How a $400 One-Time Contest Can Make You $2500 per Year

If you've followed our blog for any length of time you know how we love talking about Social Promotions (SoPros)- contests and sweepstakes that are run in such a way as to leverage social media i.e. "go viral." There a many permutations from contests to sweepstakes, quick hitting to multi-month, they can be web-only or combined effectively with print but in all cases if they're done well they're highly engaging.

It's this engagement that makes them so profitable for publishers. Clearly businesses want to sponsor activities that get their name out there and are well received so one successful promotion leads to another but there's more to it than that. Facebook is so ubiquitous most local business owners use Facebook personally so they may see your SoPro and be interested whereas your 'legacy' business doesn't catch their eye.

Though the terrific lead gen that comes from SoPros still doesn't go far enough to demonstrate their long-term value.

The truly long-term value of a simple Social Promotion is in the new access to audience it delivers to publishers i.e. Facebook fans (page likes) and most notably email opt-ins.

Let's take a look at a recent social promotions that we ran for Mansfield Magazine, it was run for less than 2 weeks and sponsored for a modest yet profitable $400. It yielded nearly 150 new email opt-ins for Mansfield Magazine. After all, "if you like this promotion why not have us let you know when we're running another or perhaps there's content you'd like to be notified of?" - there's a high correlation between participation and opt-ins.

With that background in place let's run some numbers

Local publications should be sending at least 1 email newsletter (used generically) per week, probably more and probably much more targetted by interest but I'm going to keep it as simple as possible. So, one email per week means 52 emails per year.

You should be selling email sponsorships, in packages of course, and a common price that we see for lists with decent open rates is in the $.25-.50 per recipient per email. Given that we collected roughly 150 new opt-ins that means 150*$.25 on the low end or 150*.50 on the high end or $37.5-75 per email sponsor.

If we assume a single email sponsor at $50 each week * 52 weeks you'd be looking at a cool $2600/year.

Of course the fun doesn't stop there, each email you send drives more traffic to your site, increases your ability to promote future SoPros and because they are - you know - social media friendly that means you have a multiplier effect and thus over time your list grows further while also making you look like a publisher who knows what they're doing.

That's how a single $400 social promotion could be the most profitable thing you could do for your business.