There’s a lot of competition for competitions

There’s a lot of competition if you’re trying to make people aware of your online competition.

I’m constantly amazed at the sheer volume of online competitions running at any one time. Try Googling “online competitions” and flick through sites like Win Free Stuff to see what I mean.

Companies usually need a big prize to cut through and often the competition promotion expense is worth more than the prize itself. Kind of ironic.

Having said that, holding a competition can be a great way to build awareness of your products or your brand as well as get lots of people coming to your website. In my experience, competitions are usually designed as an email database building exercise. Entrants exchange their details and opt in to receive marketing emails in exchange for a chance to win a prize. Fair exchange you’d think.

I’ve certainly seen pretty good ROI from email databases collected from a competition, in some cases quite quickly.

But it can depend on the quality of your email database list.

See, there are lots of people who describe themselves as amateur or professional “compers”.  Like professional party goers who would turn up to the opening of an envelope, professional compers basically make a tidy profit by entering into as many competitions as they can. And they’re pretty good at it.

I used to work with a husband and wife team who won a ton of stuff, including a new Mini. They subscribed to forums dedicated to competitions, sharing tactics on how to enter a competition to maximise their chances of winning.

They once bought a pallet of diet coke to enter a competition where a prize was being given away every hour. To enter you had to SMS a special code printed on the label. After a while they figured out that at precisely 55 minutes past the hour the prize would be awarded. They cleaned up.

The issue for some of our clients is that many of these competition forums and websites cotton onto the fact there’s a competition running and the compers pile in.

The traffic referred from these sites is, on paper, super high quality as you can see from the screenshot below with conversion rates from traffic from the website www.lottos.com.au running at an astounding 64%. Wincompetitions.com.au is also pretty impressive, delivering a 61% conversion rate of visitors to entries. You may notice that Direct traffic also converts highly – you can put that down to the fact the competition in question was also advertised offline as well as online.

So while you’re patting yourself on the back for the amount of competition entries you received and how big your email list has grown, there could be a catch.

If you’re running a competition to build an email database, you need to be smart about organising the segmentation of people as they are added. Everyone who enters should be segmented into a “list” which is clearly marked as “Previous Competition Entrants” (or similar) so that when you start sending emails you understand the dollar value of the audience when (or if) they convert on your site.

The problem is that your “Previous Competition Entrants” list could also contain a sizable group of compers who probably couldn’t care less about you, your products or your brand. They’ve got their eye focused firmly on the prize.

What we’ve started to do is segment the “Previous Competition Entrants” email lists even further by looking at the referrer when someone enters. If they’re from a “professional” competition website like www.lottos.com.au then those entrants are flagged and segmented.

It will be interesting to see how many of the professional compers unsubscribe from emails when they’re received and how many actually respond at all to the marketing message contained within, compared to the “non-comper” recipients.

My guess is the professionals will opt out of receiving future emails more than average and probably not be interested in the contents of the email at all if they don’t. Unless the email is promoting a new competition of course.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.