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Finally, An Exciting Way To Generate Qualified Leads...and...
By Craig Garber, Sat Dec 10th
I'm going to reveal a lead-generation selling formula, you canmake a fistul of dollars with. It's a lot of fun to use, but it's often over-looked. Want to know what it is?
O.K., I'll tell you. It's... Sweepstakes! And here's how you can start using sweepstakes as a leadgeneration tool, to build your list of prospects: Let's say you own a retail furniture store. Here's what you do: You run a display ad (or even better yet, you use several pressreleases) that says you're going to be giving away a brand newset of living-room furniture valued at $10,000 Dollars,delivered to the person who comes into your store... registersfor the contest... and comes closest to guessing how many squarefeet your entire furniture showroom display area is. The person who guesses closest, gets the furniture deliveredstraight to the front door of their home. You should film that entire delivery, by the way, and have thatvideo clip playing on a television monitor over-and-over againat the front of your store, to build enthusiasm up for your nextsweepstakes. Also, if you're really clever... team up with a local interiordecorator and tell people you'll be giving away a professionallydesigned custom layout as well, courtesy of this interiordecorator. Let your sweepstakes entrants know, the charge for the interiordesigner alone is worth "X" dollars. Or, you could even team up with one of your furnituresuppliers, and instead of having a "Guess how many square feetour showroom is" contest, you can have a "Tell me how many kingsize [insert your furniture supplier's name here] beds we havein our showroom" contest. See which of your suppliers would be willing to share the costof your contest with you, or maybe they'd spring for the wholeshebang. Anyway, you call your lead-generating contest: "The $10,000 Dollar Sweepstakes!" Then, you promote the living daylights out of it! You do a direct mail piece promoting it (postcards may evenwork in this case)... use your local val-paks... run displayads... have banners announcing your sweepstakes all over yourstore... and you give every single interior decorator and movingcompany you know, brochures about it, to hand out to theirclients. This does 3 things for you: First, it gets people interested in you. Second, it forces people to come into your store to sign up andregister to win the sweepstakes. You automatically getfoot-traffic, and the names and addresses of qualified leads,you wouldn't have had without the sweepstakes. And third, since your prospects have to guess how large yourshowroom is, it forces them to walk around your entire store inorder to make any kind of accurate "square footage" guess,right? And do you have any idea what each-and-every one of thesequalified leads will be doing when they're browsing up and downeach of your lovely furniture showroom aisles? They'll be checking out all your furniture! Mom's will be thinking "Oh, this would look so nice in thebaby's room." And seniors will be saying "Wow, that would look great outsideon our patio." And crooked CEO's like Ken Lay from Enron will be licking theirchops, saying "Hey, I can use a bunch of my shareholder's moneyto buy all those brand new top-of-the-line Herman Miller chairs,for all the guys back at the office!" Whatever. The point is, people aren't just going to come in, see your"$10,000 Dollar Sweepstakes" sign-up booth at the front desk,fill out the form, toss their entry into the box, and then leave. Now at first blush, you might think giving away $10,000 Dollarsworth of furniture is a lot to give away for FREE. But au contraire... let's look at the numbers here. Remember,before you ever make any kinds of marketing decisions, you mustlook at your numbers. Because... You are in the numbers business first, NOT... the marketingbusiness! So... here are some numbers: Let's say, over a 90-day period, you get 1,500 people to signup. That's an average of 17 people a day, which... between youand your interior decorator, and maybe a local moving company(who will do the delivery)... should
be very do-able, especiallywith all the "weekend" traffic, furniture stores tend toattract. (Oh, and by the way -- depending on the sweepstakes rules inyour state, you may even be able to say up front "Thissweepstakes is only valid if we receive 2,000 entries.", orwhatever numbers work for you.) And... let's say your average customer sale is $1,000 dollars. This means, you'll need to make 10 sales to at least break evenon the deal -- now. Plus, whatever it costs you to promote yoursweepstakes, so... let's say you need to make 12 sales to makethis promotion break even. What you have to ask yourself, is... will you make 12 sales, tothe 1,500 people who've come into your store and signed up foryour sweepstakes? That's one sale, to every 125 people who come saunteringthrough your front doors. Can you do this? Honestly, I don't know. It depends on what your conversion ratio ofprospects-to-customers is. Meaning, how many of your prospects,do you actually convert into paying customers? But at least, now you have a working formula to use, so you canfigure out what numbers you need, to make this sweepstakes ofyours work! Plus remember... you're using this sweepstakes to generateleads for future sales, not for making sales today, right? So what you also have to take into consideration, is... How many sales will you make over the next 12 months, bysending out a monthly marketing piece to all these 1,500qualified new leads you've now got? After all, isn't that what you're supposed to be doing withyour qualified leads, anyway? And this translates into, "Will you be able to make a sale to 1out of every 125 people who came through your doors, sometimeduring the next 12 months?" Well, even if you're only a halfway decent copywriter... aslong as you're consistently making these prospects a compellingoffer each-and-every-month... You Should Be Able To Do That! Sweepstakes are especially good for retail stores, since theyseem to have a hard time building their prospect list up. It's tough to get people's name and address when they come inyour store, especially if they're just browsing and they don'tbuy anything. And why are sweepstakes so effective at generating qualifiedleads for you? The answer is simple: For the most part, people don't go out oftheir way to enter sweepstakes for items they don't want, orwouldn't buy at some point in time, on their own. And really, almost any business can run a sweepstakes. Like if you're a hotel, raffle off an overnight stay in one ofyour better rooms. Then you do the same thing the furniturestore owner did -- you make a consistent offer to each and everyperson who signed up to win the overnight stay. When you're running a sweepstakes to generate leads, you mustremember the purpose of "lead-generation". And that is,sometimes it's easier to build up your list of leads, so you canmake consistent offers to your prospects, than it is to just tryand sell them something directly. (For more information on using "2-Step" lead-generating sellingformulas, see my article and "2-Step" writing samples here.) And running a sweepstakes is a fun and exciting way to get yourprospects motivated and all fired-up about your business. Do you know the most popular sweepstakes ever ran? (Yes, evenmore popular than "Ed McMahon's Publishers ClearinghouseSweepstakes!) Well, the most popular sweepstakes ever ran, was put on by AOLin April, 2004. Over 1 Million people entered the contest to wina Porsche Boxter seized by federal authorities, from a majorinternet spammer. And let me ask you this: Do you think AOL did just a "little"marketing to those 1 million entrants? Did you know, if AOL only got a 0.25% conversion rate, ofentrants who eventually became AOL subscribers (that's 1 out ofevery 400 people)... even at the lowest AOL subscriber plan ofonly $24 Dollars a month, this turns into... $60,000 Dollars A Month... or... $720,000 Dollars A Year...Forever... For AOL! Ka-ching! Not bad, hey?
About the author:Craig Garber is one of America's Top Direct-Response Copywritersand Direct-Marketing Consultants. For more copywriting tips, goto www.kingofcopy.com Copyright 2005 www.kingofcopy.com
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