The Beginners Text-to-Win SMS Contest Guide

It is no secret that the ROI on SMS marketing campaigns can be huge. Many of today’s major marketers use text messaging to collect leads from their audiences deliver coupons that drive sales, and engage their prospects to become customers.

In this guide, we will outline the step-by-step ways to establish your first SMS contest. Soon you will be able to build a mobile list faster than a speeding bullet!

Choosing a Text to Win Software Platform

First, you need to choose a platform capable of running an SMS contest. In all honestly, there are plenty of them out there. But needless to say, when it comes to SMS platforms, we are a bit biased here at VIPTap and recommend using ours.

Regardless of whom you choose, the service should be affordable, intuitive, and feature-packed. It should be simple to set up your campaign with little technical know-how and be easy to measure your results. To see how easy setting up an SMS contest is within VIPTap, just go here. Now, enough about us.

Let’s get to it.

Why Should I Run an SMS Contest?

Text to win SMS contests are a fun and entertaining way to engage prospects. They work well for a variety of situations, especially for generating leads using free giveaways, like a product, vacation trip, or event tickets. Often people can’t resist the opportunity to win something, especially if you make it easy for them to enter using text to win.

Before starting your campaign, ask yourself these three questions…

1. Does this make sense for my company?

Businesses that offer a consumer product will often have better results because their products tend to solve personal problems or meet internal desires. Often their current marketing is better suited to engaging your target audience.

If your business is B2B, making your SMS contest a success can be more of a challenge due to the nature of your product or service. Don’t worry, if you think outside the box, anything can be accomplished.

Think of Coca-Cola vs. commercial tax software. Which one is better suited to pulling off a contest?

Coca-Cola will have a much easier time promoting a contest because of the mass appeal of its product and the strength of its brand. The commercial tax software company is a niche and has limited appeal.

2. Can we provide a great incentive or prize?

A strong incentive is one of the most crucial elements of the planning process.

One thing to think about is that picking an extremely low-value prize will stymie your results and can cause a campaign to fail. The incentive you choose should resonate with your target audience. It should get people excited about joining your contest.

The incentive does not have to be some expensive grand prize; it could be a discount. Furthermore, if a customer opts into your SMS contest, you could reward that action with a voucher, special promo, or even exclusive content.

3. Are we going to put 100% into this campaign?

An SMS contest that is not properly promoted will fall flat on its face. You can’t set it up and expect it to get great results by itself. If you want a highly effective campaign, it will require you to put in your full effort. Plan properly and, more importantly, execute all aspects of the campaign.

Nothing is worse than putting in the time and effort to build a campaign that fails because you didn’t go the extra mile. Next, we will talk about how to find your targets.

Find Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach?

Who is your target? Maybe its location-based or gender-based. If you have been marketing your business for any time at all, then this step is probably a “no-brainer”. You likely already have your target audience dialled in.

For instance, if you sell golf products, then it’s clear your target is going to be people interested in golf, likely middle-aged, and living within a certain radius of local clubs.

Here is a list to think about when you are finding your audience:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Gender
  • Relationship Status
  • Product Owner
  • Family

Set Your Goals

First, you must sort out the primary goals of the campaign. What do you want to get out of it? Doing so will help you build a strategy, craft your messages, and determine your follow-up sequence. Outlining your objectives and setting achievable goals is your first step.

Here are some goals to think about during your planning:

  • Lead Generation
  • Raise Brand Awareness
  • Drip Content
  • Increase Sales
  • Heighten Event Attendance
  • Build Social Media Presence

To begin planning your SMS contest, create a set of predetermined goals. Setting goals gives you a way to determine whether your campaign is successful once it’s over. Often businesses running an SMS contest set no objectives and then watch as it fails. Then they say “that doesn’t work.” This is because they had no way to measure its success.

Regardless of your goal, keep in mind that building your SMS marketing list is important for staying connected to your prospects. With an open rate as high as 98%, SMS is the best channel for getting your message out to a large group of people quickly.

Set specific, measurable goals and you will quickly be able to see whether your SMS contest was successful. This can be done by answering yes or no questions, like these:

  • Did we collect “X” leads?
  • Did we get “X” coupon redemptions?
  • Did we increase attendance by “X”?
  • Did we increase sales by “X”?

Method of Entry – Text to Join

Should the contest entries be registered via text-to-join or a web form?

If you are promoting your contest online, then a webform probably makes the most sense. If you are promoting your contest where you are in front of a crowd or engaging mobile foot traffic like at a trade show, then text to join might be your best option. Or it may be both. Just remember that you want to use the easiest method given the channels you are using.

Choosing Your Text to Join Keyword

Don’t overthink this step. The KISS method is the best rule here. Use something short and sweet, like a brand or product name. Avoid a generic term like “save” or personal names like “James”

We have instructions on setting this up in VIPTap.

From the VIPTAP dashboard, create a new campaign, select either a landing page or website widget as the form type, and enter your keyword for the contest. In less than twelve seconds, you’re ready to go!

This keyword will be the word people will text in to enter if they don’t use the week form or landing page.

Create Your Text Message Follow-Up & Auto-Reply Response

Keep the wording of the text as brief as possible. Many other text platforms have character restrictions, which limits the amount you can say. Detailed explanations will either get cut off or sent in multiple obnoxious messages, causing them to be ignored altogether.

By the way, VIPTap doesn’t limit the number of characters per message, but if they run over 160, it counts as 2 texts per recipient.

That is why it is important to craft your message to be short and simple, outlining what the participant has to do and what the incentive is.

Want to capture an email address or name for your contest?

Enable this option on your landing page form, or include a Contract Data Input message in your message automation. It’s easy and great for text personalization.

Promoting Your Text to Join Contest

Create Awesome Images

It’s no mistake that most contest promotion ads are eye-catching. If you are planning to promote your contest with social media posts, then you need awesome images. Using a great-looking prize image means that more people will want to share it. If it sucks, then people won’t give it another thought, will not share it or even consider joining. So be sure to use graphics that grab the attention of your target audience and make them say, “I want to win that.” Don’t ignore this. It’s too simple to not do it.

You can use a free service like Canva to create beautiful text to join images in just a few minutes.

From here, you can promote your text to join SMS contests across all of your channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and more.

After the Contest

Picking the winners

Picking random winners is super simple. You can just use a free tool like Miniwebtool. With it, you can copy and paste a list of names exported from your group of subscribers and generate random winners. It’s not the only method out there, but whatever you use, be sure to state what method you are using to pick the winners in your official rules.

Notifying The Winner

Now that winners have been chosen, it’s best that you notify the winners in a timely manner after the campaign ends. You also want to be sure that you use the notification method stated in your official rules. In our experience, following up with both a text message and an email is optimal. If you still don’t get a response, then you can call and leave a message.

While a phone call to notify the winners may be more personal, it’s not recommended. People tend to screen their phone calls, and calls are not as trackable. Texts and emails can be easily tracked if ever a dispute should arise. You can also notify the winner using ringless voicemail to deliver your message without actually calling.

Thank the Participants

Ok, so you notified the winners. What’s next?

Thank all the people who participated by giving them a special offer, driving some sales in the process. It’s best if you use some scarcity such as a time limit to respond to the offer.

Create an SMS coupon and send out a broadcast message to them all with a link to your site or an expiring coupon to drive you more sales.

Conclusion

I hope this special report gave you a full understanding of how to create, run, and successfully manage your SMS contest. Now it’s up to you to get started by following the steps outlined in this report to start seeing the results you want.

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