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Why You Should Run Sweepstakes Marketing (and How to Do It With Brij)
- Sweepstakes create high-impact brand moments that drive sales, fill calendar gaps, and build awareness without discounting products.
- When tied to purchase, sweepstakes convert retail activity into valuable first-party data that fuels ongoing marketing and personalization.
- Effective sweepstakes require seamless execution across channels, from in-store and packaging to digital, email, SMS, and partners.
- Brij simplifies sweepstakes at every step – from compliance and purchase verification to data capture and CRM integration – making it easy to scale sweepstakes without operational overhead.
Running a sweepstakes isn’t only a fun giveaway. When done strategically, it becomes a powerful business growth engine that drives brand awareness, customer acquisition, retail sales, and first-party data collection.
If you’re wondering why every modern brand should consider a sweepstakes marketing campaign, here’s a breakdown of the strategic “why” and the “how” – especially when you leverage a platform like Brij to make it simple and scalable.
What Makes Sweepstakes Valuable for Your Business
Sweepstakes Are Non-Promotional (In a Good Way)
Unlike discounts that shrink margins and train customers to wait for the next sale, sweepstakes give consumers excitement without discounting your product.
Customers pay full price and participate for a chance to win something meaningful. A win for both your revenue and your brand prestige.
Sweepstakes create a story-worthy brand moment. This event turns into something people talk about, share, and remember, which makes it powerful for brand building.
Strategic Business Benefits of Running a Sweepstakes
1. Drive Sales and Retail Velocity
Sweepstakes are about sales. That’s because entry can be tied to a purchase, which motivates customers to buy now for the chance to win, without turning into a discount. This can increase velocity at key retail partners and strengthen your relationship with those partners.
2. Capture First-Party Data at Scale
In a world where third-party cookies are fading and acquisition costs are rising, first-party data is gold. Sweepstakes provide a value exchange: consumers happily share emails, phone numbers, preferences, and purchase data in exchange for entry.
This transforms anonymous retail transactions into known customer profiles you can market to again and again.
3. Boost Brand Awareness and Engagement
Sweepstakes create excitement that spreads organically. Because participants talk about prizes and tag friends, your campaign gets social amplification far beyond a typical ad.
4. Grow Your Owned Audience for Ongoing Marketing
Entries don’t just stop at the prize draw. Each one becomes part of your long-term lifecycle marketing. Think email flows, SMS campaigns, loyalty programs, or personalized retargeting.
You can segment, target, and nurture through personalized marketing campaigns.
How Sweepstakes Work in Practice
At their core, sweepstakes are chance-based campaigns where winners are selected randomly. What makes them effective is how they’re structured and distributed.
1. Define the Action
Every sweepstakes starts with a clear action that unlocks entry:
- QR code scan or link click
- Receipt upload
- Form submission tied to a product or experience
This action determines where the sweepstakes lives (online, in retail, or across both).
2. Design the Entry Experience
The entry flow must be fast, mobile-friendly, and frictionless. The best-performing sweepstakes:
- Clearly explain the prize and timeline
- Require minimal steps to enter
- Collect only the data that matters
This is where conversion is won or lost.
3. Choose a Brand-Congruent Prize
Prizes should reinforce brand identity, not distract from it. When the reward feels exclusive and aligned, you attract customers who are genuinely interested in your brand, not just sweepstakes hunters.
4. Distribute Across Channels
Sweepstakes perform best when they’re everywhere your customer already is:
- Paid media
- Email and SMS
- Product packaging and retail displays
- Partner websites and influencer content
5. Capture Data and Measure Impact
Each entry becomes a data point, revealing who your customers are, where they shop, and how they engage. This makes it possible to measure not just entries, but downstream impact on sales, retention, and lifetime value.
How Brij Makes Sweepstakes Easy and Effective
Running a compliant, large-scale sweepstakes does involve operational details, from landing pages to integration with your CRM, and that’s where Brij shines.
✔ Turnkey Sweepstakes Setup & Compliance
Brij handles rules, eligibility, state laws, legal disclosures, and compliance with state and local regulations so you don’t have to become a law expert.
From drafting official rules to managing required disclosures and eligibility logic, Brij removes legal complexity and risk from every sweepstakes campaign.
✔ AI-Powered Purchase Verification
Require proof of purchase for entry? Brij’s AI receipt verification makes it frictionless for customers and scalable for your team.
✔ Capture Rich Data Seamlessly
Every sweepstakes entry becomes real customer data – email, phone, purchase patterns, and more – and flows directly into your CRM or martech stack via Brij’s integrations.
✔ Dedicated, High-Converting Sweepstakes Landing Pages
Brij creates dedicated sweepstakes landing pages that act as the central hub for your campaign to clearly communicate the prize, entry requirements, and timeline in a fast, mobile-first experience.
Each page is designed to reduce friction while capturing first-party data, with space to incorporate product education, brand storytelling, and optional upsell moments without hurting conversion.
✔ Multi-Channel Promotion
Brij enables sweepstakes to run seamlessly across ads, social media, email, SMS, websites, retail QR codes, partner placements, and influencer content by connecting everything to a single campaign and entry flow.
By centralizing data capture, verification, and attribution, Brij lets brands scale distribution without adding operational complexity or fragmenting the customer experience.
✔ Proven, Cross-Industry Success
Leading brands have seen impressive results with Brij-powered sweepstakes:
- Chamberlain Coffee captured nearly 9,000 emails with over 50 purchases tied directly to sweepstakes engagement.
- Health-Ade generated 40,000+ entries while boosting revenue and educating customers.
- Mijenta Tequila achieved a 40% registration rate even during a short trial campaign.
- Feastables sees 60,000+ scans per day and millions of engagements monthly.
These results show that when sweepstakes technology removes operational complexity, you can focus on strategy, creativity, and customer experience.
Final Thoughts
Sweepstakes are more than giveaways. They’re a strategic tool to:
- Drive sales without discounting
- Capture first-party data
- Grow owned audiences
- Build meaningful brand moments
And with Brij, you can launch, scale, and manage sweepstakes with less friction, more compliance, and better results than traditional approaches.
Ready to turn retail shoppers into real customers and advocates? Get started today with a personalized Brij demo for your brand here.
