Slick prize management is essential to the success of any promotion. Winners may make up only a very small portion of your overall audience, but treat them right and you’ve created lifetime brand ambassadors who will be your biggest advocates. Don’t underestimate the power of an enthusiastic individual – their reach and influence over the long-term can be significant.

For your customers who didn’t win, there remains an opportunity to maintain engagement with your brand. It’s about spreading the feel-good factor as far as possible.

5 ways to delight your winners

With a carefully thought-through winner management strategy you can create a stream of winner-led content which touches and influences a mass audience. By opening up the right communication channels your brand can benefit enormously from winner created content which is more powerful, impactful and memorable than any advertising campaign.

Offering a great prize isn’t always enough to delight your winners. As the saying goes: it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Here are our top tips on how to look after your winners and make them your biggest advocates.

1. Have a plan

The devil is in the detail when it comes to successful winner management. Physical prizes are relatively straight-forward to fulfil. However, when it comes to delivering experiences, you need to cover all bases, from insurances and check-ins through to dietary requirements and travel delays.

2. Get the message right

The initial contact with a winner is extremely important to a successful outcome. You want to convey a sense of delight and excitement but you also need to be clear about what is and isn’t included in the prize. Setting expectations from the outset is critical to a winner feeling satisfied overall.

3. Maintain contact

“It’s really important that someone takes ownership of the contact with each winner. From simply ensuring their prizes have arrived and that they are what the winner was expecting to receive through to a courtesy call when the winner has returned from a trip – it all helps to create the right impression and nip any potential issues in the bud,” explains Jocelyn Nicholson, NDL’s Customer Experience Team Manager

4. Deliver a great prize

Get the best prizes your budget can buy and deliver them with style. If these are physical prizes, get the right merchandise delivered to the right place at the right time and try to add a finishing touch which will make it even more memorable, even if that means simply packaging your prize like a gift or including a well written covering letter. If it’s an experience-based prize, look for ways to add a little more luxury, or include an aspect which they wouldn’t be able to arrange themselves.  Try Unmissable.com for exceptional travel experiences.

5. Know what success means to your brand

Decide in advance how you are going to measure the success of your promotion. Of course, 99% of promotions aim to improve sales performance and to get consumers to switch brands. But there are other measures you can set in place, from something as simple as reporting the number of entrants through to measuring a more complex indicator such as the level of chatter about your brand by fans on social media.

Here at NDL Group we have a Customer Experience Team dedicated to prize management. They’re matched to each client depending upon the nature of the promotion and brand, and it’s their enviable task to make lots of people very, very happy. It’s this team’s job to fulfil every aspect of a prize, whether that’s the delivery of goods and merchandise which have been won, or organising special experiences and once-in-a-lifetime holidays.

To discover more about our award-winning prize management service, please get in touch on 020 7428 3090.

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