Subscribe to the You're a Winner! email marketing service.
Create a prize.
Decide whether you want to track your customer's birthdays and anniversaries to create additional recognition for your business.
Decide how long customer registrations are good for (we suggest six months to a year to start). Customers receive emails each time a draw is run for the entire registration period.
Decide how many prize packages you want to award and how often to run draws.
Design email templates for:
If you are going to provide reminder emails for birthdays and anniversaries then you will need to design email templates for:
When you first subscribe to the You're a Winner! service the system will provide you with sample email templates for each of these five emails. The sample templates are set up for our fictitious restaurant Presto Bistro, as a suggestion of how the layout and wording of each of these messages might look.
As indicated above, you will need to create an opt-in confirmation email and at least two email templates.
If you are using the suggested congratulations message that lists the names of the winners for each draw then the message should also contain a sentence that indicates that by signing up for the contest they give you permission to publish their name in case they are a winner of any particular draw. We have included a sample confirmation email here.
You can use the advertising portion of the emails to promote your business any way you want - by describing special promotions, hours of operation, new products or new services.
When any of your advertising materials (i.e. tent cards, receipt extensions, flyers, posters etc.) contains a QR code that your customers can scan using their mobile device to register or re-register for your contest you have virtually eliminated all of the overhead costs of running a mailing list.
If the customer has previously used their device to register a visit to a You're a Winner! client site (either the one they're at when they scan the code or any other) then their visit is registered effectively immediately. If the customer has never used their device to scan a You're a Winner! QR code, they're asked to provide their email address. If the user has registered in a You're a Winner! system running anywhere, that profile information is on file and can be used to fill in your database from the information on the You're a Winner! main server. If they've never registered that email address at any You're a Winner! client site then they're presented with another window on their device where they are asked to provide their name (first and last) and optionally their birthday, anniversary and postal code/address information. All of that information is stored on our servers and the customer profile is marked as being a participant in your draws.
Gifts can be awarded at any interval you choose - daily, weekly, monthly... whatever. In the case of a restaurant, the gift might be dinner for two; a golf and country club might give away a round of golf; an automotive service department could award a car detailing package; a grocery store might provide a specific dollar amount of free groceries, etc. Gifts should be awarded as gift certificates of some sort. Note that the You're a Winner! service doesn't track the redemption of gifts or certificates - that has to be managed separately.
When a customer registers or re-registers the system automatically records the visit by creating a "visit record" for that customer for that date and client. Visit records make the customer eligible for all draws in a specified period of time. We recommend that the visit record be valid for at least six months or so, but the validity period is entirely up to you.
The more visits a customer has, the better their chance of winning. However, the system limits the visits to one per day per customer email, so no one can "stuff the ballot box".
The contest manager portion of You're A Winner! calculates all eligible visit records, generates a randomized list of visit records, picks the winner, and sends the winner email notification of the fact of their winning.
It then sends consolation email notices to all other contestants.
Both the winning notification and consolation emails should include marketing information that you want to get to your customers - sales, featured products, special events, etc.
The time-consuming list management chores like dealing with bounced emails and unsubscribe requests are handled by the You're A Winner! list manager software. Customers can unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email they receive. You can also unsubscribe a customer from the client configuration portion of You're a Winner! by editing the subscriber's status.
The optional birthday and anniversary tracking facility allows you to collect birth dates and anniversary dates from your customers and to send them a congratulatory email just prior to the day (any number of days in advance - you select the date range). Of course you can also award the recipient a discount coupon, gift certificate or similar promotional item.
The You're a Winner! email marketing system is a service and as such there is no software to be delivered. All the software runs on our servers. We take care of all the maintenance, backups, hardware and operating system issues that might arise.
Because of the marketing method we currently use, you (as a prospective client or marketer) must be invited to participate by one of our marketing partners. However, if you fill in the form below we will forward your contact information to a marketing partner as soon as possible and they will contact you directly.