"Let's just run a competition"

We have heard it many times: “We need a few more newsletter subscribers — I was thinking a competition? Maybe give away a tablet? Run some ads to bring people in?”

And there is no doubt that a competition like that will bring in a lot of new recipients. Competitions work. We see it again and again.

Unfortunately, we also see what comes next.

The problem

Competitions are good at getting new recipients onto your list. But have you considered the quality of the recipients you get?

Today you are weighed as a sender on how interested your recipients are in what you send. The better a sender you are — the better you are at turning recipients into readers — the more of your mail reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder. If you are not good at getting people to read your content, more and more of your mail ends up filtered.

And that is where the trouble starts, because the people entering your competition are usually only interested in the prize. They know perfectly well they probably will not win, so they sign up with a throwaway address where newsletters pile up unread, checked occasionally in case one of the many competitions they entered has come good.

The chance of gaining genuinely interested readers from a competition with a tablet as the prize, and broadly targeted ads bringing in the entrants, is very small.

The fix

The best thing you can do when planning a competition is choose a prize that is relevant to the audience for your newsletter.

If we ran one, the obvious choice would be a place on a well-regarded course in email marketing. That attracts people whose interests sit alongside our product, while the habitual competition entrant finds the prize unappealing — which is exactly the point.

If you advertise the competition, target the ads at people inside your audience. Never settle for something as broad as “adults, 18–65”. A scattergun only helps if the sole thing you care about is how many addresses you can pull in. The quality of those recipients is what you should be measuring.

A few things worth remembering

Tag the recipients who arrive through the competition, so you can recognise them later. That lets you segment your sends and see whether they behave like your existing recipients, or read less and click less often. Following up on competition entrants is an important part of the work.

Send a confirmation email that lets them confirm the newsletter subscription, as you always should. It raises the odds of ending up with serious recipients on the list.

Send a welcome email once they have confirmed. Thank them for signing up, say when the competition closes, and tell them something about the newsletter they are now subscribed to.

Run a competition sensibly and you can certainly grow your list — but more importantly, you can grow it with people who are interested in what you have to say, read your email, and eventually spend money with you.