According to the 2015 Form Conversion Report, contest forms have a 35% conversion rate, which is 11% higher than any other form. That said hosting a contest is a great way to grab visitors’ attention and shower potential customers with goodies.
But before you decide to run that contest check out the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Q&A section on its Endorsement Guides. Detailing the dos and don’ts for the future of advertising, The Endorsement Guides are a marketer’s best friend.
What do these updates mean for marketers looking to take advantage of generating leads through social contests? In two words: conspicuous and clear. State what you may think is obvious and without abbreviation in order to avoid any red flags.
While adhering to the new guidelines, put these best practices into play for a winning combination:
- Use clear, relevant hashtags to promote and disclose your contest. Contests with custom hashtags tend to get more user engagement on Twitter than those without. And if your contest requires entrants to post information or images related to your brand, make sure your official contest rules require a clear disclosure, such as #contest or #sweepstakes.
- Embed your contest form on your social sites. Conversion rates jump from 9% to 20% when forms are integrated with a user’s Facebook page.
- Use Social Autofill to help entrants quickly fill out and submit your contest form. You can lift your conversions 189% by making use of this feature.
- Promote your contest on your social sites on Thursdays at 8 p.m. Formstack's research indicates that this is the peak submission time for contest forms.
- Don’t purchase Facebook likes to make your contest seem more popular than it is. The FTC frowns on this type of deceptive practice. And it’s not clear if the number of likes on a post is really a draw for Facebook users anyway.
- Make sure your employees disclose their relationship with your brand when promoting your contest via their personal social accounts. In the name of full disclosure, those reading your employees’ promotional posts should know that the posts are coming from paid employees of the brand sponsoring the contest.
Infographic courtesy of: formstack.
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