Who’s the winner?

We all want to be winners. Because when we are, we feel we achieved something, are rewarded (for the right reason) and we might even feel flattered.
One of the strategies implemented at one of my customers makes use of this principle: it turns all your customers into winners, so they act faster, with more dedication and feel better about the results: All winners take all-strategy.

Organizing a lottery (the word might be different in various countries: raffle, sweep-stake, jackpot, etc.) is a campaign in which your customers receive a chance on a prize through a ticket with numbers or icons. The specific prize for them can be checked by scratching off a layer of the surface which reveals the ‘winning numbers’, or by checking numbers on a list or website or by listening live to a draw (‘bingo’). Unless they pay for the tickets, people generally know that you are trying to seduce them into doing things they might not want to do, but the outlook on winning a prize might seduce them to check their possible price anyway.

The strategy entails giving out prices in such a way that the participants feel the price is too good to ignore, and they will use it (as a discount) to purchase our products. Let’s look at the practical example: a retailer handed out 350.000 tickets. There was only 1 dream prize of EUR 1.000,-. The rest was divided in prizes of EUR 5,-, 10,- and 25,-, each as a discount on products to be purchased at the retailer who organized this campaign. The retailer distributed almost exclusively prizes of EUR 10,-. This had the effect that nobody either lost or got the ‘lowest’ possible price of EUR 5,-. This caused all participating consumers to think they were ‘lucky enough’ to win at least a reasonable prize, which would be a waste not to use. Conversion rates were significantly higher compared with a regular ‘EUR 10,- discount coupon’ sent to the same group before.

Now, who’s the winner?