3 Tips to Make the Most of Your TapKat Sweepstakes Fundraiser
So you’ve sourced a great prize that you know your donor base will love, you’ve built out your sweepstakes site with great photos and compelling text, and you’ve launched your TapKat sweepstakes, wahoo! Now what happens?
Over the next weeks and months comes the fun part: It's time to spread the word about your TapKat sweepstakes to your donor base and start watching the donations roll in.
Over the hundreds of nonprofit sweepstakes we’ve worked with, there are some “best practices” that we always encourage our customers to make sure and do. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how — and why — they’re so important (and how you can easily implement these strategies for your organization’s benefit).
Tip #1: Create an Email Marketing Calendar for Your TapKat Sweepstakes
TapKat makes this super easy. When you sign into your TapKat dashboard, you’ll see that our system automatically generates a customized email marketing calendar for you. Take note of the suggested dates, and plan ahead to make sure that you’re actually sending out emails on those days.
Why is this so important? In our experience, email is still king when it comes to raising funds. More than any other means of advertising (social media, television, radio, etc.), when a donor receives an email directly to their inbox, it makes an impact. We recommend sending out at least one email per month to your donor base, and planning for more during flash contests and at the tail end of your sweepstakes.
All your emails should have these four things in common:
Every email you send to your donor base should be a dedicated email. This is different than simply including a blurb about the sweepstakes in your newsletter — that’s not enough. On average, a newsletter mention will only raise about 10% of what a dedicated email will generate. A dedicated email is one that focused exclusively on the sweepstakes and links only to the sweepstakes. Remember, a confused mind says “no”, so it’s important that your email is simple, direct, and encourages the donor to click through and make a donation.
Every email you send should feature beautiful images of the prize. Whether you’re giving away a dream vacation to Belize, an exciting new car, or a desirable experience, the photo at the top of the email should help the donor envision how amazing it would be to win. If your prize is a vacation, make sure you have great photos of the beach/pool/other enticing attraction. If you’re giving away a car, share beautiful photos!
Every email should be filled with links to your TapKat sweepstakes fundraising site. Make sure that all photos are clickable, and will re-direct the donor to your sweepstakes site so they can quickly and easily make a donation.
Finally, check that your email looks just as good on mobile devices as it does on desktop. Many donors these days are opening email and completing transactions through their smart phones, which means that your images need to be clear, and your text needs to be very legible even on small devices.
Sometimes when we talk to nonprofits about sending out emails at least once per month, they get worried about unsubscribe rates. In our experience, this should not be a concern. Yes, some people will unsubscribe — but the number of people who do will be negligible compared to the money your email can raise for the organization. Plus, once someone has entered the sweepstakes, they won’t want to unsubscribe because they’ll be eager to learn if they have won!
Tip #2: Use Promo Codes for Your TapKat Sweepstakes
Promo codes are a fantastic and easy way to track your marketing efforts, and you can create as many as you want within your TapKat dashboard. A promo code will essentially offer your donors a percentage more entries with every donation they make to your sweepstakes. So, if your promo code is for 25% more entries, when the donor enters at a $50 level, instead of receiving 40 entries, they’ll receive 50.
Donors love promo codes and they’re very effective for building excitement and generating more donations, even among donors who have already donated to your sweepstakes. But they’re also really helpful on your end: once you launch a promo code and people make donations using the code, you can track how many donations you received using that code. So let’s say you have a social media campaign and you want to measure how effective it is. Create a promo code and put it on all the social media ads you plan to run. When you look up the promo code in your TapKat dashboard, you’ll easily see how many donations came in thanks to that promotion. You can even see who donated, and when, and download the list of folks that donated using that promo code.
As you can imagine, promo codes can help you refine and strengthen your marketing efforts in a big way. If you learn that one promo code is performing better than the others, you’ll understand which promotional activities are most effective for your particular donor base and prize.
Tip #3: Update Your Donor List Before You Send a Marketing Email
When you’re logged into your TapKat dashboard and click over to the “entries” page, you’ll see at the bottom an option to download the list of donors. We suggest that all our nonprofit customers download the .csv of their donor data and use that document to update their CRM database before each email send. This way, you’ll know that you have the most current list of donors.
This is important for a few reasons:
It will ensure that you’re communicating with all your current donors when you send out your next email. Over the years, we’ve seen quite a few donors enter a sweepstakes multiple times. This often happens when there are new promo codes or flash contests going on, or simply at the end of a sweepstakes when everyone’s getting excited about the winner being drawn soon.
New donors will learn more about your nonprofit. A big piece of TapKat sweepstakes is the opportunity to grow your donor base. Make sure those new donors are added to your list so that they can begin to learn more about your organization when you do send out newsletters and other campaigns.
Finally, you’ll definitely want to make sure the list is updated before you announce the winner! Everyone will be very curious about that piece of information.
Get in the habit of updating your list frequently.
Don’t Forget to Have Fun with Your TapKat Sweepstakes!
Running a TapKat sweepstakes is a fun and rewarding way to bring in new donors, activate lapsed donors, and generate excitement and buzz around your organization. Don’t forget that when you have fun with your sweepstakes and its marketing, the donors will pick up on that. The most exciting sweepstakes are those that get creative in their promotion, have a great time, and recognize the win-win potential for all involved!
Want to learn more about how to maximize your sweepstakes? Check out these articles on our blog…
