Growing your email list with GDPR compliant competitions

Competitions, giveaways and prize draws are a great way to engage with new audiences and can also be the ideal way to grow your email marketing list. But in this post GDPR world, what can you do and what should you avoid to remain compliant?

We all love winning, that’s why competitions resonate with the masses. They are the perfect opportunity to get some great exposure for your brand, grow your customer base AND there’s usually a prize. It’s a win, win – literally.

Running competitions with consent options

For a contest, giveaway or prize draw, always make sure to include a separate, clear action that allows the entrant to give consent, such as ticking a box. To make sure that consent counts and is completely unambiguous, it should be separate from other questions and not lumped into lengthy terms and conditions.

Don’t try to confuse your audience. It’s not beneficial to have subscribers in your database that don’t expect to be there. You can’t hide conditions of entry (one of them being added to a mailing list) within your terms and conditions – ultimately, this will only harm your email marketing efforts.

Data capture, consent and conditions

The main concern to be aware of when considering incentivising data capture is that all competitions, prize draws and giveaways you’re running should be as inclusive as possible. If you make people jump through too many hoops that they don’t understand, their consent simply won’t be valid.

If you’re running a prize draw along with your data capture ad or email sign up page on your site, really choose your words carefully. Data capture should remain the first aspect of any good campaign, with an incentive secondary.

To open out the campaign, we’d also advise making it possible for people to enter the prize draw without joining your email list. This way you’re not making it exclusive to email subscribers only.

Running a GDPR compliant data capture campaign can be as simple as getting the wording right. Think ‘unambiguous consent’ (the type you need for a compliant marketing list). Instead of ‘Enter our prize draw by signing up to our emails’, we’d recommend changing this to ‘Sign up to our emails. When you sign up, we’ll also automatically enter you into our current prize draw’.

Consider making a competition page to run alongside the automatic entry you’re running for your data capture outputs; this way you’re not making it exclusive to email subscribers.

Quality over quantity

Don’t lose sight of your end goal – you’re not trying to get people onto your list that purely want to win something. You want them to join your email list because they want to hear from you and engage with future communications. If you go to hard with the ‘WIN’ angle, your list will quickly fill up, but with inactive, disinterested subscribers who will likely lay dormant, or instantly unsubscribe.

Don’t forget the basics

One of the best ways to collect new subscribers into your list remains simply to shout about what they will receive when they sign up and the benefits of joining. Maybe you can let your potential subscribers know that they will be amongst the first to hear about sales, new products, offers, your latest content and competitions.

Ethical marketing

If you’re still getting used to the new GDPR legislation, you just need to continually ask yourself – have I made this clear? Is it fair? These questions will really help you to keep your marketing ethical and compliant, especially when you’re asking for consent or running competitions.

At Fox&Bear, we love seeing email databases grow, but only with strong, compliant data. We don’t use tricks or magic – just creativity and data. If you want to run creative campaigns to support list growth, but don’t quite know where to start, give us a call on 01273 208913 or fill in our online form and we’ll be in touch!

Please note that all the information contained in this blog is for guidance only and is not legal advise.