Top Tips for Maximizing the Entry Rate of your Social Media Campaigns

This month Wildfire hit a big milestone! We have now officially powered over 100,000 campaigns on our Promotion Builder platform! In honor of this milestone, we wanted to share our top tips for maximizing the entry rate of your social media campaigns. We’ve gathered these tips by analyzing data from thousands of campaigns running on our platform and by identifying common elements shared by the most and least successful campaigns. We’re breaking these tips into several posts - in this post we’ll focus on simple ways that you can optimize your campaign landing pages to ensure the maximum click-through rate. In future posts we’ll outline successful strategies for contest optimization, prizes, and more.

FIRST IMPRESSION IS EVERYTHING!

Tip #1: Don’t make your users scroll!
It’s extremely important that you put the most critical elements (e.g. the ‘Enter Now’ button, the prize details, eye catching images, your brand name) above the fold. If you require users to use their scroll bar to access your promotion’s enter button or to find out the contest prize you’ll see a dramatic reduction in your entry rate. Remember, users are lazy - if they visit your campaign’s landing page and it it is not immediately obvious why your campaign is interesting to them and what they need to do to get started, they will bounce.

Different consumers have their browsers set differently, therefore even if your main campaign elements display above the fold on your own computer, it doesn’t mean that this will be the case on all computers. As a general rule, however, if you ensure that your most important content is displayed in the the top 300 pixels of your promotion this should be optimized for the majority of viewers.

Tip #2: Don’t make your users think!
You should make your campaign as intuitive as possible. Within a glance users should be able to understand what your campaign is all about and why they should enter. This means that your title should be clear and self-explanatory - e.g. A title like “Cutest Baby Photo Contest’ is preferable to a seemingly more creative but obscure title like ‘Show us your little darling Contest’. Generally, simple and clear headlines lead to higher entry rates.

Example: Shopping.com’s Sweepstakes
The sweepstakes below exhibits many of the qualities that we find to be important to success:

• the most important elements (title, prize, ‘enter now’ button) are clearly presented above the fold


• the title “Fan-Tastic Sweepstakes!” clearly tells the viewer what the promotion type


• The prize (“We’re giving away 10 great prizes, valued at $5,000!”) is stated in large, eye-catching font and pictures of the prizes make it even more eye-catching and clear.


• The call to action (a large, bright ‘enter sweepstakes’ button) is clear and easy to find.


• There is a lot of space on the page - it is not cluttered with lots of text or calls to action.


• While this promotion does have more details in fine print, those are displayed below-the-fold.

Tip #3: Emphasize the Prize
People enter promotions for exclusive access to deals, discounts, content, news, and prizes. One of the best ways to increase your entry rate is to show off the cool prize, not hide it! The best promotions we’ve powered had the prize details and pictures front and center, making it crystal clear to the user what is at stake in the promotion.

Rather than providing a long, detailed description of your prize, you should capture the main elements of your prize in a short, catchy sentence. You can always provide more detailed information about the prize ‘below the fold’ but above the fold you should keep the description brief, but make it large and eye-catching.

Example: Fox 31 Photo Contest
In the example below, the contest is clearly labeled as “Colorado’s Cutest Kids Photo Contest” and great emphasis is placed on the prize using large font, a short, clear sentence and photos that capture the prize.


THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS BEING TOO CLEAR!

Tip #4: Make the ‘call to action’ completely obvious
One of the worst mistakes we see companies make is to make it confusing or hard for consumers to find the main call to action (e.g. the ‘enter now’ button) for your campaign. There are several ways that companies make this confusing: 1) they provide numerous buttons and links for the consumer to click on instead of providing one clear ‘call to action’, 2) they make the main ‘call to action’ too small, or bury it among a lot of text, or clutter the page with a lot of content so that it is hard to find and 3) they put the main ‘call to action’ below the fold. We see the greatest click through rates when campaigns have just one main call to action (i.e. just one button or, if there are other links/buttons on the landing page the main ‘call to action’ should be much larger and more obvious than all others) and when they are not cluttered with a lot of text or images that make it hard to find the main ‘call to action’. Additionally, ensure that your main button looks obviously clickable (by giving it rounded edges and some back lighting).

Example (what not to do): Fab-niversary Giveaway
In the example below it is very hard to find the ‘enter now’ link because it is buried in a paragraph of text and is a small link instead of a prominent button. Many users would bounce from this landing page rather than search for the ‘enter now’ link.



Tip #5: A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words
Use bright, attention-grabbing images in your promotion. Images are a great way to help your users understand at a glance what your promotion is all about. For a sweepstakes, use attractive images that highlight your prize - such as images of a tropical beach for a vacation sweepstakes or photos of an elated woman wearing a gorgeous necklace for a jewelery sweepstakes. For user generated contests use images to help the user understand what they need to do to enter the contest. For example, if you’re running a photo contest that asks users to submit a photo of their happiest moment, provide sample images in a photo contest, some great graphics to include would be pictures of sample photos one might find inside your own campaign. Doing this really helps to make clear exactly what the contest requires from the user, without him having to read a ton of description copy. (Remember, he’s lazy!)

Also consider the whitespace in your promotion. While an enticing design speaks volumes, sometimes white space around elements in your landing page can serve to draw attention to them with subtle emphasis. Next time you notice some white space around an element in a landing page, check out what it is surrounding— most of the time it will be surrounding the call-to-action and drawing eyes there.

Example: HomeAgain Happy Hug-a-Day Photo Sweepstakes
In the example below, the contest asks the user to submit a photo of them hugging their pets, and the contest graphics include several examples of just such photos, in the top right. This helps the user to clearly understand what type of picture the contest administrators are expecting.


HOW CAN YOU KNOW IF YOUR LANDING PAGE IS RIGHT?

6) Check yourself before you wreck yourself: Use the 10 second test
The below example does not exhibit many of the best practices we’ve discussed in this post. Give this page the 10 second test: if you only had 10 seconds to look at this promotion page, would its message be clear? Would you know what the campaign is about and what you could win? Is the call to action clear? Are the images clear and attractive; does the design reel you in? These are the kind of questions you should ask yourself every time you create a landing page. You can see in the below screenshot that the answer to almost all these questions is no. There is a lot of text but the main headline does not explain the nature of the promotion or the prize details. The call-to-action is not isolated in a clear and clickable button and there are many different links to choose from instead of one clear entry path. There are no images to help draw you in and give you a sense of what the promotion is about. Unless you, the user, were to read every word of the dense detailing paragraph, chances are you would have only a vague idea what the promotion is about, which would certainly lead to lowered entry rates.