Using promotions to turn shoppers into fans

It’s a well-known fact that happy customers are your best sales force. That’s why it pays to go the extra mile to make the winners of your promotional competitions feel super-special. Here at NDL, we know only too well that the impact of winner management can reach far and wide, and have long-lasting consequences for a brand.

5 Tips on Delighting Your Winners

A great prize isn’t always enough to delight your winners. As the saying goes: it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Here are our top tips on how to look after your winners and make them your biggest advocates.

1. Have a plan.

The devil is in the detail when it comes to successful winner management. Physical prizes are relatively straight-forward to fulfil. However, when it comes to delivering experiences, you need to cover all bases, from insurances and check-ins through to dietary requirements and travel delays.

2. Get the message right.

The initial contact with a winner is extremely important to a successful outcome. You want to convey a sense of delight and excitement but you also need to be clear about what is and isn’t included in the prize. Setting expectations from the outset is critical to a winner feeling satisfied overall.”

3. Maintain contact

Appoint someone to take ownership of the contact with each winner. From simply ensuring their prizes have arrived and that they are what the winner was expecting to receive through to a courtesy call when the winner has returned from a trip – it all helps to create the right impression and nip any potential issues in the bud.

4. Deliver a great prize

Get the best prizes your budget can buy and deliver them with style. If these are physical prizes, get the right merchandise delivered to the right place at the right time and try to add a finishing touch which will make it even more memorable, even if that means simply packaging your prize like a gift or including a well written covering letter. If it’s an experience-based prize, look for ways to add a little more luxury, or include an aspect which they wouldn’t be able to arrange themselves.

5. Know what success means to your brand

Decide in advance how you are going to measure the success of your promotion. Of course, 99% of promotions aim to improve sales performance and to get consumers to switch brands. But there are other measures you can set in place, from something as simple as reporting the number of entrants through to measuring a more complex indicator such as the level of chatter about your brand by fans on social media.

What to do next

If you would like to find out more about how NDL can help you to run even more successful promotions, please get in touch on 0207 428 3090. You can also download our series of free guides here: The NDL Guide to Successful Promotions.