10 Ways to Make Customer Engagement Fun: Sweepstakes, Contests, & Other Proven Tactics

December 8, 2023

Engaging with your customers and nurturing their journey, through data and brand personalization is an important part of running a successful online business. However, it can sometimes be difficult to keep your customers engaged and interested in your brand when they aren’t directly using your product. So, how can you make customer engagement for your brand entertaining and successful?

Fortunately, there are plenty of fun, creative, and cost-effective ways to make customer engagement more enjoyable for both you and your customers. To help you learn more about how to keep the customer journey engaging, Audience has prepared 10 proven ways to improve your brand’s customer engagement.

If you’re looking for a platform that can help you leverage your in-house data to create groundbreaking customer engagement strategies for your business, Audience can help you.

1. Sweepstakes for Customer Engagement

The first way we suggest that you boost your customer engagement is by offering your customers the chance to win prizes by entering sweepstakes while using your platform or otherwise engaging with your brand.

We’ll be the first to admit it: sweepstakes, by nature, are fun! Sweepstakes engage customers and make your brand stand out from your competition. Brands use sweepstakes to increase customer engagement, generate top-of-funnel interest, and collect valuable customer data. 

Through sweepstakes, you can offer rewards such as cash prizes, discounts, or free products in exchange for your customers taking part in activities such as completing surveys, engaging with your social media posts, or signing up for your newsletter.

There are many ways to make sweepstakes fun for customers while still achieving your goals. For example, you could organize social media raffles or quizzes and surveys that require customers to answer questions about your brand or product in order to win prizes. You could also create a company-related challenge where customers have to complete tasks related to your business in order to win rewards.

If you’re interested in offering brand sweepstakes at your company, our platform has a wide range of services that can help you create and manage sweepstakes for customer engagement. 

Our team of experts works with our clients to design custom sweepstakes campaigns that meets their company’s needs and objectives. We also provide tools to help you track the progress of your sweepstakes and measure its success. If you’re looking for an effective way to engage customers and boost sales, make sure to reach out to Audience.io and book a demo of our platform.

2. Giveaways to Improve Customer Engagement

These types of giveaways are a great way to engage customers and make it fun. They provide an incentive for customers to interact with your brand, and can be used to build loyalty and increase customer engagement. 

Giveaways can come in many forms, from free products or services, to discounts or coupons, to sweepstakes and contests. 

For example, Icon Electric Vehicles gave away a free golf cart as a way to engage customers and grow first party audiences. Through this giveaway, they were able to gain thousands  of new email addresses and followers. Read more about the campaign and methodology here.

Audience’s platform allows you to easily set up and manage giveaways, track performance metrics, and analyze results so you can optimize your campaigns for maximum impact. 

We also offer a variety of features designed to make running promo giveaways easy, efficient, and on-brand. Our automated system handles all the details for you – from setting up entry forms and tracking entries, to selecting winners randomly – so you don’t have to worry about any of the technical aspects of running a giveaway.

So, check us out if you’re curious about how to better manage your giveaways!

3. Contests to Boost Customer Engagement

Next, why not host product-knowledge related contests and quizzes that allow customers to show off their knowledge and win prizes?

Contests come in many forms, from simple quizzes or polls, to more complex tasks such as creating a video or writing an essay. Contests are a terrific way to get creative and engage customers while making interacting with your brand a fun experience for everyone. The Verge did a great job of this with their Color Quiz that showcased a great way to engage readers in a fun and interesting way. They compiled a quiz with 8 questions testing how well someone knows the brand colors of some of the most well known logos like Twitter and Yelp. Incentives are an extremely effective way of motivating people to act but incentives don’t always have to be monetary. And in this case the incentive was the thrill of testing a consumer's knowledge. This is a great strategy to increase traffic to your website, collect email addresses, or learn more about your customers. 

At Audience, we specialize in helping you create effective contests, using our contest tool, that will capture the attention of your target audience. Our platform allows you to easily set up and manage contests, track performance metrics, and analyze results so you can optimize your campaigns for maximum impact. We also offer a variety of features designed to make running contests easy and efficient.

Contests can be used as incentives for customers to sign up for your newsletters or follow your social media accounts. Or, you can also use them as a fun way to reward existing customers. 

If leveraged in certain ways, you can use contests to generate interest in new products or services, provide feedback on existing ones, and reward creative efforts from customers that may lead to valuable ideas for improvement. 

Before running a contest, simply make sure to have your goals in mind and leave the rest to Audience.io. With our powerful tools, creating effective contests has never been easier!

4. Curated Invite-Only Experiences 

Customer engagement is an essential part of any business, and it's important to make sure that your customers have a positive experience when interacting with your brand throughout their entire journey. One way to do this is by offering curated invite-only experiences. These experiences can be tailored to the needs of your customers and can help create a fun and engaging environment for them.

Invite-only experiences are designed to be exclusive and provide customers with something special that they wouldn't get anywhere else. This could include exclusive discounts, early access to new products or services, or even VIP access to events. By offering these unique experiences, you can reward customers for their loyalty and make them feel valued by your company.

At Audience, we understand how important customer engagement is for businesses, which is why we offer a range of tools to help you create the perfect invite-only experience for your customers. Our platform allows you to easily manage invitations and track customer engagement so that you can see what works best for your business. 

5. Gamification

According to Investopedia, gamification refers to the “incentivization of people's engagement in non-game contexts and activities by using game-style mechanics.”

Gamification is a fantastic resource for building customer relationships while adding an element of fun into the process. Gamification strategies can include inspiring competition, encouraging users to share their rewards and achievements with others (such as on social media platforms), providing opportunities for customers to acquire data, and creating incentives for customers to stay loyal to your brand.

You can harness the potential of gamification to motivate interaction, engagement, and loyalty among your customers - creating an unforgettable experience that will keep them coming back to your brand.

Audience offers unique gamification solutions designed to help you create a unique customer experience that keeps buyers engaged. We offer a range of tools that allow you to create engaging games that reward your customers for their loyalty and participation.

For example, Listo used gamification in their lead generation campaign by offering +50 bonus entries if their participants answered yes to learning more about their brand. This is a fun way for the them to earn extra entries while the brand is gathering more customer insights into the participant's data.

With our gamification solutions, you can increase customer engagement while making it fun at the same time. If you’re curious about our tools - just ask us! We’d love to book a demo and show you how to use our platform to gamify your customer journey.

6. Storytelling as a Customer Engagement Tactic

Storytelling is a powerful tool for customer engagement, as it can help your business connect with your customers on an emotional level - just take it from Entrepreneur.com. Storytelling allows you to create an engaging narrative that resonates with your audience on an unconscious level, helps you to build relationships with them, and helps nurture them through their entire buyer’s journey. 

For example, you may wish to emphasize a storytelling initiative for your entire company by hiring copywriters, brand managers, or content directors that understand brand storytelling. 

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that these creatives can work in-tandem with people who manage data on your team and can provide them with valuable insights regarding their campaigns, such as product managers, data managers, and more.

Audience’s platform enables you to craft stories that are tailored to your customers’ specific needs and feedback, allowing you to create content that is both engaging and informative for users. We also provide analytics so businesses can track the performance of your brand stories and adjust their details accordingly.

Storytelling isn’t restricted to one or two marketing campaigns; your story should remain apparent and consistent across all marketing channels to ensure the utmost success for your brand. To succeed in brand storytelling, identify ways to resonate with your customers’ pain points and make your customers the hero’s of your brand story on all platforms.

7. Personalized Messaging 

Sending personalized messages tailored specifically to each of your customer’s needs, interests, and preferences is a strategic way to ensure they engage meaningfully with your brand.

Personalized messaging is a powerful tool for customer engagement, allowing businesses to create more meaningful connections with their customers. With the help of Audience, businesses can leverage zero-party customer data to create personalized messages that will engage and delight their customers.

By unlocking and leveraging this zero-party data, you can create highly targeted campaigns whose messaging will resonate with your customers and drive conversions.

In addition to creating personalized messages, Audience provides insights into customer behavior so businesses can better understand their audience and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Companies can use this data to identify trends in customer behavior and develop strategies that will increase engagement and loyalty among their customers.

8. Host Live Events

Want a refreshing way to engage your customers? Host live events such as webinars, Q&A sessions, or virtual meetups where customers can interact directly with you and other members of your team in real time. You can also, of course, host real in-person meet-ups as well!

Hosting live events is an effective way to engage customers and build relationships. Live events can be anything from a small gathering of close friends or family, to a large corporate event with hundreds of attendees and colleagues. Regardless of the event size, hosting a live event provides an opportunity for customers to connect with each other and your brand in a unique and meaningful way.

For example, WaTiki Waterpark Resort did an Instant Campaign live in person for New Year’s Eve 2023. By using QR code links to campaigns displayed at person events, they were able to create engagement through all the different prizes they gave away.

Live events can help create an atmosphere of fun and excitement that will keep customers engaged throughout the event. Whether it’s a product launch, customer appreciation day, or simply a networking event, having an interactive element such as games or activities can make the experience more enjoyable for everyone involved. Don’t forget to record all of the highlights from your event to post on social media sites, such as LinkedIn!

Overall, hosting live events is an effective way to engage customers and build relationships with them in a fun and exciting way.

9. Social Media Challenges

Next, to increase customer engagement, you can create challenges on social media platforms such as Instagram or TikTok that encourage users to share content related to your brand and tag their friends in order to spread awareness about it further across the platform’s user base.

Creating branded social media challenges is a great way to increase customer engagement and make it fun. Social media challenges are viral trends that invite people to partake in “challenges”. To create your branded social media challenges, you can pick a catchy, brand-relevant hashtag to drive your campaign forward.

These challenges can be used to engage your customers by creating a challenge related to your brand or product. 

For example, if you own a clothing brand you could create a challenge where customers must post photos of themselves wearing your products to spread awareness. You could require that users tag your brand’s instagram account and type your challenge-specific hashtag in their caption to be an official part of our company’s social media challenge. This will help spread awareness of your brand while also engaging customers in a fun and interactive manner.

Brand-based social media challenges provide a novel and interactive way to engage your customers. With the help of Audience's helpful tools, brands can easily launch successful campaigns designed to maximize their reach and engagement rate – all while having fun!

10. Loyalty Programs

By offering exclusive incentives like club member discounts, free products, or other rewards, companies can encourage customers to return and make more purchases. A well-designed loyalty program can help increase customer lifetime value, create positive word-of-mouth marketing, and attract new customers.

Audience possesses the proper tools that allow you to customize your loyalty programs according to your needs - from setting up rewards tiers for different levels of engagement, to creating fun activities that will keep your customers coming back for more.

You can also reward loyal customers with points, discounts, or exclusive access to new products when they engage with your brand regularly over time through means like punch cards or subscription boxes.

At Audience we believe in the power of customer loyalty programs and how they can help businesses grow their customer base and strengthen relationships with existing customers. Our team is dedicated to helping you create the perfect loyalty program for your business so you can get the most out of it.

If you are interested in learning more about Audience’s platform for leveraging zero-party customer data, reach out to us and book a demo today. We’d be happy to talk with you about how we can help grow your brand by unlocking valuable customer insights.

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December 8, 2023