What are sweepstakes?
Sweepstakes are offers and the main aim of them is to attract the audience to lotteries and quizzes. Users get the opportunity to participate in a lottery with valuable prizes, and in exchange they leave their personal data or card details.
The audience is motivated to participate, with almost no investment required other than spending a small amount of time or some money. Due to the comfortable conditions and the opportunity to win prizes, the conversion in Sweepstakes is much higher than in any other verticals.
Sweepstakes meaning
Sweepstake is a “lottery”. Lotteries in which the winner (or winners) is chosen randomly. However, the end point of any advertising campaign is a drawing of a prize. Some of the most popular prizes in sweepstakes are Apple products, gift cards and vouchers. Well, the point is that in order to participate in one of these draws, the user must share his personal data:
- Last name and first name
- Email address
- Phone number
- Interests
- Social media accounts
- Card details, etc.
The advertiser is interested in collecting as much data as possible about a person in order to make him their client. In return, the user gets the opportunity to win an expensive and useful prize. And the affiliate receives a payout when the user completes the registration process.
Benefits of sweepstake affiliate offers
Sweepstakes offers allow all participants to hit the jackpot, sometimes even more than it might seem at first view:
- Advertisers get a wide reach for a brand, hot leads, a customer base with data to work with or resell.
- Affiliates can get conversions more easily and spend less money on ad campaigns. Additionally, the affiliate can get a database of numbers or email addresses for their own mailings.
- Users can win a valuable prize without any extra investment.
Types of sweepstakes offers
Sweepstake affiliate offers differ in the complexity of the actions and can be divided into 5 types of sweeps:
Single opt-in (SOI) – collecting data from the audience without confirmation. The simplest type of sweepstakes with the lowest pay per lead.
Double opt-in (DOI) – data confirmation via email.
PIN Submit – users must leave phone numbers and confirm them via SMS. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – user data entered on the site is confirmed by voice through a call. To confirm, just dictate a unique code.
Credit Card Submit (CC-Submit) is one of the most expensive and complex sweepstake, as the user leaves the bank card details, and sometimes pays a small amount of about $ 1-2. Thus, discounted rate subscriptions can be made. At the end of the grace period, the user switches to a tariff with 100% payment.
To work with this type of sweepstake, the affiliate must already have a certain amount of knowledge and experience. However, this is offset by higher pay per lead than SOI, DOI and PIN Submit sweepstakes.
Traffic sources for sweepstakes marketing strategy
To make money on sweepstakes offers in affiliate marketing, you can run your traffic from the following sources:
Native advertising
Native ads organically fit into the theme of the site and the structure of the article. They don’t cause banner blindness and are great for promoting a variety of verticals, including sweepstakes. You can successfully enter a smartphone picture into the site page about new phones and gadgets.
Choose the affiliate network AdsDoom with the conditions that will be good for you and set up native advertising. Test different ad creatives and find the most profitable funnels.
Popunders
Popunder is a pop-up banner ad format that automatically appears when pages are opened. When you try to close the popunder, the ad is opened in a separate browser window.
This traffic source is one of the most popular for sweepstakes. Popunders show a good conversion and, in addition, you can promote sweepstakes on the desktop as well as on mobile devices.
The most profitable social network for sweepstakes is Facebook. However, at the moment, sending traffic from Facebook directly, unfortunately, is prohibited. But some affiliates use cloaking.
Cloaking is a “black hat” method of running traffic, with the help of which different users see the same page differently. Note that this method is officially prohibited, sooner or later your deception will be revealed, and your account will be blocked.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are a great traffic source for sweepstakes. It’s a text-graphic notification from the site to which the user has subscribed. The good thing is that it is suitable for both computers and smartphones.
Users most often agree to receive push notifications, so the conversion from such a traffic source is high.
For sweepstake offers, email campaigns are great as a way to run traffic. The main thing is to choose an offer that is attractive to the target audience and skillfully present it.
On the one hand, it will take a lot of time to build a user base. On the other hand, after that you will have an affordable and easy way to get leads.
Keep in mind that advertisers in this niche are strict about promotional materials and may block an affiliate for scams that are popular among some affiliates: misleading (for example, guarantees of a gift instead of advertising under a different brand), using shocking headlines, or mentioning celebrities.
How do sweepstakes work?
One of the most important points is to determine the necessary offer and GEO for it. This can be clarified with the affiliate manager of AdsDoom
The next step is creatives. You can get them in our affiliate platform or create them by yourself. Creative will make the user participate, so you shouldn’t use such phrases like “guaranteed win” in the ad. Here it is worth to show what specific prize the participant can win.
Don’t forget about pre-landings (landing – directly the site with the questionnaire). Pre-landers warm the desire of the user to reach the end of the questionnaire. Most often, they use thimbles, a wheel of fortune, small questionnaires, as well as fake pop-up comments from already winning participants. Fake news from TV, newspapers and social networks also perform well. Brand context (“Join iPhone 13 giveaway”) is usually prohibited.
Guide to Sweepstakes GEOs
When working with sweepstakes, you need to pay attention to location. Newcomers to this niche should start with Tier-2 and Tier-3 countries. Payments here are small, but cheep traffic. Most affiliate networks work with them in this vertical. In countries such as the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, profits are many times greater than in others, but competition is also higher.
One of the most common mistakes of newbies is targeting “expensive” countries, they are classified as Tier 1. Big payouts are relevant here, and there is also a lot of competition in these countries. That is, if we are talking about a low budget, money will be lost even at the initial steps.
Why should you target tier 2 and tier 3 countries?
- A lot of cheap traffic here;
- More loyal attitude to such draws on the Internet;
- Mobile traffic is great for sweepstakes, while mobile pop-unders show excellent monetization rates in tier 2 and 3 countries.
Conclusion
Even beginners can work with sweepstakes. They convert almost in any GEO and as you can see sweepstakes in Tier-2 and Tier 3 are not demanding on the visual quality of creatives, so basic knowledge of working with graphics and services for creating creatives will be enough to start. Good luck!