What are sweepstakes and how to work with them?

Sweepstakes are an effective tool in affiliate marketing. For many webmasters, this is the main vertical, but literally every newbie knows that it is relatively easy and profitable to pour traffic to sweepstakes. Especially if you approach it wisely.

What are sweepstakes-offers and where is it better to send traffic to them? How to create creatives? We will tell you about this and much more in this article. You will learn how to make money from sweepstakes and you can start using this knowledge today. Make yourself comfortable – we are starting our journey into the world of profit!

What is Sweepstakes in affiliate marketing

Sweepstakes literally means “lottery” in English. In social networks it is an online raffle with a random selection of the winner. To become a participant and get a chance to win the coveted prize, users must leave information about themselves – at least a name and e-mail address. Most often in social networks there are sweepstakes-offers with a drawing of the latest iPhone, a discount coupon or certificate, household appliances and even a car.

Sweepstakes as one of the verticals of offers appeared a long time ago, but it is still as relevant today. 

Benefits of Sweepstakes Offers

• The owner of the offerer (advertiser) gets mostly targeted traffic. Recall, the target audience are potential customers, that is, those who are more likely to perform a targeted action – leave personal information, sign up or make a purchase. 
• Participants in an online sweepstakes get the hope of winning a coveted prize in exchange for their personal data. Depending on the type of sweepstakes-offer, the user must leave information about themselves such as name, location, email address, and phone number. 
• The media buyer or affiliate also gets rewarded for each completed registration in the giveaway.

For those who are just starting to learn the basics of affiliate marketing, sweepstakes are a great way to practice with minimal financial loss. Every experienced media buyer has made mistakes at the start of their career. The high level of competition in this vertical requires a webmaster to understand the principles of working with sweepstakes, approaches and nuances that come only with experience.

Types of Sweepstakes – how to choose and where to start?

Every year it’s getting harder and harder to get users interested and get quality leads, so there must be a really valuable prize in an online sweepstakes. The more personal data you need to get, the longer the form to register for the sweepstakes and the harder it is to attract traffic.

• SOI (Single Opt In) is a simple funnel for which you just need to enter your name, age, gender, email address or phone number. Such offers do not require confirmation, but the payment per lead is low.
• DOI (Double Opt In) differs by one step – the user must complete the registration. The e-mail specified by him receives a letter with a link, clicking on which you can confirm the registration. For the affiliate, this step will be additionally monetized.

How to make money on sweepstakes

You don’t need in-depth knowledge to understand how to pour traffic to sweepstakes. However, it is important for a beginner affiliate to know some details so that the budget is not wasted. Earning on sweepstakes looks like this step by step.

Choosing an offer

The topic of the offers should be relevant and interesting for a wide audience. For this purpose, there are sweepstakes affiliates, where they offer convertible SOI offers. You can attract a large audience using the excitement around the release of the new iPhone or tying in with upcoming holidays.

Choosing a GEO

All countries in the world are divided into three zones:

• Tier 1 – it includes the countries of Western Europe, Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, America, and South Korea.
• Tier 2 – these are former CIS countries, India, Japan, Thailand, developed countries of South America and Africa.
• Tier 3 – here are undeveloped countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Sweepstakes in Tier 1 has a higher potential, but there is more competition here as well. When launching an advertising campaign, it is important to find a successful combination of an offer and geo. 

Prelendings under sweepstakes

Use prelendings under sweepstakes, don’t direct traffic directly. The intermediate page helps to “heat up” the audience’s interest in the giveaway, encourage participation and filter out uninterested visitors. The most working techniques here are wheel of fortune, prize selection, and polls. Quality preloading for a sweepstakes is 70% of success. Check the loading speed, because the longer it takes to load, the higher the bounce rate and, consequently, fewer conversions.

Optimization of the landing page

The last crucial step that determines whether a user will sign up is the landing page. Make the optimal headline size – 5-7 words, and in it clearly articulate what is the uniqueness of your selling proposition and benefits. Ensure high loading speed, working correctly on mobile and desktop devices. If you use our smartlinks, we take care of this stage.

Testing

Testing is the key to success. This stage determines working bundles that allow further optimization of advertising campaigns. Use trackers to obtain data and analyze statistics, try different combinations of prelendings and landing pages, analyze competitors – “peeking” creatives that the audience liked and testing your own.

Remember that all advertising materials stop working over time, so change creatives, take into account the peculiarities of prelendings for sweepstakes, optimize them for the languages of the countries you are targeting, and do not rely on the international language. When working with smartlinks, it is important to test traffic sources and channels to attract traffic.

Sweepstakes Creatives

These approaches in creatives work well in different bundles:

• when using an email or message icon, add the number 1 to it to make it look like an unread message;
• if the offer is related to gadgets, use the well-known icon of a green android robot;
• use an image of a parcel with the geo that is supposedly waiting for the user at the post office, this technique has proven to be a good one in Western European countries;
• find attractive emoji that make the text more appealing to users, “light”, “fireworks” and “gift wrapping” work well here.

When working on creatives for sweepstakes, try to look at them through the eyes of your target audience. Avoid small mistakes and inconsistencies, as user trust immediately decreases. Update and make creatives unique, change icons.

How to write texts for whitepapers

For those who are new to affiliate marketing, we recommend that you learn from experienced webmasters how to write texts for sweepstakes. The most “working” online sweepstakes landing pages look like this:

• “Leave your email and get a gift certificate to our store!”
• “We’ll be raffling off a brand new iPhone 13 Pro Max soon! Hurry up and register!”
• “For just $1 get a chance to win a PS5! Hurry up and enter the drawing!”
• “Yay! We’re back to raffling off a MacBook Air! If you want to win, register your phone number!”
• “Download the video lesson and get a chance to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Egypt!”

Where to pour on the sweepstakes

Traffic sources can be anything, the webmaster himself chooses where to pour on sweepstakes from:

• social media;
• contextual advertising;
• search traffic;
• native advertising, etc.

It should be taken into account that in social networks newcomers will not be easy, because there is a long struggle with sweepstakes.

Affiliates with sweepstakes – how to choose the best one?

An important stage in the work of the affiliate is related to the choice of sweepstakes-partnership. Not only the profit of the advertising campaign depends on it. To make it convenient to work with the affiliate network, you need to evaluate the functionality: the ability to analyze statistics and payment terms. If some part of leads is not accepted – this is normal, but when the affiliate offers few ways to withdraw funds or a lot of bad reviews, it is better not to work with it.