Instant Win Drawings Reduce Incentive Costs and Improve Panel Engagement

Every panel manager is faced with recruiting, surveying, engaging and retaining respondents. They are constantly looking for new promotions to deploy to drive respondent behavior to ensure that company and client stakeholders stay happy.  Common problems panel managers are faced with stale promotional offerings, a tight budget, and a disconnected user experience. When we hear this from marketers, the first thing we look at is the marketer employing games in their marketing mix and if they are how are they implementing the game within their program.

Incentive drawings are designed and deployed to impact consumer behavior and are meant to engage a panelist with an opportunity to win an offered high perceived value that is enticing enough to impact consumer behavior by increasing consumer engagement, build brand advocacy of your survey,  the client you are serving or your company. A well designed promotional drawing or sweepstakes will accomplish all of the above. However, there are pitfalls to be avoided.

Incentive drawings need to be carefully created, deployed and managed to avoid legal, operational and financial pitfalls.  Legal issues associated with a promotional drawing can have considerable ramifications. To avoid the considerable issues associated with drawings, it is often best to partner with an incentive marketing agency with expertise and experience in designing and managing promotional drawings. An effective incentive drawing does require a base level of volume.

To launch an effective incentive drawing program the reward mix must be attractive enough to impact behavior. Supporting a reward-mix of $5,000 requires either a willingness to pay for rewards well in advance of distribution and have the drawing play out over a long period of time or sufficient volume to burn through the drawing entries available in a considerably shorter window.

When clients implement our SaaS GameSTACK™ reward management technology along with our Reward WIZARD™ API for a single-point integration to their existing system assets they are instantly connected to ADR’s extensive incentive reward products offerings to engage respondents real-time with a simple, easy to deploy and affordable sweepstakes and instant win drawings games.  They have the ability to run multiple drawings for different panels and demographics simultaneously, each with its incentive scheme and cost per entry. They can determine the drawing reward budget and the number of entries available, thus retaining control over costs.

Additionally, They can adjust the odds of winning to meet their specific objectives while holding both aggregate and incremental costs constant. Each reward budget can remain unchanged while the number of winners is increased dramatically allowing them to leverage the power of a high-profile reward like a 6-night/7-day cruise, or a 65 inch TV at a unit cost of $0.10 or less.

We help clients use a high-profile reward as the primary enticement in the marketing of the incentive drawing to potential respondents. It is Grand Prize Reward that is the engine driving the program’s effectiveness. A successful incentive drawing must impact the decision making and consequently the behavior of the target audience. To accomplish that objective your incentive drawing must have a well-chosen “hook” that offers a perceived value high enough that recipients are willing to trade their time, effort, or loyalty points for merely the opportunity to win the prize.

In short, the recipient must associate some real or intrinsic value to the reward; enough value that the mere chance to win the reward is sufficient to impact their decision making.

A menu of incentive drawings with high profile, high perceived value “hooks” embedded in an overall incentive program supported by advanced technologies can dramatically reduce marketing costs and liability. The concept of “Preference Reversal” will allow you to siphon off liability through members self-selecting to redeem points or other incentive currency for drawing entries at an attractive rate.  A drawing entry with a hard cash cost of $0.10 priced at $1.00 – $2.00 in incentive currency can dramatically reduce costs and increase engagement.

There are three very clear conclusions: there is a role for drawings in almost any incentive plan, drawings need to be administrated through technologies that panelists want to use supported by program management software that can offer marketers the ability to manage 1,000 of rewards, multiple games, and access to real-time reporting.  But no drawing is successful if the wrong reward mix is assembled and legal issues are not worked out in advance when creating an effective drawing.

The economic flexibility, attractiveness, and engaging nature of incentive drawings allow for a myriad of uses.  However, it is important to have specific objectives for each drawing and to create a rewarding mix, entry distribution method, and user experience reflective of that objective. Without a well-structured plan, an incentive drawing will not be as effective as it should be and not impacting behavior is simply an exercise in spending money.