open to everyone where they have to submit their email address to enter. Or you can open the contest up to only customers and still expand your email list. Let’s look at how easy it is to do.
Why Expand Your Email List?
You should be building a list of prospects and customers. You constantly need to add new prospects to fill your sales funnel, and once someone purchases a product from you, that person is more likely than anyone else to buy something from you in the future. The easiest way to make money online is to build an email list. People join your email list or newsletter because they are interested in what you have to offer.
FREE Checklist: How To Run A Challenge
How To Hold An Online Contest
The objective of a contest or challenge, apart from helping you to expand your email list, is to provide a solution over the course of the contest to a problem. So, you’re not doing a single post or article solution, but a very in-depth one that can span anywhere from a week to a month.
Running something that long and on a daily basis creates, as you can imagine, a flood of comments and questions. This is all valuable engagement for you to further communicate with those taking the challenge. In the process, you also find out a lot more about your audience.
Know Who Your Target Audience Is
If you don’t know who your target audience is, you can’t do anything – from writing content, to creating products, to having a contest. Knowing who the target audience is answers so many questions for you regarding when, what, why, where and how you’ll proceed. Everything you do is about your audience and what type of value you can provide them.
Know Your Goals for Your Contest
One goal, in this case, is obviously to expand your email list. But are you wanting to promote a certain product to the list that you build? Do you want to launch a new product or make fast sales? Do you want to collect user-generated content? Write down the goals for your contest so that you can ensure that you’re doing what needs to be done to meet that goal.
Think about the results you are trying to deliver, and choose a length of time for your contest that allows your participants to achieve those results. You want it short enough to keep your audience engaged and thinking with a scarcity mindset, but long enough for your audience to see some real and positive changes in their lives.
Use the Right Tools for Your Contest
There are many tools that you can use for contests. Each social platform has its own approved contest software and in some cases, there is third party software that can work very well for your needs. If you want to run a contest on Instagram and Facebook, check out ShortStack.
Market Your Contest
Don’t have a contest without also adding the marketing component. Think of it just like you would with any product you want to launch. You’re going to want to get your affiliates involves, run some online ads, and share widely on all social media platforms. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are absolutely perfect for marketing your challenges and getting sign-ups.
Test, Track, Tweak
Everything you do should have a goal. That goal should be a numerical value so that it can be measured. Did you want to improve the sign-up rate by 50%? Or did you want to get 100 new subscribers? Perhaps you want your contest to “go viral” and if so, what does that mean in terms of numbers?
Follow Up
When the contest is over, you don’t have to let it be over yet. Follow up with everyone. Loudly announce the winner. Interview the winner. Interview the top three entries. Send email messages that you’ve pre-planned to everyone who entered and everyone who signed up during the contest.
Free Checklist: How To Hold An Online Contest
Holding a contest to grow your list is an excellent way to accomplish your list-growing goals. Treat the contest as you would another product so that you promote it, launch it, test it, and improve it for the next time. To help you hold an online contest for your business, download my free checklist, How To Run An Online Contest, and get more people interacting with your website to expand your email list, drive sales and generate profits for your business.