The Brainbox Online Competition Process

Competitions are a great way to add interest to a website - and a great way to expand your list of email contacts.

Six good reasons to run an online competition

1. To increase the traffic to your website
2. To support offline marketing efforts
3. To add interest to your website
4. To encourage previous visitors to return to the website for another look
5. To use as a PR "hook"
6. To get email addresses from your visitors

Overview of the Online Competition Process

Here are the eight key stages to successful online competition:

1. Decide who you want to enter the competition
2. Get people to the website
3. Get people to the competition page
4. Encourage them to Enter
5. Privacy Policy: Get Agreement
6. Record Everything
7. Close the Competition
8. Celebrate the Victory!

Step 1: Decide who you want to enter the competition

Assuming that one of the aims of the process is to gather email addresses from entrants, do you want:

• As many entrants as possible?
• As many of the *right* entrants as possible?

It's better to have 100 great contacts than 10,000 bad ones, so take some time to identify who you are targeting.

Step 2: Get people to website

If the purpose of the competition is to attract entrants from the "existing readership" of the website, then skip this step. In most cases, you'll want to attract additional visitors to the website. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

• Via offline activities - such as advertising
• Via email - by inviting existing contacts to enter the competition
• Via the website - by asking visitors to the website to recommend the website/competition to people they know

Again, think about who you are targeting: which is the best way to get to your targets?

Step 3: Get people to the competition page

Assuming people are on the website, the next thing is to point them in the direction of the competition itself. At a minimum, this requires a link on the Home Page. More likely, you're going to want some form of banner, and you'll probably want it on most -if not all - of the pages on your website.

Step 4: Encourage them to Enter

Finally, your visitors have made it to the competition page. But not everyone who gets this far will enter. Here's how to get as many of the right people to enter as possible:

Make it easy

The aim of the competition is to garner email addresses… so there's no point in making the questions hard. If your target entrants have specialist knowledge, then the questions are an opportunity to improve the quality of your entrants list: pose questions that will be easy for them… but tricky for the rest of us.

Email Address Policy - Make it clear

Some people will leave the page as soon as they see the email address box. Not much you can do about that.

Most web users understand - or accept - that an online competition is a trade: it is the exchange of (typically) an email address for the chance of winning a prize.

If you don't state your email policy, many people will assume the worst… and leave the page. So make it clear:

"We will use your email address to contact you about special offers from time to time. Under no circumstances will you email address be revealed to third parties."

Step 5: Privacy Policy: Get Agreement

There's no point in getting an email address that can't later be used, so make sure you stay within Data Protection guidelines:

• Make sure there's a Privacy Policy on the website
• Make sure that there's a link to it from the competition page
• Make sure that there's a way for the user to show their acceptance of / agreement to the Privacy Policy

Step 6: Record Everything

Record each result:

• The entrant's details (email address, etc.)
• The answer given
• The date and time of the entry

It goes without saying (doesn't it?) that details for both correct and incorrect answers should be recorded. Recording the date and time will help with the analysis of the competition: how many people entered on the first day / in the first week / etc.

Step 7: Close the Competition

All things must come to an end. At the end of the competition, there's some housekeeping to be done:

• Remove the competition form from the website
• Assemble the results.
• Pick a winner
• Notify the winner
• Dispense the prize

Step 8: Celebrate the Vistory!

Too often, the end of the competition is the last anyone - other than the winner - ever hears of it. What a waste! Make the most of the PR opportunities that a competition winner presents. Think about putting a feature on the website. You may even want to use your new-found list of email addresses to say thank you to your entrants.