Finding the Right Method to Announce Your Promotional Contest Winners

Keeping things clear for your customers is absolutely essential if you're looking to build customer loyalty. This means always following through on your commitments to them, as well.

Northsail values the customer loyalty that we've earned from our clients by always keeping our projects on-spec, on-budget, and delivering on-time.

We're so confident in our ability to meet and exceed our customer expectations that we offer a 6-month guarantee on every project, and if we don't think we can meet our normal top-quality standards, we simply won't take it on.

Part of following through for your customers involves giving them some kind of method for checking to see if they've won your contests or promotions. If you're asking them to take the time to participate, you should also take the time to make sure they know whether they're a winner at the end of your promotional event.

To help you expand your contest ideas, we've got some suggestions on how you can improve your methods for making contest winner announcements.

Before we jump into those suggestions, let's discuss a bit about promotional contests.

Contests and giveaways are engaging ways for you to offer you customers the opportunity to win a prize. Typically, these are used to draw in potential customers and increase word of mouth advertising. Frame it correctly, and your promotional activity could have a huge impact on your short-term conversions.

There are different types of contests, such as seasonal promotions, photo contests, no purchase necessary events, or even promotions that offer the opportunity for bonus contest entries.

There's no one type of promotion that works best, as long as you're mindful of ensuring that any potential winner understands the rules of your promotion, as well as time periods in which your event will take place.

This will help make it clear exactly how they can participate, as well as for how long. Just be sure no matter what type of marketing strategy you're going to use, you make sure your marketing message is relevant to your industry - otherwise, you might not draw the interest you're hoping for.

Regardless of the contest formats that you're using, the potential customers that have taken the time to participate in your promotion will want to get some sort of closure to the event.

Obviously, everyone hopes that they're going to win. That's a given. However, building excitement for an event, and then suddenly going quiet about the conclusion can give the impression that there were no winners.

Even if they didn't win the prize you're offering, a prospective customer will want to see that someone won. It adds credibility to your promotions. This way, the next time you hold an event that person may want to participate again, because they'll still see themselves as a potential winner.

There are a handful of industries where you might actually not want to announce your winners, but we’ll discuss those a bit later.

Picking a winner can actually be a challenge - especially if you've received a lot more additional entries than you'd originally expected.

Thankfully, there are ways to make the whole process easier on yourself, such as using a contest winner generator.

A contest winner generator allows you to copy and paste in the whole list of entries, set your parameters, and then it automatically picks out one (or a few) lucky winners from the list.

It's really that easy. As long as you've got all your entrants listed cleanly in some kind of database, this should be a relatively easy process for you.

This Random Name Picker works great, and it's free to use.

1.) Email Every Participant

This is as simple as setting up two very different email templates to post to your entrants:

The first email (which you'll only send one or a few) will be for your lucky winners. It should detail exactly what they've won, as well as any pre-established promotion guidelines they need to follow in order to claim their prize.

The second email should go out to each of the other eligible entries that didn't win. It should focus on thanking them for their participation, as well as encourage them to take part again in the next event.

As long as everyone gets an email, it will at least let them know that the event is over. Even if they didn't win, you'll be showing every customer that you appreciate their participation and their business.

2.) Make an Announcement Through Your Website

You don't necessarily have to create an entirely new landing page to announce your winners, but it's a good idea to make sure they're listed somewhere prominently on your site.

Whether that means including the winners somewhere in a rotating site banner, including a blog post about the end of the event on your homepage, or putting up a temporary image somewhere visible from most of your site, it's a good idea to include something here.

How heavily you want to feature the winner(s) could depend on the size of your promotion, or how much interest is drawn throughout the course of accepting eligible entries.

You also don't have to leave these announcements up for an extended time frame, but even a week or two would be enough to let your most engaged participants know that the event is over.

3.) Make a Social Media Announcement Post

If you've made a giveaway post on social media, it's important that you also take the time to notify people within that same space of who won.

Making an announcement post gives all of your followers from the original post the opportunity to celebrate the person who won - even if that isn't them.

Give your community the chance to congratulate the lucky winners and encourage the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play alongside your contests.

Not only will this improve the perception of loss within the minds of your social networks, but it's a great way to build positive brand affinity within your customer base.

4.) Keep It Secret & Include a Disclaimer in the Promotional Guidelines

This might seem like a strange choice considering that we're talking about methods for announcing your winners, but the truth is that not every single promotional winner will want to have their name and face plastered all over your marketing material.

This is especially prevalent in certain types of industries - healthcare, insurance, alcohol, cannabis, and adult entertainment products are just a few industries where people tend to want to keep their associations and information private.

But just because your business exists in those spaces, doesn't mean that you have to keep promotions out of your marketing activities. Just be mindful of your customers, and in these types of cases, consider keeping your announcements minimal or not at all.

If other customers wouldn't want their own information shared for these types of events, they most likely won't expect you to share someone else's either.

5.) Let Your Customers Vote

If your promotion involves any kind of user-generated content, there's nothing wrong with letting your own social networks vote on who they think should win.

Not only does this take any potential biases away from you, it gives you the opportunity to showcase user-generated content from within your existing customer base, which can encourage long-lasting relationships with these participants.

In order to keep things fair, each follower should only get a single vote. You can encourage them to reach out to friends and family, so that they can vote for them in your event too.

The best part is that you're expanding the entire reach of your brand when this happens. The user-generated content they provide for your event acts as social proof that they stand behind your business.

In the digital age, this is one of the most effective kinds of word-of-mouth you can hope to achieve.

6.) Make the Announcement Through a Giveaway Widget

Of course, if you've used a giveaway widget to promote your contest through your website, then there's a good chance you'll want to also make the contest winner announcement through the giveaway widget as well.

Keeping the information in the same place on your website makes it easy for customers to find it when they want to check to see if you've announced any winners yet.

Effective advertising also means giving customers a clean, intuitive UX experience on your website. Maintaining consistency, so that customers don't have to spend time re-acclimatizing themselves to your site design every few months, means customers will be more engaged and less likely to click away.

Always keep your customer journey in mind when you're making any announcements, because if you don't put the information in a place they'd think to look, there's a good chance that some customers will miss it.

7.) Partner with an Influencer to Make the Contest Winner Announcement

What's better than making a contest winner announcement yourself? Partnering with someone that also has a huge follower base to make the announcement for you!

Influencers are often looking for marketing partnerships, so as long as your brand's values and the influencers are in line with one another, this could be a beneficial deal for both of you.

The influencer may ask for some free product samples, or some kind of compensation for their support, but as long as you're reasonable, there's usually some kind of positive compromise you can reach with them, where everyone comes out a winner.

Then when they make the announcement, you can take advantage of both combined groups of followers, which can give your event a lot more reach.

It's also a wonderful method to start drawing more interest, especially if you've already got another promotion on the horizon.