How Our Holiday “Elf on the Shelf” Contest Helped Our Customers Learn About New Features and Increased Brand Awareness

Sick and tired of doing the same holiday contests year after year? We get it! We decided to try something new this year. To step out of the box, we took the well-loved holiday tradition of Elf on the Shelf (okay, so some parents may disagree) and made it into a contest for our customers to win swag and a gift card. Read on to learn more about how we did it and the results.

Campaign Objectives

As you probably know, ShortStack (our platform) allows marketers to run online contests, create unique landing pages and send emails. However, we have recently released a lot of new features that many current and potential customers might not know about. As a way to spread the word about new features, we decided to run a contest. The primary goal of feature awareness led us to create a unique contest that required participants to search our website and learn about our product before they could submit their entries.

We promoted our Jack on the Stack contest on Instagram as well as emails

The Solution

We landed on an Elf on the Shelf contest after discussing our contest goals and determining that the best way to require folks to look at specific features on our website was to hide entry forms on pages that talk to those features. Plus, the Elf on the Shelf theme gave us the opportunity to have a little fun with the contest, which fits our brand. After putting our heads together, we came up with Jack on the Stack -- our own version of Elf on the Shelf.Using our Giveaway Calendar template as a backbone for the contest, we created a contest landing page. The Giveaway Calendar released clues on the dates of our choosing. We decided to give folks one week to find that week’s elf.

We used our Giveaway Calendar Template as the base for the Jack on the Stack Landing PageView and Create Your OwnEvery Tuesday of the month of November a new clue was revealed, then participants visited our website to find the ShortStack feature described within the clue. Jack, the mischievous elf, was hiding somewhere on a feature page. When he was clicked, a popup would appear with an entry form. Each entry form was a separate landing page that we embedded on the appropriate ShortStack web pages.Participants could submit one entry every week. Upon submission, they would find out immediately if they won ShortStack swag through our instant win feature. Furthermore, at the end of the four-week contest, we chose a winner for our grand prize by combining the entries from each week and using our random entry selector to choose a winner. If folks participated each week, then they had four chances to win the grand prize.

For a more in-depth overview of how to use ShortStack to set up an Elf on the Shelf Contest, check out our blog post How to Create Your Own Elf on the Shelf Contest This Holiday Season.

Contest Details

Our Jack on the Stack contest ran from November 3 through November 30, 2020. During this time, we allowed folks to submit up to four entries toward winning the grand prize. Plus, each week 10 instant win prizes were doled out. We promoted our contest to our customers via email, on social media and within our platform’s dashboard.Over the 28-day contest period, we handed out 40 instant win prizes. This included:

• Sixteen (16) ShortStack bottle opener keychain, sticker and pin packs;
• Twelve (12) ShortStack face masks;
• Eight (8) ShortStack t-shirts; and
• Four (4) ShortStack Big Truck hats.

At the end, we held a random drawing from all our contest entries for the grand prize of a $100 Visa gift card.

The Results

During our Jack on the Stack contest, our contest received 5,906 views and 1,525 entries. Our contest landing page, where participants went to see the weekly clues, had 2,949 views, of which 2,068 were unique views. From week to week, our entry form landing pages saw:

• Week 1: 1,235 Views & 683 Entries
• Week 2: 744 Views & 368 Entries
• Week 3: 659 Views & 339 Entries
• Week 4: 319 Views & 135 Entries – We expected a dropoff in views and entries this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

A surprising result of our contest was the positive feedback from our customers! We had a number of folks reach out to say they enjoyed hunting for Jack on our website. It was nice to know that our contest brought a little fun to our customers’ days.

Contests don’t have to be all about leads

Sometimes you want to run a contest to collect leads, but other times leads might be a by-product of something different. Our goal of educating customers about our new features led us to create an Elf on the Shelf contest where folks had to explore our website in order to submit an entry. The leads we collected over the contest were just a bonus.

Create your first contest now

Free TrialSign up for our free trial today. No commitments, cancel anytime.