How Frontier Airlines Uses Online Contests for High-Flying Brand Awareness

Content marketing and brand awareness go together like two peas in a pod. When most people think of content marketing, they think of blog posts or sharing content on social media. While these types of content are great for promoting awareness, they might not stick with your customers or help you with remarketing down the road. Enter interactive content.

Interactive content is just like it sounds: content your audience can interact with. This can be anything from quizzes and contests to interactive videos, infographics and calculators, and so much more. Interactive content is becoming more widely used in recent years, and the stats speak for themselves. According to marketers, compared to passive content (like blog posts), interactive content is more effective at:

• Differentiating a brand from its competitors (88% for interactive content vs 55% for passive content); 
• Generating conversions (70% for interactive content vs 36% for passive content); and
• Prompting sharing (38% for interactive content vs 17% for passive content).

The Frontier Airlines marketing team has created some extremely successful contests focused on increasing brand awareness using interactive content. Find out how Frontier Airlines uses ShortStack to reach its goals and read about one particularly successful contest they ran. 

Frontier Airlines + ShortStack

Frontier Airlines positions itself as America’s Greenest Airline with an ever-growing young and fuel-efficient fleet and the home of low fares done right. If you’re at the airport and looking out at the tarmac, the Frontier Airlines planes will certainly catch your eye. The plane tails feature animals as a way to draw awareness and educate the public about these animals and our responsibility to care for our planet for them. Frontier Airlines has been a ShortStack customer since December 2020. 

Kelsey McWhorter is the Marketing Coordinator at Frontier Airlines. According to McWhorter, “We use ShortStack for a variety of different types of marketing campaigns, ranging anywhere from simple free flight giveaways to contests where users can vote on their favorite endangered species to put on one of our upcoming plane tails. We have also used the platform for various internal contests, sweepstakes, RSVP forms, etc.” Her team runs three to four contests and promotional campaigns per month with ShortStack.

Using ShortStack has helped McWhorter’s team meet some of their brand awareness-related key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, between February 2021 and July 2022, McWhorter mentioned her team ran six external sweepstakes. These sweepstakes generated about 450K landing page views and about 300K unique entries. Her team promoted these sweepstakes and contests on the Frontier social and web channels and in promotional emails. 

McWhorter mentioned she’s been most impressed with the various templates ShortStack offers for different types of contests and landing pages. “Whether it’s simple data entry, voting functions, or personality quizzes, there is a template for everything we need and more!”

Her team has even found uses for ShortStack in ways they hadn’t initially planned. For example, they use ShortStack to engage with Frontier employees, something that they don’t normally have the ability to do. With ShortStack, airline employees like flight attendants, pilots, gate agents, and maintenance employees can submit original user-generated content, which McWorther’s team then repurposes for use on Frontier’s social media channels. This simple act of sharing has helped build a network of Frontier employees that love the brand.

Frontier Airlines’s 28th Birthday Celebration Sweepstakes

In July 2022, Frontier Airlines turned 28 years old. “For Frontier’s 28th birthday, we wanted to give 28 (how old we turned!) of our loyal customers the gift of a free round trip flight,” shared McWorther. 

The sweepstakes ran from July 5, 2022, at noon to July 12, 2022, at midnight. Entry to the contest was simple. People visited the contest landing page, then filled out the form, which consisted of four fields: Name, email address, zip code, and contest terms. Participants could only submit one entry during the contest period. 

At the end of the contest period, 28 winners were randomly selected from all of the entries. Winners received one roundtrip ticket, valid for $250, in the form of one Frontier Airlines voucher. The total value of all prizes was $7,000.

McWhorter said they promoted the sweepstakes “on our social and web channels (FlyFrontier.com and Flights.FlyFrontier.com) and had a birthday-themed promotional email takeover with multiple touchpoints that took users directly to the landing page.”

The Results

The results of Frontier’s 28th birthday contest were inspiring. The sweepstakes garnered 98,284 entries. McWhorter shared that her team will “use the email addresses and data collected for email marketing and paid media purposes. The zip codes provided allow us to send customers geo-targeted content specific to where they live (‘Hey Denver, escape the cold and head to the beach!’) type of messaging.” With a total prize value of $7,000, that’s about $0.07 per entry for future remarketing purposes!

According to McWorther, “Click Through Rate (CTR) is an important KPI that we use to judge the success of a promotional email send, and the mention of the birthday contest in the subject line, hero image, promo code, and secondary content helped the CTR to be above our average.”

Beyond entries, the contest had 141,576 views, 82.7% (117,085) of which were unique. That’s HUGE for their goal of promoting brand awareness! McWorther mentioned, “This contest was our second most viewed landing page since February 2021 and had more entries than any of our other external contests.”

McWhorter also shared, “I was not necessarily expecting this to be our most entered sweepstakes for the year; however, anytime we have a “free flight” promotion, they tend to perform well. There were more chances to win than most of our other sweeps, which typically attracts more entries.”

Contests Turbocharge Brand Awareness

Celebrating your organization’s birthday by giving away your product shows your customers you appreciate their business and helps grow brand awareness. This was certainly the case for Frontier Airlines and their 28th birthday contest. However, you don’t need to celebrate a milestone in order to reap the brand awareness benefits of a contest. 

Frontier Airlines uses the power of interactive content, specifically contests and promotions, to reach its goal of promoting its brand to new audiences. Contests not only allow for increased brand awareness, but they also serve as a way to collect leads and help differentiate your brand from competitors.

Interested in running a contest or sweepstakes for your next brand awareness campaign? Get in touch with our sales team to learn more about what ShortStack can do for you.