So, you’ve run your WordPress contest legally with a solid WordPress contest plugin and had great giveaway prizes that connect with your target market. In doing so, you’ve also generated piles of strong leads and thick email lists. 

Great!

The question now is: what do you do with the results of a successful WordPress contest? 

The exposure and increased brand awareness are certainly wins for you. However, you now need to figure out how to turn those leads into conversions.

Because — let’s be honest — as much as you love your leads, you didn’t create an awesome WordPress contest to just lose money on smart prizes and marketing.

There are four clutch things you can do once you’ve announced your winners to make sure your content is a business success: 

• Offer exclusive deals to those who entered but didn’t win
• Learn more about your new subscribers
• Create a welcome email series
• Interview the winners

Generating a cache of quality leads and email subscribers for your business is easy with a WordPress contest plugin like Simple Giveaways. However, the key is to be able to quickly and efficiently convert those leads not only into consumers but loyal customers.

Generating Excitement for Exclusive Discounts

Everybody enters a giveaway hoping they’ll win. They see that grand prize and figure that it’s worth a try. 

While it’s fun for them to daydream about what they’d do with the prize if they took it home, in reality, they know that only one person can win. 

This is good for you. Really good. Because it means it’s not going to take much to push them past their momentary disappointment of not taking home the grand prize.

As it turns out, one of the most effective ways to convert all those contestants into consumers after using Simple Giveaways — as well as turning those frowns upside down — is reaching out to them with an exclusive deal.

Let them know you’re just as bummed as they are that they didn’t win, and then share a little secret: there’s an exclusive deal for your products or services available only to people who entered the contest.

This extra incentive at a time when they are already actively interfacing with your brand can often be an out-of-the-park home run. At the end of the day, they’re going to see that deal and feel like winners. And, surely, you want all your leads to feel like winners.

Discover Who Your New Followers Really Are

Marketing is all about knowing who your target market is and appealing to them — you don’t need a degree to have that one in your back pocket. So, given that you’ve just generated a huge number of leads via a successful WordPress campaign, it’s worth your time to get to know who they are.

Once you do, you can adjust your messaging to increase conversions.

The best way to get the ball rolling with this is to boot up your email automation tool, such as MailChimp, and send them questions. You’ll want to ask the kind of questions that allow you to divide them into several groups based on the type of products and services they want and why they want them.

By sorting them into these two groups, you’ll have a clear picture of what to market to each segment and how to do so. Just make sure you use relevant tags in your email automation tool to keep your leads clearly identified based on their needs.

Create a Powerful Welcome Series

An effective welcome series — anywhere between four and six emails — is going to really help you capitalize on the sign-up momentum generated through your WordPress contest.

New subscribers are great because they tend to be more engaged and are statistically more likely to open your emails. They also represent untapped potential with regard to being converted into customers.

However, one email is rarely enough to explain:

• Who you are
• What your brand represents
• What your products are
• That you care about your customers
• To convince them to make a purchase 

With a welcome series, you can ease them into your brand, voice, and product line.

The idea is to use these emails to build trust before pushing for a sale. To do this, you’ll want each email in your welcome series to be focused on a single topic with a natural flow into what your next email will be. These emails can include highlights to your most popular blog posts, market insights, tips, and discounts.

Leave those breadcrumbs so they can easily follow you to where you’re headed: a sale to a happy customer.

Another reason a welcome series is so important is that at some point you’ll want to have all of your followers on basically the same page. If you just add the new subscribers to your standard mailing list, they’re not going to have a real grasp of what you’re talking about.

Think of the welcome series as giving these leads a running start so they can catch up with the rest of the pack.

Interview the Contest Winners

Without a doubt, there is always a little voice in the back of people’s heads when they enter an online contest that asks: “But is this for real?”. So, take a minute to build trust and authenticity with an interview featuring your contest winner.

By interviewing your contest winner, you not only generate some great content that people will really engage with, but you also show people that your brand delivered on the prize. 

If posting the first name of the person with the initial of their last name can make a difference, how much better to let your followers learn more about the person and what they’re going to do with the prize?

The more you can use the contest to connect on a human level with your leads, the better. And, an interview with one of them is a great way to do that.

After Using a WordPress Contest Plugin, What to Do With all of Your New Leads?

Now that you’ve generated a pile of quality leads and email subscribers by using a WordPress contest plugin like Simple Giveaways, you need to convert those leads into loyal customers.

By combining a variety of the best ways to do this — such as offering exclusive deals, creating a welcome series, and interviewing winners — you’ll be well on your way to cashing in a winning ticket from your own successful WordPress contest.

Have your own contest experience to share? In the comment section below, tell us what makes a winning WordPress contest campaign work for you!