As you may or may not remember, I’ve been updating you on some of the additional findings of the research that was carried out for Prizeology earlier this year. I’m doing a short series of posts focusing specifically on what it revealed about prize promotions and you can read the previous post, which is about the actions people take just before they enter a promotion, here. In this post, though, I want to look at the data on responses to the places in which people come across a prize promotion.
Our research company asked a number of questions about which contexts make people more or less likely to enter a promotion. So, for example, the research found that if people are personally invited to take part in a prize promotion, whether it’s by email or by letter, they are 12% more likely to enter, and if they come across a prize promotion in an electronic newsletter they are 14% more likely to enter.
There was a small jump if people saw a promotion on a website, with 20% of people saying they were more likely to enter, and a couple of contexts scored pretty poorly with, respectively, just 6% and 5% of people saying they would respond positively to a text message and a WhatApp message, perhaps reflecting reduced trust of those contexts due to the well-publicised prevalence of prize draw scams on those channels. Other social media platforms were slightly more popular, with respectively 8%, 9% and 14% of people receptive to promotions on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Obviously, there were corresponding percentages of people who were less likely to enter in a particular context, but these were broadly similar right across the board and the percentage for whom the context made no difference at all was also fairly constant, averaging just under 40%. There were some variations for gender, age and region, but nothing that particularly stood out as being significant.
So that’s all reasonably interesting and one could certainly infer that where people see a prize promotion isn’t particularly important – if they like the promotion they will enter irrespective of the context – but what was actually really interesting is that when asked about their response to a prize promotion in a magazine 36% of people said they were more likely to enter. Similarly, 44% of people said that they were more likely to enter a prize draw or competition if they came across it via an on-pack promotion.
It goes without saying that at Prizeology we get good response rates whatever the context because we tailor the promotion to work well in that context, but – and let me spell this out – people are more likely to enter a promotion if it’s presented in the pages of a magazine or on product packaging. In other words, the established, tried and trusted contexts score highest. Isn’t that surprising?! Or perhaps it isn’t. I guess people like old media!
Obviously I’m not going to abandon promotions on new media, and if a client has clear reasons for wanting to run a promotion on What’sApp I won’t dissuade them, but, depending on what you want your promotion to achieve, just bear in mind that a magazine or on-pack promotion can also be an effective solution.
And just so you know, the research I’m referring to above was carried out by Vitreous World on behalf of Prizeology. It was based on 2015 interviews conducted between 30 January and 2 February 2018 with a nationally representative UK audience using an online methodology. Respondents were a minimum of 18 years old and quotas were placed on age, gender and region to ensure an accurate representation of the UK public demographic.
Old-style or new, Prizeology can run a promotion on any platform, page or pack. Call us on 020 7856 0402, email us on hello@prizeology.com and if you prefer to write us a nice, old-fashioned letter, you’ll find our postal address on our website.
Sarah Burns is Prizeology’s Chief Prizeologist and a National Trading Standards Scams Team Scambassador.
