User Engagement Contests
As Senior UX strategist, part of my responsibility was to keep engagement up and hit various monthly goals outside of long-term development projects / feature rollouts. The following two contests are a small peek into the large collection of contests I single-handedly ran and promoted through email and social media.
Friend Flurry Contest
Role Involved
UX, Marketing, Content, PM
Problem
During the end of year, our numbers tend to decline due to a lull in site activity from the extensive holiday season. Additionally, the cost-per-click skyrockets during the last quarter so it's difficult for us to efficiently maintain our growth.
Strategy
To counteract the lull in activity, I wanted to give our users a reason to return to the site. So, I lured them in by using a prize incentive.
I wanted it to be super easy to understand how to win, plus I wanted to use the engagement to help solve another issue we were facing - holiday acquisition. With that, the contest became a one-step referral process turning our socially active userbase (nearly every one of our users hears about us from social media) into becoming brand ambassadors.
That being said, there were a few challenges gamifying the contest. First, I didn't want to dissuade the less socially inclined members from participating, so I used a raffle system for prizing so everyone felt they could win. Second, internally there was a concern over users inviting fake accounts instead of high-quality acquisitions, meaning real people who can go on to qualify for programs. Thus, we added an additional clause to require a social media verification step to the invitees' sign ups.
Results
The first ever Friend Flurry in 2014 yielded a 724% boost in sign ups for its duration. Due to its success, Friend Flurry became an annual tradition that runs each December. The most recent contest, although having ran a shorter duration than previous "Flurries", yielded a 110% growth in sign ups with 77% of them connecting at least one social network resulting in data for other initiatives.
March Madness Contest
Role Involved
UX, Marketing, Content, PM
Problem
There was a number of users signing up at the time who were not connecting social accounts. We were also concerned about users only connecting one of their accounts, or connecting fake accounts that weren't valuable to us or our clients.
Strategy
To boost our over-all connects, we capitalized on the spirit of March Madness and competition. Users could gain entries towards qualifying to receive an upcoming box, amongst other prizing, through their social connects. Each connect counted towards a user's overall Impact score, a branded term that translated to that user's sum of friends and followers.
Our promotion of the page also added some much needed transparency in attempt to "help us help you" by explaining to users that even if they didn't win, they are still boosting their chances to win in the future.
To incentivize users to connect all of their accounts, we granted entries to win based off of the quantity of their connections. To get a user to connect their actual, personal accounts, we granted bonus entries based on how many followers they had across all of their connections. This effectively dissuaded connecting fake accounts with little to no followers. Lastly, any prior connetions were automatically converted to entries, so as not to upset any users who were previously connected and ready to go.
Results
Although the contest ran only a short three weeks, I boosted the average daily social connects by 566% and collectively grew our over-all social connect count from the past three years by 12.5%
