
Travis Ketchum
Founder of Contest Domination
Travis Ketchum is the Founder & CEO of ContestDomination™, a powerful and proven lead generator for sales. Between class-leading software and creative training, Travis and his team have helped over 20,000 business owners and marketers generate millions of qualified leads online.
Article
Using Contests To Generate Leads And Sales
After I graduated college I got my first job working for a digital education company.
However, cubicle life wasn’t for me and I soon went off on my own to work with clients.
I was helping them build funnels and buy ads, I had traded my desk job for what was essentially a desk job-from-home. If I stopped working the money did too.
Expert session
Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Travis’ success
Using contests to generate leads and sales
Result if you follow the steps in Travis’ session
A strategy to structure promotional contests to give you highly qualified leads that can turn into customers
Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more
Expert session snapshot
Transcript
First of all, a lot of people get stuck on I have to have, you know, 200,000 email subscribers to make any money or I have to have a million whatever, right? And that’s very not true. In fact, some of the most profitable email marketers, I know, have some of the smallest email lists. Okay.
So what’s important is that they’re targeted and that you have a relationship with them. And this plays into contest specifically because if you stopped 10 people on the street and said, you have to give away a car, you have to run a contest, your life depends on it.
What are you going to give away, I can almost guarantee you that 9 out of 10 of those people is going to say one of three things. An iPad, an iPhone or a gift card. The problem with an iPad and iPhone or a gift card is that they do nothing to prequalify that lead.
So if you get a bunch of leads that are interested in that, all you’re going to have is an expensive email list bill at the end of the month. I bill for all the subscribers that don’t care about your business, you’re going to run the risk of a lot of unsubscribing spam complaints which damaged reputation with your account, and you’re not going to make any money. Okay?
As a flip side, let me give you an example. Right? So you think of like a gym, right? A gym is a hyper competitive, super local kind of business. You know, there’s very cutthroat as far as a lot of competition in each geographical area.
Let me give you an example of a contest that didn’t generate that many leads, but had a great outcome in terms of revenue. And I’ll tell you why.
So they, they wanted to generate more subscribers, paying memberships for their gym. And so they decided to give away 90 days with a personal trainer at their gym, right? This is highly correlated to the exact thing they want to sell them, right. They want to sell them gym services, and professional training, which is a high end option.
And so they ran this membership this 90 day, personal coaching, and then what they did was they asked for name, email, phone number, and they asked, what kind of workout are you most into? Right? Is it yoga? Is it strength training is a cardio right?
They asked like 10 different questions. They’re all correlated to classes and services, they specifically service. And every single person who entered was awarded a free five day pass to the gym.
So here’s how it works. They run this contest for a couple weeks, they only spent $400. In Facebook ads, it generated 421 leads, that’s it 421 leads, one person wins, right?
And then at the end of the contest, what they do is they actually called every lead and said, “Hey, I see you’re interested in yoga. Hey, I see you’re interested in strength training. Here’s the programs and services we have to offer that will help you do exactly what you want to do when can you come in and activate your free five day pass”. All right.
Now normally, this gym thinks it’s awesome if they spend $1 in advertising and generate $3 in revenue. So that means for them to achieve their goal. They would have to hit 1200 dollars in revenue from just a $400 ad spend. Okay, that would be considered gold. They ended up generating $12,000 in membership subscriptions.
So I mean, they spent about what 77 cents per lead and generated, what 2050 in revenue per lead. That’s a 30 times return on their investment 10 times better than their previously best performing campaign. Because they asked the right questions, and they provided a prize, it’s highly, highly correlated to exactly what they want to sell.
So after they awarded that prize, they had 420 leads that told them exactly what they wanted by entering the contest. So targeting is everything.
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