Original published date: October 17, 2023.
With so many prize ideas, win mechanics and routes that brands can take, planning a promotion can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be.
With some guidance, budgets of various sizes can run successful campaigns, making brand promotions a long-term tactic that bolsters audience engagement, drives sales, amongst other many benefits.
1. Defining and deciding between different promotional mechanics
1a. What is an instant win promotion?
1b. What is a prize draw promotion?
1c. What is a text-to-win (TTW / T2W) promotion?
1d. Other promotional mechanics to consider
1e. Combining promotional mechanics
2. Choosing between an agency and a platform
4. Getting audiences’ attention and awareness
5. Got attention? Now, how do you engage that audience?
5c. What other tools, features, and services should you incorporate?
7a. Administering a fair and just promotion
7b. Including terms & conditions
7c. Choosing a winner and administering prizes
To begin, one of the major considerations is the promotional mechanic that your brand wishes to use. There are many to choose from but the most popular mechanics are typically instant wins and prize draws.
Simply understanding what an instant win promotion is, can already be a little confusing, let alone understanding how to run an instant win promotion. In the simplest sense, instant win promotions are when participants can find out immediately if they’ve won after they’ve made an entry into a promotion. This can be done in a few ways but the most common is through either a ‘winning moment’ or a ‘winning token’. They must be randomly generated by an independently auditable method - typically a computer-generated algorithm in accordance with the law of chance.
A winning moment scenario is when a participant enters an instant win promotion within an allotted time frame, the first entrant made within this period is the winner of this specific ‘winning moment’. Under winning moments, there are two types: ‘open’ and ‘closed’ winning moments.
An ‘open winning moment’ has a definitive starting period where entrants can join the promotion and be the winner. It’s not until a winner is chosen, that the winning moment will end. Even if the first entrant occurs 30 minutes after the ‘winning moment’ begins, they will still be a winner. This is the recommended winning moment for brands to take.
Whereas a ‘closed winning moment’ is more rigid – it requires an entry to be made within a specific time frame, this winning moment period could be a minute or even a second and if there are no entries within that period, the winning moment ends without a winner. This means brands could hypothetically advertise that there are “1000s of prizes available to be won” without having to give away a single prize. However, this route is often seen as ‘predatory’ and is not favoured by audiences, and at worst, could potentially become a point of complaint which could end in an ASA ruling.
Alternatively, you can use a ‘winning token’ method instead. The ‘token’ itself can be a variety of things, a URN (unique reference number), a physical ‘ticket’ – which in itself can take various forms, it’s not restricted to a paper ticket and can be a physical object. However, the caveat of using a winning token is that there’s no guarantee that they’ll be bought or redeemed. Tokens such as URNs work better as a way to validate the entry rather than to choose a winner.
The appeal of an instant win is the immediate gratification of winning a prize and not having to wait for the results, grabbing attention instantaneously. Trust in the brand will also rise.
A traditional prize draw is where the winner(s) are selected from a collection of valid entities from all participants, the winning results must be random to be deemed fair by the ASA. Independence is a crucial compliance requirement of the CAP code. The ASA has stated “Members of staff are unlikely to be considered independent.”
Prize draws are a good way to keep audiences returning, since winners are not announced instantly, the disappointment of not winning lessens whilst the excitement associated with the possibility and anticipation of winning remains relatively strong.
Text-to-win promotions are also an incredibly popular promotional mechanic, used by big and small brands alike, it’s a low-effort way for shoppers to enter a promotion. It involves participants sending a certain message, usually including some personal details to a specific number which will enter them into the promotion. Compliance can be tricky, e.g. readability and acknowledgement of terms & conditions, privacy policies, and of course age gate verification.
If none of the above promotional mechanics feels particularly appealing, there are other promotional mechanics that your brand can consider. For example, other mechanics that are not used as often by brands are as follows:
Another example is with tech products as seen in Xperia Rewards, often, they will allow customers to redeem a product such as headphones, or other tech accessories for free on www.xperiarewards.co.uk, their microsite, with the purchase of another product, usually hardware.
With these various promotional mechanics, there’s a lot of overlap between them. It’s common to see a promotion with a prize draw that is also an instant win; an instant win or a prize draw that is also a text-to-win; or other various combinations.
A common combination is a prize draw that also includes instant win mechanics. Frequently, brands will begin a promotion with instant win prizes and when the main promotional period comes to an end, there will be a ‘wrap-up’ period where participants enter a prize draw to win the remaining prizes not claimed in the instant win, or even to win the ‘headline’ and grand prize. Figuring out “how to run an instant win prize draw” may sound and seem intimidating at first, but when equipped with the right tools, getting that activation set up and running can be easy.
Part of running a good activation of any kind is understanding and equipping yourself and your brand with the right tools, skills, and labour. For brands with little digital promotional experience, and even brands with lots of past promotions under their belt, it’s advised to either work with an agency or build their promotion with the help of an end-to-end platform.
The decision comes down to a few key factors which will vary from brand to brand:
Agencies are a great way to begin your brand's promotional journey, whether it’s a long-term or short-term addition, an agency is a consistently strong option, regardless of what route your brand takes. Digital agencies like Promotions Interactive are powered and backed by experts who have a strong knowledge of what it takes to run a promotion from start to finish. The agency does the heavy lifting and it’s a less time-consuming and less labour-intensive way of adding promotions into your brand’s toolkit.
That being said, agencies – digital, promotional, marketing, etc, can help build promotions from scratch and, bar the transitional period, they can pick up where others have left off. Helping you:
And ideally, under a strict, tight deadline.
However, when a brand repeatedly runs promotions, it becomes apparent that agencies don’t always stick around and not all agencies maintain a consistent quality.
There can be many reasons for this, as for all projects, the skillset needed for one will not always necessarily be the same set of skills needed for another and so, an agency that did amazing work before, may not be the best choice to work with again if the next promotion requires different mechanics and options from their last.
To mitigate this, many large agencies will make up for their weaker spots by outsourcing some of the work to other agencies to make up for it. However, like brands that hire agencies, the work outsourced may not always be developed by the same people as before. The agency in charge may even decide to build a more robust in-house team to make their skillset stronger to stop outsourcing work, causing the quality to fluctuate.
The great part of working with an agency is that they are experienced and knowledgeable. An established promotional marketing agency will have a good knowledge of reliable prize fulfilment companies; the regulations and laws surrounding promotions; and what makes for a strong and effective promotion in the first place. For brands who are testing the waters and are curious – wanting to expand into the digital promotions space, working with an agency is a beneficial option to start their promotional journey and can be seen as an extension of your brand’s marketing team.
However, once a brand becomes more familiar with the promotional process, agencies may not be the most beneficial choice. It must be noted that, for agencies, their prerogative is to keep working with brands and will tend to gatekeep their process, keeping the knowledge of “how to run a promotion from start to end” mostly to themselves.
Working with an agency to run a promotion means your brand loses out on some of the control and flexibility over your brand and the promotion itself. For more ambitious brands who want to be in control and take charge of their promotions, they can best be empowered by a promotional platform; typical cost savings of 30% can be expected.
Each promotion will have different timelines and objectives to hit. Say if you’re planning a recurring promotion, the burden of planning may be lighter than an entirely new promotion, or so it may seem at first.
Let’s say you’re running a recurring prize draw, but you’re working with a new marketing and digital agency. Although there’s already an existing skeleton for the promotion – things can get messy and confusing. As a brand, previous agencies seem to have the power in promotions, they handle and know all sorts and aspects of your brand, it can often feel like your brand’s campaigns and promotions are not fully in your company’s control.
Why do so many brands struggle with control? Think about how a promotion is organised. You, the brand that wants to run the promotion, must seek out and jump to each agency, working around the agencies rather than inviting agencies to work within your organisation during the promotion roll-out.
Moreover, brands simply don’t have a way to organise and structure their promotions completely internally, so they often rely on agencies. A great way to solve this issue is to host promotions on a platform so that all past, current, and future promotions, promotional material, etc. are hosted and centralised within one platform.
Learning how to use a platform to build and facilitate an activation can be an intimidating process. Like picking up Photoshop for the first time, learning the ins and outs can be a long process, but provides you and your brand with an incredibly valuable tool which opens more opportunities for your brand’s campaigns.
With a platform, brands are empowered with more choices, faster delivery, flexibility, and most of all, complete control. Third parties can make the planning period longer since it adds more chains of command, you will then need to account for my time to liaise and speak with and communicate with the various parties involved. This can be a fatal flaw in the process as many activations are extremely time-sensitive.
The biggest issue with promotion-building platforms is finding a reliable one that suits your business needs. Choosing one begins with understanding the scope of your promotion(s).
Whilst there are platforms like Woobox, that can help brands build quick one-off campaigns like sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways, the options and features they provide are limited where it matters and open-ended where a little more guidance would be ideal.
The platform has a user-friendly interface and it’s easy to get started but users may feel limited in what the platform can provide. They offer a few options for different promotional mechanics, but to create a more robust promotion with more customisation, more flexibility, and more capabilities, brands need to look for a different platform. Overall, Woobox and similar platforms are a decent way to get started but with limited flexibility and the most basic capabilities at their advanced price range of $249/month (£196.01/month) for promotion handling, the platform works best for brands who are getting started. Along with a rather rigid price scheme, what is listed is what you get.
For promoters looking for something more strategic, a way to professionalise, organise and evaluate their brand promotions, an end-to-end solution is the answer. Legitimate end-to-end managed services for promotions are harder to come by, but provide many more services and flexibility in features and personalisation - and that’s before we consider first-party data and security. One such example is PromoNow, a platform built and run by promotional experts and has been made to cater exactly to each brand’s promotional needs.
When it comes to finding prizes that your audience will love, it can be a challenge.
Two main factors make a prize draw’s prize pool enticing: quality and quantity. Everyone wants to win big, but having a greater chance of winning in the first place is also a bonus if the prize pool is vast, more consumers may sign up as they feel they have more of a chance of winning. A headline prize helps grab the attention of initial consumers, particularly busy shoppers; followed by a fair number of ‘lower-tier’ prizes, which keep their attention and engagement, also lowering participant disappointment.
A brand’s prize pool is not limited by options, just the given budget. Even with a small budget, you can give your customers amazing prizes by getting creative. Prizes can be cash or practically anything. Travel, experiences, entertainment, merchandise, vouchers. There are endless choices for you to add to your prize pool.
Suppose your brand is having trouble coming up with ideas, or you’d rather leave it to professionals and specialists. In that case, you can contact and work with a prize fulfilment company, such as Prize Professionals who can help come up and compile prizes for your customers that they will love and want to win.
If you’re working from a true end-to-end promotional platform like PromoNow, vetted partners, including prize fulfilment companies (along with suppliers, printers, packaging experts, influencers, and other types of partners) can be found via the platform.
Having a working promotion is all well and good, but if customers, consumers, and shoppers don’t know about it, brands lose out in the end. In short, brands need to market the campaign itself.
There are a few ways to get attention to your promotion, the most common and popular options are, as follows:
When you’ve got attention on your brand and people want to enter the promotion, the next considerations are crucial to keep that attention.
With plenty of entry formats to choose from, the most common and popular one by far, is the form-based entry. Used both as an individual entry method and an additional method in combination with the other options, the entry form is a straightforward and surefire way to log participants’ information, making it easy to track and prevent invalid entries.
Some promotions, usually those hosted solely on social media platforms leverage social engagement as a way to enter the promotion, i.e. entrants are required to like a post on a brand account, to follow the account, or to tag someone in the post’s comments. Be cautious about auditability here to stay on the right side of the ASA.
For text-to-win promotions, the entry method sometimes ends in sending a specific message to a number. Sometimes an automatically generated response is sent, prompting participants to take further action which usually is to fill in an entry form.
There are also promotions where the method of entry is for participants to create user-generated content (UGC) like taking a selfie, submitting a photo, or creating some art, among many other types of UGC, which gets participants engaged and invested in the promotion.
The easiest way to represent your brand is through visuals, using personalised brand designs, and creating UI that reflects your branding. Likewise, curating the UX experience to be natural and ergonomic ensures that participants leave the promotion feeling satisfied and not frustrated or confused. It’s imperative to eliminate as many pain points as possible since what users experience when they interact with brands will undoubtedly impact their opinion and impression of the brand.
Another way to ensure your brand is represented well, have support in place for participants. Part of this is having terms & conditions readily available and air-tight and ensuring consumer data is protected. In brand promotions, participants share and trust the promoter with this personal and sensitive information which means promoters need to do their due diligence and work with partners and agencies that value and take consumer security seriously. From GDPR compliance to being officially ISO27001 certified, making sure those that you work with take your customer’s data as seriously as you, will prevent data leaks and any negative press that follows.
Microsites – Microsites keep your main website’s day-to-day functions separate from any promotional activity or digital activations that your brand may be working on. This gives your microsite a specific and targeted purpose that gives you more creative freedom with the design and function in a way that your main website may not be able to achieve due to stricter brand and website guidelines.
iframes – working similarly to a microsite, using iframes to create a promotional page on your main website is a way to keep everything contained on one website, allowing agencies to work on creating a microsite without the brand itself surrendering control over their website.
Web applications – this also includes features such as online forms which can connect customers quickly and securely which ensures that participants who submit their information have their data protected the entire time.
Interactive games – shopper marketing and digital activations can be dull without much interactivity. When users are invested and actively engaging in a promotion, they’re more likely to remember and walk away with a positive impression, perhaps even returning to the promotion, perhaps via a microsite, and repeatedly participating and engaging with the activation.
Making sure your promotion abides by the laws is just one part of running a promotion. It’s a consideration that brands need to remember to account for throughout the promotion, both pre-launch and post-launch. It’s also the very first step in making your brand a trustworthy option for consumers. Running promotions of any kind is putting your brand out there to the public and inviting them to see and interact with your brand which is why running a considerate and well-thought-out activation is critical.
Before and throughout the ‘rollout’ of the promotion, the promoter should ensure several things (as seen through the CAP codes 8.14 to 8.15.1 and 8.19 to 8.24):
Being able to demonstrate the fairness of the promotion in how it’s administered when challenged by the ASA is also crucial to ensuring your promotion doesn’t receive any undue bad press. Having an ASA’s ruling on your promotion upheld can be detrimental to your brand and reputation.
The fine print is where promotions get finicky. As a brand, your promotions need to communicate all significant conditions and information. Any information that may be misleading when omitted also needs to be included. What is considered significant will vary based on the promotion but as a general rule of thumb, significant conditions are:
Terms and conditions need to be made available either before or during a promotional period and should be accessible to consumers. Any changes to the terms and conditions must be avoided at all costs. If it’s unavoidable, prepare to give a robust defence on its fairness and argue its level of impact, i.e. not causing participants ‘unnecessary disappointment’.
Finally, your promotion is out there–it’s time to select the winners and give them their prizes.
To begin, when determining a winner we have to make sure that they’re determined through and per “the laws of chance.” Now what does this entail? You could use a random computer process which is verifiably random, however, the ASA will need to see proof of this. Otherwise, winners selected through other means will need to be done by or under the supervision of an independent observer. Something like a member of staff scrolling through and selecting an entry does not abide by the “laws of chance” as they’re associated with the brand and hence, not considered an independent party.
Now that you’ve got a winner, ensure the prize gets to them as promised. The prize must either:
Making consumers pay or face costs to claim a prize is prohibited and charging them to call and claim their prize is unacceptable.
As the promoter, you will also need to make an effort to contact the winner. If, despite best efforts, the promoter cannot get into contact with the winner, the prize does not have to be awarded to the winner and can be awarded, instead, to a runner-up.
The promoter must publish information indicating that a valid award took place. Usually, this just entails providing the details of the prize one, county, and prize winner’s name. However, the intention to publish this information must be made known so that they have the opportunity to object to this and possibly reduce the information made available. Please note that regardless of any information kept private, that information is still expected to be provided to the ASA if so challenged.
Running promotions, especially frequently, can be a nerve-wracking endeavour. With possibly hundreds and thousands of participants signing up for a brand's promotion - ensuring that they meet those immovable deadlines and previous promotional standards can be an organisational disaster at times. Especially when you have external parties involved in your brand's communications. It's not only difficult to make sure everyone is on the same page, but it can also be difficult to move forward with the promotion if there are too many chains of communication involved.
This is why we've engineered PromoNow to be a one-stop-shop platform to handle all your promotional needs, with our PromoNow Experts ready as an extension of your brand and shopper marketing team. Start, plan, and monitor all on the platform. Better yet, communicate with all your partners and agencies on PromoNow - make sure everyone with a stake in your promotion is represented and heard.
Want to stay up-to-date on brand promotions and be the first to hear about the retailer offerings in promotions? Keep an eye on our insights page or follow up on LinkedIn by clicking the ‘follow’ button below and be the first to hear about PromoNow’s Insights.
Curious about how PromoNow can enhance and revitalise your promotions? Get in touch with one of our experts through the form below.
To run your prize draws and other promotions with best practices built in from the beginning, consider using the PromoNow platform. Speak with a platform consultant at +44 (0) 20 380 555 38 or email [email protected] to learn more.
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