Sweepstakes Marketing: Drive Retail Velocity and Capture Customer Data with Brij

For brands selling through retail channels, the disconnect is real. Your products sit on shelves at Target, Walmart, and specialty retailers nationwide, but who's actually buying them? What drives their purchase decisions? Where else are they shopping? Without direct customer relationships, these critical questions remain unanswered—leaving millions of dollars in potential customer lifetime value on the table.

Traditional sweepstakes marketing has long offered a solution, but executing compliant, large-scale campaigns has been complex, resource-intensive, and fraught with legal landmines. Enter modern sweepstakes technology: a way to transform every retail purchase into a data-rich marketing opportunity while delighting customers with prizes and experiences they'll actually care about.

The brands winning in retail today—from emerging DTC darlings to established CPG players—aren't just running sweepstakes for the sake of it. They're leveraging sweepstakes as strategic tools to capture first-party data, drive retail velocity, and build owned audiences from customers who would otherwise remain anonymous. The question isn't whether sweepstakes work, but whether you have the infrastructure to execute them at scale without drowning in compliance requirements and operational complexity.

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Why Sweepstakes Marketing Delivers Measurable Business Impact

Sweepstakes aren't just about giving away prizes. When executed strategically, they become powerful engines for customer acquisition, data collection, and retail sales growth.

Here's why leading brands turn to sweepstakes as a core marketing tactic:

First-Party Data Collection at Scale

In an era where third-party cookies are crumbling and customer acquisition costs are climbing, first-party data has become the most valuable asset in your marketing arsenal. Sweepstakes provide a natural value exchange: customers willingly share their information—email addresses, phone numbers, purchase preferences, shopping behaviors—in exchange for a chance to win something meaningful.

For brands selling through wholesale and retail channels, this data is particularly valuable. When 90% of your sales happen off your own website, sweepstakes become the bridge that connects you with customers who would otherwise remain invisible in your CRM. Each entry becomes a CRM record, complete with purchase verification, location data, and behavioral insights you can leverage for personalized marketing campaigns.

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Increased Brand Awareness and Social Amplification

The excitement around sweepstakes is inherently shareable. Customers talk about prizes they're trying to win, tag friends who might be interested, and spread the word across social channels. This organic amplification extends your marketing reach far beyond your owned channels and paid media budget.

Unlike static ads that consumers scroll past without a second thought, sweepstakes create moments of genuine excitement that stick with consumers long after the campaign ends. Major brands like Sephora, Pepsi, and Starbucks have built sweepstakes into their core marketing strategies not because they're trendy, but because they consistently drive measurable engagement and brand affinity.

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Cost-Effective Customer Acquisition

Rising customer acquisition costs pose one of the biggest challenges for modern brands, particularly those in competitive retail categories. Sweepstakes offer a different value proposition: targeted engagement with customers who've already demonstrated purchase intent, often at a fraction of the cost per acquisition compared to digital advertising.

Consider the math: investing in prize inventory and campaign infrastructure to capture thousands of engaged customer records often costs less than acquiring the same number of leads through paid social or search advertising. The difference? Sweepstakes participants are already customers—they've purchased your product to enter. You're not paying to convince strangers to try your brand; you're paying to identify and connect with people who already love what you make.

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Driving Retail Velocity and In-Store Sales

Perhaps the most compelling business case for sweepstakes is their ability to drive incremental retail sales. When entry requires proof of purchase, sweepstakes create immediate purchase incentives that translate directly to increased sales velocity at your retail partners. This matters enormously for your retail relationships—retailers allocate shelf space based on sales performance, and products that move quickly earn better placement, more facings, and increased promotional support.

A well-executed sweepstakes campaign can demonstrate clear sales lift, strengthening your position with buyers and paving the way for expanded distribution. With AI-powered receipt verification, you can track exactly which retailers, products, and purchase patterns your sweepstakes are driving.

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Building Owned Audiences for Lifecycle Marketing

The true value of sweepstakes extends far beyond the campaign itself. Each participant who enters becomes part of your owned audience—an email subscriber, SMS contact, or loyalty program member you can market to long after winners are announced. This transforms one-time retail purchases into the beginning of long-term customer relationships.

The email addresses and phone numbers collected through sweepstakes entries flow into your CRM, where they can be segmented, targeted, and nurtured through personalized marketing campaigns. For brands with loyalty programs, sweepstakes provide the perfect entry point for program enrollment, as customers already engaged enough to enter a sweepstakes are prime candidates for deeper brand relationships.

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Best Practices for Sweepstakes Campaigns that Convert

Like many marketing campaigns, the difference between a sweepstakes that delivers exceptional results and one that falls flat comes down to execution. While the basic concept is straightforward—offer prizes, collect entries, select winners—the details matter enormously.

Here are the essential best practices that separate successful campaigns from mediocre ones:

Choose Prizes That Actually Excite Your Audience

The prize is the foundation of your sweepstakes—get it wrong, and nothing else matters.

Your prizes should align with your brand identity and provide genuine value to your target customers. This doesn't necessarily mean expensive; it means relevant. A year's worth of your products might be more compelling than a generic gift card. An experience related to your brand story—like meeting a brand founder or attending an exclusive event—can generate more excitement than cash prizes worth more money.

For example, in partnering with Brij, Health-Ade offered a year's worth of groceries alongside their products, while Chamberlain Coffee offered fans a chance to meet Emma Chamberlain and have her redesign their coffee corner. The best prizes create aspirational moments while staying authentic to your brand.

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Create a Dedicated, Frictionless Landing Page

Your sweepstakes landing page serves as the hub for your entire campaign, where customers learn about prizes, understand entry requirements, and decide whether to participate.

A well-crafted landing page immediately communicates the value proposition—what customers can win and how to enter—using high-quality imagery and clear, concise copy. Beyond the basic entry form, consider incorporating product education, brand storytelling, and upsell opportunities.

Health-Ade used their sweepstakes landing page to educate customers about SunSip's benefits, while Mijenta Tequila integrated information about their sustainability initiatives. Most importantly, minimize friction by collecting only essential information—every additional field in your entry form reduces completion rates.

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Simplify the Entry Process With Smart Technology

Your campaign's success, much like with your standard customer acquisition funnel, hinges on providing customers with the lowest friction experience possible.

Conversion rates live and die on friction, and this is particularly true for purchase-based sweepstakes where requiring proof of purchase adds a natural barrier to entry. Modern AI-powered receipt verification eliminates this barrier—customers simply upload a photo of their receipt, and intelligent systems automatically extract relevant information, verify product purchases, and validate entry in seconds. This technology transforms the user experience from frustrating to effortless, dramatically improving completion rates.

Beyond receipt verification, every aspect of the entry process should prioritize simplicity: pre-populate fields when possible, minimize required information, provide clear progress indicators, and use mobile-responsive design that works perfectly on smartphones where the majority of entries will likely occur.

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Navigate Legal Requirements With Expertise

Sweepstakes compliance is complex and varies significantly by jurisdiction, with federal regulations, state laws, and platform-specific rules creating a maze of requirements that brands must navigate carefully. Having a compliance-knowledgeable partner for campaign creation is essential.

The most critical rule: you cannot require purchase for entry—sweepstakes regulations mandate that you offer an alternative means of entry (AMOE) that doesn't require customers to buy anything. Your sweepstakes must also clearly disclose eligibility requirements, start and end dates, prize details, odds of winning, winner selection process, and notification methods. Different states have specific bonding, registration, and filing requirements for sweepstakes above certain prize value thresholds.

The smartest approach? Partner with experts who handle compliance on your behalf, allowing your team to focus on creative, marketing, and conversions while specialists ensure every legal requirement is met.

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Promote Strategically Across Multiple Channels

Building an amazing sweepstakes experience is only half the battle—you need to drive traffic to it with efficient & effective multi-channel promotion.

Multi-channel promotion ensures maximum visibility and participation across your customer base. Start with your owned channels: email subscribers, social media followers, website visitors, and loyalty program members. Extend promotion to your retail channels by working with retail partners to incorporate sweepstakes information in shelf displays, end caps, and checkout areas.

Don't forget about packaging itself—QR codes on your products create instant entry points for customers to scan and participate, which is particularly powerful for wholesale brands. As the campaign progresses, maintain momentum with reminder communications, as participation often spikes in the final days before a sweepstakes closes.

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Brij Sweepstakes: Compliant, Scalable, Data-Rich Campaigns

Understanding best practices is one thing. Actually executing compliant, high-converting sweepstakes campaigns at scale is another challenge entirely. This is where Brij transforms sweepstakes from a complex, risky marketing tactic into a streamlined growth engine.

AI-Powered Purchase Verification

Brij's AI-powered receipt verification technology eliminates the traditional friction of purchase-based sweepstakes. Customers upload a photo of their receipt, and our intelligent system automatically extracts and verifies product purchases in seconds. No manual data entry. No frustrating form fields. No abandoned entries because the process was too complicated.

This technology doesn't just improve user experience—it unlocks powerful insights. Receipt data reveals where customers shop, what else they're buying, basket sizes, and purchase patterns. This point-of-sale intelligence helps you understand the full context of how customers interact with your brand in retail environments.

For brands running large-scale sweepstakes across multiple retailers and SKUs, AI verification makes campaigns manageable that would otherwise be operationally impossible. Feastables collects over 60,000 scans per day, generating more than 2 million monthly engagements. Manual receipt verification at this scale would require an army of people; AI handles it automatically.

End-to-End Compliance Management

In the event that your team does not have a sweepstakes compliance partner, Brij can handle every aspect of compliance so your team can focus on marketing and conversions. Our platform includes comprehensive compliance services:

• Terms & Conditions Drafting: The creation of legally sound sweepstakes rules tailored to your specific campaign, prizes, and target markets
• Alternative Means of Entry: Establishing compliant AMOE processes, whether through mail-in options, online forms, or other free entry methods
• Winner Selection & Verification: Management of the winner selection process, from random drawing to notification to verification
• Affidavit & Release Management: Handling all winner documentation, including affidavits of eligibility and liability releases required before prize fulfillment
• State Registration & Bonding: For sweepstakes that trigger registration requirements in states like New York, Florida, and Rhode Island, management of the necessary filings and bonding on your behalf

This comprehensive compliance management eliminates the legal anxiety that often accompanies sweepstakes campaigns. You can launch with confidence, knowing that every regulatory requirement is handled by specialists who live and breathe sweepstakes law.

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White-Glove Service or Self-Service Flexibility

Brij offers two approaches to sweepstakes campaigns, depending on your team's resources and preferences:

• Fully Managed Service: Our team handles everything from campaign design to experience building to compliance management to winner selection. This turnkey approach is perfect for brands launching their first sweepstakes or teams that want maximum support with minimum internal lift.
• ‍Self-Service Platform: For brands with marketing teams who want creative control, our experience builder enables you to design and launch sweepstakes campaigns yourself. Build custom landing pages, configure entry flows, integrate with your CRM, and manage campaigns through an intuitive interface—all while Brij handles compliance in the background.

Both approaches leverage the same powerful technology and compliance expertise. The difference is simply how much hands-on involvement you want in campaign execution.

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Seamless CRM Integration and Data Activation

Every sweepstakes entry captures valuable first-party data, but that data only delivers value when it flows seamlessly into your existing marketing systems. Brij integrates with core tech stack platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo, and others, ensuring that participant information automatically syncs to your customer database.

This integration enables immediate marketing activation. Customers who enter your sweepstakes can be automatically enrolled in welcome flows, segmented based on purchase behavior, targeted with personalized offers, and nurtured through lifecycle marketing campaigns. The sweepstakes becomes the beginning of an ongoing customer relationship optimized for LTV expansion; not a one-time transaction.

For brands with retail loyalty programs, this integration is particularly powerful. Sweepstakes participants can be prompted to join your loyalty program, with points automatically awarded for their verified purchases. This bridges the gap between retail sales and owned customer relationships, turning anonymous transactions into identified, marketable consumers.

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Proven Results Across Brand Categories

Leading brands across industries trust Brij to power their sweepstakes campaigns:

• ‍Chamberlain Coffee drove 750+ purchases and captured 9,000+ email addresses through a sweepstakes offering fans a chance to meet Emma Chamberlain. The campaign achieved a 24% registration conversion rate while strengthening retail relationships and improving in-store placement.
• ‍Health-Ade collected 40,000+ sweepstakes entries for their Grocery Sweeps campaign while simultaneously educating customers about their new SunSip product and driving over $7,000 in incremental DTC revenue within a single month.
• ‍Mijenta Tequila achieved a remarkable 40% registration rate for their holiday sweepstakes, collecting 500 registrations in just three months during a trial rebate program. The campaign seamlessly combined sweepstakes entry with product education about their sustainability initiatives and B-Corp certification.
• ‍Feastables collects 60,000+ scans per day with over 2 million monthly engagements across 6 international markets, transforming retail purchases into rich customer data and ongoing brand engagement.

These results demonstrate what's possible when sweepstakes technology removes complexity and enables brands to focus on strategy, creativity, and customer experience.

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Transform Retail Purchases Into Invaluable Revenue-Generating Opportunities

The brands winning in retail today understand a fundamental truth: the sale isn't the end of the customer relationship—it's the beginning. Every product purchased at Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, or independent retailers represents a potential long-term customer relationship, if only you can identify and connect with them. Sweepstakes provide that connection.

Whether you're launching your first sweepstakes or running your fiftieth, Brij provides the technology, expertise, and support to maximize results while minimizing operational complexity.

With Brij, you can turn every retail purchase into a data-rich marketing opportunity, build owned audiences from wholesale channels, drive measurable sales lift at your retail partners, and create moments of brand excitement that customers genuinely care about.

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Ready to launch a game-changing sweepstakes campaign? The Brij team is here to help you scale with success.

Click here to book a Brij demo with our team of expert omnichannel strategists.