E062: Running a Sweepstake for Your DTC Brand? Here’s Your Checklist to Get It Right

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast - Episode E062: Running a Sweepstake for Your DTC Brand? Here’s Your Checklist to Get It Right

Release Date: June 3, 2025

In Episode E062 of the "Marketing Operators" podcast, hosts Connor Rolain and Cody Plofker delve deep into the intricacies of running a successful sweepstakes for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands. With the rising popularity of sweepstakes among marketers, Connor and Cody provide a comprehensive checklist to ensure brands execute their campaigns effectively, maximizing both engagement and revenue.

1. Introduction to Sweepstakes for DTC Brands

The episode kicks off with Cody sharing insights from his recent endeavors, including a collaboration with McLaren to launch a new set of everyday carry gear inspired by supercars. This high-profile partnership sets the stage for discussing the strategic value of sweepstakes in creating unique brand moments.

Notable Quote:

Connor (00:00): "Today, Cody's out running around in Europe with his family. We wish Cody all the best as he's in Europe with two young kids."

2. Why Run a Sweepstakes?

Connor and Cody explore the fundamental reasons brands initiate sweepstakes. For DTC brands, sweepstakes serve multiple purposes:

• Creating Excitement During Off-Peak Periods: Cody mentions, "We really had nothing going on. We were figuring out ways to make something exciting in August and September" ([15:12]).

• Non-Promotional Incentives: Instead of typical discounts, sweepstakes offer unique value propositions that encourage purchases without direct price reductions.

• Brand Building Opportunities: Sweepstakes can significantly enhance brand visibility and engagement, as seen when Cody recounts partnering with Hennessy to give away high-value trucks, generating substantial discourse and media attention.

Notable Quote:

Cody (15:12): "It's a non-promotional way to drive incentive to purchase and then three is like I do think it's a really cool brand building opportunity."

3. Designing the Sweepstakes Campaign

A critical aspect of a successful sweepstakes is its design, which includes:

• Offering Congruent Prizes: Prizes should align with the brand's ethos. For instance, a health and wellness brand might offer a wellness retreat instead of a cash prize.

  Notable Quote:

  Connor (18:03): "What are you offering the winner? Is it congruent with your brand and what your customer wants?" ([18:03]).

• Branding and Visual Distinction: Creating a unique design language ensures the sweepstakes stands out across multiple channels. Cody emphasizes the importance of "cool fonts, cool colors" to build long-term recognition ([23:06]).

  Notable Quote:

  Cody (23:06): "How do we create a design language so that it is distinctive and recognizable and can be cohesive across many channels?"

4. Gamification and Driving Business Objectives

To maximize the effectiveness of sweepstakes, incorporating gamification elements can significantly influence customer behavior and drive specific business goals.

• Strategic Entry Incentives: Offering multiple entries based on certain actions, such as purchases in specific product categories, can steer customer spending towards desired areas. Cody explains, "We have customers getting two entries for a dollar spent in knives, three entries for aprons, and one entry for cookware" ([30:18]).

• Enhancing Engagement Through Bonuses: Introducing bonus entry periods and mystery crates keeps the campaign dynamic and maintains customer interest over extended periods.

  Notable Quote:

  Cody (30:18): "If you spend a certain amount, you get bonus entries, which keeps the campaign exciting and maintains steady engagement."

5. Legal Considerations

Running a sweepstakes involves navigating complex legal landscapes to ensure compliance with federal and state laws.

• Third-Party Legal Assistance: Hiring legal experts, such as Martin Kane, ensures that sweepstakes rules adhere to all legal requirements, including bonding in strict states like New York and Florida.

  Notable Quote:

  Cody (49:06): "Whenever anybody asks, I refer them to Martin Kane, that's who we've used four years in a row." ([49:06]).

• Clear Rules and Transparency: Ensuring that winners are selected randomly and that the process is transparent is crucial for maintaining credibility and avoiding legal pitfalls.

6. Tracking Entries and Building Funnels

Effective tracking and funnel optimization are essential for measuring the success of sweepstakes and ensuring high-quality lead generation.

• Leveraging Loyalty Platforms: Cody discusses repurposing loyalty program ledgers to track sweepstakes entries, ensuring participants can easily see their entry count and actions taken.

  Notable Quote:

  Cody (52:27): "Loyalty programs already have a ledger... can we just repurpose this ledger to track sweepstakes entries?" ([52:27]).

• Enhancing Customer Experience: Providing participants with real-time updates on their entries and the actions they've taken increases engagement and fosters a sense of participation.

7. Cross-Channel Activation and Funnel Building

Sweepstakes should be integrated seamlessly across all marketing channels to ensure a cohesive and effective campaign.

• Website Integration: Creating a dedicated sweepstakes landing page with clear explanations and multiple touchpoints ensures that visitors can easily understand and participate in the sweepstakes.

• Consistent Messaging: Aligning ads, emails, and website elements with the sweepstakes branding creates a unified experience for participants, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the campaign.

  Notable Quote:

  Connor (66:44): "We have every touch point... a banner at the top of our website that follows you everywhere... landing page experience to opt in." ([66:44]).

8. Future Enhancements and Innovations

Looking ahead, Connor and Cody discuss potential advancements to make sweepstakes even more engaging and profitable.

• Partnership Content: Leveraging influencer collaborations and integrating sweepstakes into high-impact content can amplify reach and participation.

• Enhanced Gamification: Incorporating interactive elements, such as daily or weekly games, can increase habitual engagement and brand loyalty.

  Notable Quote:

  Cody (35:41): "I just think we see that probably 10x over time... Ecom brands will just get more gamified over time." ([35:41]).

Conclusion

By meticulously planning each aspect of the sweepstakes—from offering relevant prizes and ensuring legal compliance to tracking entries and leveraging cross-channel marketing—DTC brands can create successful and engaging campaigns that drive both brand loyalty and revenue. Connor and Cody's in-depth discussion provides a valuable roadmap for marketers looking to harness the power of sweepstakes in their marketing strategy.

Notable Quotes Recap:

• Connor (18:03): "What are you offering the winner? Is it congruent with your brand and what your customer wants?"
• Cody (23:06): "How do we create a design language so that it is distinctive and recognizable and can be cohesive across many channels?"
• Connor (66:44): "We have every touch point... a banner at the top of our website that follows you everywhere... landing page experience to opt in."

For marketers interested in implementing a sweepstakes, this episode serves as an essential guide, blending practical steps with strategic insights to ensure campaigns not only attract participants but also build lasting brand value.

Transcript

[Connor]

All right, we're back. Another episode of marketing operators podcast. Just the Connors. Today, Cody's out. Out running around in Europe with his family. So is that what he's doing this week? Yeah, I think he's out in Europe. I. I think he's out there with. With the entire family. Both. Both. His, like, I think his first daughter is like three or three or four, and then his newborn. So we. We wish Cody all the. All the best of luck as he's in Europe with. With two young kids. Looks like he's having a blast out there. Yeah. Connor, what's going on? How are you doing, dude?

[Cody]

Doing pretty good. I was in Miami this past weekend. What's going on there? We are launching a. There's a. There's a very recognizable colorway of supercars, and we're launching a. A set of everyday carry gear inspired by it in June. That. That's all. I'll keep it relatively vague, but I had to. It was really tough. I had to go out to Miami and shoot with McLaren on Monday. Um, so.

[Connor]

Whoa.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever driven one of those?

[Connor]

No, definitely not. But I did just watch Ford versus Ferrari like, two nights ago, and now I'm like, I'm just so ready to dive head first into, like, racing and F1.

[Cody]

All right, well, have we got the wallet for you in about 20 days. So just so if you were in market, hold off for a bit longer.

[Connor]

That is so awesome. Well, I'm still. I'm rocking the. That leather one that you sent me a while back. I love this one. Yeah, this one's great. Well, that's cool. How long were you out there, dude?

[Cody]

It was actually a brutal trip. I got there Saturday night and I left Monday night. So I was just there one full day. There's a lot of. A lot of travel and a lot of time change for, you know, like 36 hours. But successful trip and first time driving a very fast car, so that was fun.

[Connor]

Yeah. I was going to say. So you got to drive the car?

[Cody]

Yeah. And you know what's funny is I'm not a car guy at all.

[Connor]

Not either.

[Cody]

Like, I didn't even own a car until, like, last year, but I was in it and I was like, it's like a quarter million dollar car. I mean, it's just, like, absurd.

[Connor]

Is it an F1 car that you were driving?

[Cody]

No, not an F1 car. Just a. With some sort of crazy McLaren.

[Connor]

Yeah. How fast you get that thing going, dude?

[Cody]

Not that fast. We're just cruising around Miami.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

But Sean out there, no, it was just me and Chris from my team, our performance creative manager. But I. I, like, I almost felt guilty about, like, how cool I thought it was. I would never spend a quarter million dollars on a car, I think, no matter how much money I had. But I was in. I'm like, all right, these things are. These things are kind of fun.

[Connor]

You got it. You like? You got it?

[Cody]

I got it a little bit. I got it a little bit.

[Connor]

You understand why Zach stuck so into cars now?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%.

[Connor]

Nice. That's fun, man. Cool. Well, I'll keep an eye out for the. I'm always. I mean, I'm always keeping an eye out for how you guys go to market, so I'll especially have an eye out for this one.

[Cody]

Dude, I'm stoked. I'm stoked for this one. We don't need to get into it because I don't want. I don't want to disclose any details, but I think it looks really, really sweet.

[Connor]

Is qu. Can I ask you one question about it? Is there like a. Is there a co promotion piece that'll happen? Like, are you going to be able to tap into McLaren's audience by doing a partnership with them?

[Cody]

No, not for this one. Yeah.

[Connor]

Okay.

[Cody]

No co promotion piece. I think there's some cool. Like, we've aligned with some automotive YouTubers. So it's like this. This automotive inspired colorway. So we, like, have all this cool content. What I really like about it, which you'll see is like the graphic treatment, I just think we were really clever with the way of like, uniting the car and the history of the colorway and the products and just from a design perspective. And then, yeah, that's kind of how it's coming together. And I mentioned the automotive YouTuber, so I think we'll, like, get in front of people who just love cars. Like, people who will have seen Ford vs Ferrari maybe a couple times instead of just recently for the first time.

[Connor]

Dude, that's awesome. Well, I'm excited to check that out. We got a few, like, outdoor cooking products that. Not. Not that level of like, brand partnership, but trying to. We're trying to activate more influencer partners as we launch some of these products that are maybe like a B level launch for us. So I'll be keeping an eye out for how you guys do that with the YouTubers. What else we got going on? We got the meta summit coming up. That's in the first week of June. I think all three of the Marketing operators. I think a bunch of the operators are headed out there. I will. I'll only be out there for day two, unfortunately, but I'll be there all day. So. Yeah, come. Come holler at us. We're excited. This is my first.

[Cody]

Super stoked. Yeah.

[Connor]

Yeah. This is my first meta. What's it called? It's the Meta Performance Summit.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Yeah. And you've been before I went in 2023. What's the. Yeah. What's the deal? Like, just a bunch of marketers from a bunch of brands.

[Cody]

It's like a keynote, you know, it's like a. It's like. It felt almost like an Apple keynote where they're rolling out, like, the new. New MacBooks or iPhones or whatever, but they're talking about, like, AI enhanced ad creative. It's perfect for people who geek out on Facebook ads.

[Connor]

Nice. Cool. Well, we're. We're headed out there. We're excited. So, yeah, if you're out there, you know, come say hi. We'll be. We'll be there ready to. Ready to jam with all of you. We got tariff relief a little bit. I don't know about you guys, but we're. We're pretty excited about that, about some of the news that happened on Monday. So that's good. We had a really good Mother's Day sale. That's a massive moment for us. I think it's a massive moment for Cody as well. Probably not as much you guys now, I would imagine. Now.

[Cody]

Yeah, we just launched. It's. It's February or. Sorry, Jesus. It's May 15th today. We just launched, like, an early Memorial Day sale, and then that will turn into our Father's Day sale. So we're just going into, like, a very peak period for us, I would.

[Connor]

Say Father's Day is probably. Is that. Is that your biggest non. Q4 moment?

[Cody]

It's like June can. June can. This used to be more true. In the past. We've had difficulty making this comp. But June is as big as the previous November.

[Connor]

Oh, wow. Dang. Okay.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's. Maybe it's like May 15th to June 15th is as big as the previous November. It's something like that. But like. Yeah. Really, really big in scale.

[Connor]

Nice. Nice. Yeah, we're. We're like opposite. Mother's Day is huge. Memorial Day.

[Cody]

So. Why is that? Because you also talk about. And we have a. We kind of have a packed agenda so we can get into it in a second. But you. I feel like you describe hexcloud as a More masculine brand. But you guys crush Mother's Day.

[Connor]

We're actually it. The branding is very masculine, but we actually are split, like, 50, 50 totally in our. In our, like, male, female buyers. Dude, cookware is such a good gift. Like, there's. There's no better gift for your mom than, like, a $700 cookware set. Like, it's also, like, a gift that keeps on giving, too. So I think, you know, if you're a husband and you're buying your wife $700 cookware, like, you're getting brownie points with your wife, and now your wife is. Is cooking for you. It's just, like. It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Mother's Day is always our. Our biggest moment. It's our Father's Day, or, like, for you guys, it's. It's our biggest moment outside of. Of BFCM and our holiday sales. So, yeah, we're feeling good about the numbers we put up, and, yeah, we'll see how the rest of the summer goes. Father's Day is solid. We usually do, like, a smaller activation for Father's Day.

[Cody]

What about Memorial Day?

[Connor]

Memorial Day is good. It's just. We roll it out, you know, five days after Mother's Day ended. So there's just a lot of people have been converted. The funnel's not quite as juicy, so it'll be good. Just, you know, slow kind of tapering.

[Cody]

So Memorial Day goes live soon.

[Connor]

Tomorrow.

[Cody]

Tomorrow, yeah. All right, cool.

[Connor]

Tomorrow. Yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. I was on Live Tuesday, and I was like, did we. Did we go too soon? May 13th. I'm like, I don't think many people are thinking about Memorial Day two weeks ahead of hand, but the sales start whenever.

[Connor]

I mean, because you guys weren't on sale, though, so if we weren't on sale, I would have launched earlier. Yeah. If we hadn't been. One thing we're doing this year much, much better. We hired a director of design, and we are. We'll get into this in the sweepstakes episode, but we're branding our. Our moments a lot stronger this year. Like, you'll notice, last year, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, from just, like, a pure aesthetic standpoint, looked more or less the same. The offers are and were different and are different. Some stuff's the same, but just, like, visually and aesthetically feels way different this year, which I think is going to be really, really important for us because we are on sale a lot. So really excited about that. Keep an eye out on, like, the website and the ad creative and you'll. You'll notice some, some pretty big differences. So we're excited about that. We're, I'm really interested to see how that changes. Like I want to look last year at our, at our like growth rates between the two sale periods compared to this year and see if that like branding because the offers are fairly similar. I want to see if that branding actually allows us to have like a stronger Memorial Day sale relative to Mother's Day this year over last just because people will hopefully feel different about it.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

So we'll see. But all right, let's get into it. We got a fun one today. We're gonna kind of go back to the sweepstakes. You know, I think you and I have both noticed a lot of brands rolling these out. We're getting a lot of questions from marketers around sweepstakes, so we wanted to revisit that one and kind of like a, a checklist style of episode before we do that. Thanking the sponsors as always. Motion Rich Panel Revo Prescient and after Cell Sam okay, I just sent my entire team an email about this training that Motion's putting on and you guys are going to block your calendars for this. Every operator I talk to is thinking about how to build lean teams and become more efficient. And AI is an obvious part of this. We talk about it on the marketing operators all the time because they can automate timec consuming parts of the creative strategy process. And Motion, our sponsor, they're doing a live virtual event series with five sessions on how to adapt timeless advertising principles to the new era of AI first ad production. This is their legendary virtual event series make ads that convert. Last year over 11,000 DTC marketers registered for it and it is going to be a banger. Listen to these topics and just an elite cast of the best of the best experts. You'll hear from names like Alex Cooper, Jimmy Slagel, Jacob Pasell, Dara Denny, Kelly Rocklin, Mirella Crespi and Barry Hot A few of the topics that they're going to go over. Using AI for deep customer research Advanced prompting techniques for ads that don't look AI generated making sure your AI ads actually sell physical products using AI actors and voice models for scalable UGC building a lean AI augmented team of 2025. Here's one session that really caught my eye. It features Kelly Rocklin and she is going deep into using AI to make scalable UGC with AI actors and voiceovers without it sounding cringe. How to spin up high volume messaging tests using AI agents Super Interested in what she's learned here. Expand on what already works without replacing the human spark that makes it work in the first place. How to test creative like a craftsperson, not a chaos agent. How to build internal creative testing systems for your AI creative, just to name a few. It's going to be really, really good. Highly recommend registering. If you want to check it out, go register for this. It's free, and it's five total sessions. You can register at Motion App.com forward slash, make-ads-that-convert. That is Motion App.com forward slash, Make-ads-that-convert all right, let's get into it.

[Cody]

So just quickly, before you start, you said, yeah, I think we're going to see. Like, I've talked to so many brands, and I saw someone tweet about it yesterday. Everybody's thinking about doing sweepstakes. I think we might see, like, 12 in the back half of the year. Like, like, there my only.

[Connor]

It's not so much a concern.

[Cody]

I think there's a lot of room for sweepstakes, but, like, yeah, August and September might just. Every D2C brand that listens to this podcast might be running a sweepstakes. I'm letting everybody know now.

[Connor]

Well, what I'm excited about is I want to see how these sweepstakes come to life. These things are not easy to pull off. There's a lot of details. There's a lot of things to figure out. I think there's. There's a lot of talented marketers and brands out there that are going to do a really, really, really great job. But, yeah, these things are hard to do. There's a lot of. A lot of things to take care of.

[Cody]

Totally. And that's kind of, like, the purpose of the episode, Right? Because I think some people will be like, oh, we're just going to throw up a $50,000 cash prize and, like, we have a sweepstakes now, which we've never done, like, that low touch of a. Of a sweepstakes. So I don't know what the incremental value is. There's probably some. But, like, I've also gotten the sense from the few that I've seen over the last, like, year, I've gotten the sense, like, they weren't as commercially successful as someone might think. And I think that just comes down to, like, how intense and comprehensive is execution. Like, I think the value is there if you line it up. And we're hoping to cover that in this episode.

[Connor]

Yeah. All right, let's dig into it. So all right, before we go into kind of like the step the things to like I've kind of organized this, like what are the questions you need to answer? Like if you know the questions to answer then you'll the, the the kind of execution will take care of itself. Right. So before we get too deep into that though like fundamentally going, moving back high level, like why do a sweep stakes?

[Cody]

Totally. So well I'll start and then I think you guys probably have similar reasons, maybe some differing ones. For us we launched it, it's become August and part of September. So it's like a 45 day period for us that is a off peak period. So we really had nothing going on. We have our anniversary sale in Q1. We have Father's Day in Q2 which we just talked about. We've obviously got the holidays in Q4. So we were figuring out ways this was back in 20. It was the pandemic 2021 I guess maybe 2020. How can we make something exciting in August and September so like making a moment of what otherwise there's really no seasonal reason to be purchasing wallets. That's one, two. We like that it's non promotional so like we could theoretically just run another big sale in August, call it you know, back to school or whatever. But we like that this is a non promotional way to drive incentive to purchase. And then three is like I do think it's a really cool brand building opportunity. We run three big sales out of the year that doesn't include like prime sales or Mother's Day sales. So it's like let's, let's create some sort of large moment where there's a story involved. For us it's about like being prepared, being rugged. We always have this like kind of off roading outdoor theme. We kind of have an adventure adjacent lifestyle brand. So we can just lean into that particularly hard in this period. And it's. I think it's a refreshing way to break up what's otherwise. You know your basic E commerce, marketing and sales strategies. So that's how I would describe it. Anything different on your guys end?

[Connor]

I think, I think a lot of the same. I mean we run ours right in between like right after Labor Day or a week or two after Labor Day is when it launches. October is our slowest month of the year without a like not even close. So we are definitely creating like a new moment by running it. Then it's also like we're trying to. I don't really like doing like hey bfcm's coming opt in to be the first to know. Like, I, I, I like building a list through the sweepstakes a lot more than that because there's a purchase incentive. So that list is a lot more qualified and you can see that. And like, just looking at our list performance side by side by side, the sweepstakes looks just as good or better and in a variety of metrics compared to our evergreen offers. So definitely trying to like build that funnel as we head into bfcm. Definitely a big brand moment. I mean, that was like the most important thing in our entire sweepstakes last year was how we branded it.

[Cody]

Oh, maybe you could quickly, just quickly describe, like, what was the premise of your guys's sweepstakes last year?

[Connor]

Yeah, so our sweepstakes last year was, it was called Gordon's Golden Ticket to London. So basically the winner got, you know, basically the most bougie trip to London you could imagine. They got a first class flight, they're staying at the Savoy. I think we hooked them up with like three or four Michelin star dinners. We gave them a bunch of cash just to spend in London. They got to go to a cooking academy at Bishop's Gate. So it's just like this big fun brand moment that like, people want to engage with. Gordon Ramsay did a, did a launch post for us that got like over 10 million impressions and like tens of thousands of traffic to our site. So it's definitely, definitely this is big brand building moment as well. But I'd say the, the biggest piece is the timing. Like, we're not going to launch this in spring when we already have a bunch of tent pole moments.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

The other big piece is exactly what you said about having an offer that's not like a discount, it's not a dollar off value, it's not a percentage off value, it's an offer. But you're still paying full price for our products. We're not discounting during that time period, except for the four days of Prime Day 2. And like, we were very, very strategic about how we merchandised our products because the other thing we wanted to do is get some juice going behind on cookware. And we were able to do that with how we set it up. So it's, it's really just to create a tent pole moment. I think to summarize, like to create a tent pole moment in a time when you would not have as much growth or as much revenue or as much engagement as you, as you otherwise would you layer in a sweepstakes. Great. Now you've created a moment, I think. What does Taylor call it? The Peaks theory.

[Cody]

Basically four Peaks.

[Connor]

Right. So you're creating a new peak, basically. Cool. Should we get into some more of the details?

[Cody]

Let's do it.

[Connor]

All right, so I think the first question that all brands should be asking themselves is what are you offering the winner? And this should really be like congruent with your brand. I've seen like, I've seen brands do this where it's not. It's like if you're a health and wellness brand and you're offering like a $70,000 car is the giveaway. I'm like, well, that doesn't really line up with like your products and who you are as a brand and like your ethos. Like, why not offer a, like a wellness retreat to some place in the world that's like known for yoga or health and wellness or whatever it is? So I think that's the big thing to answer first. Like, what are we offering the winner? Is it congruent with our brand and what our customer wants and like what our products are all about? We offered a trip to London with dinners at some of the best restaurants in the world. We offer premium kitchenware products. That's like a very one to one, Connor. What did you guys, or what do you guys offer? And like, what's the thinking behind what you offer to the winner and kind of like your brand ethos?

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. So our brand mission, what we've been describing, what we've been saying for the last year or so, is to create innovative, functional products designed for every day that kind of has, like I said earlier, kind of like preparedness implications. Like I think people want RFID blocking. It's more secure. It's. It's designed for life like it is ready for anything. So I think we lean into that particularly hard. So for the last four years, we've been giving away mostly off road trucks. First year was like a souped up wrangler. And then the last three years we gave, we partnered with Hennessy, which is this like legendary Texas automotive house, to do these souped up Raptors and Broncos. And those are like $150,000 trucks. And then last year was really cool.

[Connor]

$150,000 truck.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think like 125, something like that. This is like $100,000 truck with like at least $25,000 worth of aftermarket parts and, and labor.

[Connor]

Yeah, so I just totaled my car. So maybe market. Yeah, I'm in market, man. Maybe. Maybe I got to wait till the Red sweepstakes. Yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. So we've been giving away these, like, big trucks. And then last year was the first year. One of our goals was to just create more discourse. So we gave someone the option to choose between a Hennessey velociraptor or a cybertruck, which, like, cybertrucks were the. They were. They owned the zeitgeist last year. So we were. We. We got one very early. We got one of the foundation series cybertrucks, and we gave people that ch. And basically people spent the whole time. And that was also cool because there's like this very, like off road gas powered truck versus the like, futuristic, absurdly futuristic looking electric cybertruck, which I think from a brand perspective, we can kind of lean into either. So it was cool to kind of play off of that juxtaposition.

[Connor]

So it was a. This or. Right. Last year, like, it was the cybertruck. And so what did the winner choose?

[Cody]

The cash.

[Connor]

The cash. The cash, yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. So that's. I mean, I guess we'll get into it just a second, but there's always a cash prize, so that's always kind of an alternative.

[Connor]

So we. We actually didn't do that. We, like, cash was part of the sweepstakes, but we didn't actually say, like, you can choose. You can choose the winnings and the cash or you can just like, take all the value in cash. Is that. We really wanted to make sure the person, like, did the experience. We could capture it. What's your guys thinking? Been behind, like, the cash versus the Experience.

[Cody]

There's. I think there's a lot of legal implications and maybe it's different with, like, the experience and the fact that there's cash involved. But, like, we couldn't force someone to win the truck and then have to pay taxes on it. Like, that would kind of suck. So I think you need some sort of, like, comparable alternative.

[Connor]

But yeah, we did a tax offset, which I think is why we were able to do it. Like, we had to offer the tax offset as part of it. So maybe that was the. The caveat that. Okay, sweet. All right. Well, I think that's. I think that's a good covering of, like, the offer. Thinking so important, everything starts there. You can't, like, brand the campaign without knowing what you're giving away. All the, all the headlines, all, like, the design treatments, everything follows that. So. So that's the next question, right? Is like, how are you branding this campaign? I just talked about it in the intro with how we're doing with our sales, like our Mother's Day sale and our Memorial Day sale, they are branded very differently. I think that's very important. So people just like, instinctively feel and know that this is something special, it's something different. It's not going to hit as hard if you just, like, write new copy on your kind of evergreen website. So, like, talk me through, like, how do you think about naming the campaign? How do you think about, like, the design treatments that you're giving to the campaign? And, like, what's the. What's, like, the creative exploration of that? Can you talk through some of that stuff?

[Cody]

Yeah, good question. That, and this is something that I talk about a lot. I'm trying to go back over the last couple years. We've always done a pretty good job of it. It feels you have a larger opportunity to create something that is, like, visually distinctive and creating kind of like a design guide so that you can spread that out across channels and it feels cohesive in a way that I think you can be a little bit looser with, like, you know, a Memorial Day sale or something. Right. Like, this is just such a. It is such a. There's so many components to this campaign. It's like, okay, you have to introduce the brand, you have to introduce the premise of the sweepstakes, you want to introduce the products, you want to have some sort of call to action. It can live in so many different places between partnership ads and websites. And, you know, we had fixtures in some of our wholesale partners and like, I'd love to do an out of home campaign this year. So it's like, it feels like it can be pulled across many more channels than you'd want to for a typical, like, sales campaign or something. And because of that, I think, like, the. The graphic treatment is particularly important. So that's what we've just focused on. How do we. How do we create a design language so that it is distinctive and recognizable and can be cohesive across many channels? That comes down to, like, cool fonts, cool colors. It's also a way that you can, like, build equity in something that we have at least at Ridge, like anniversary. So if we're going to do this every year for the last four years and for the next hundred, like, let's do it in a way that people will recognize over time, which.

[Connor]

So do you have consistency in your branding then with your sweeps? Because that's something we're talking about this year is like, do we want to keep that Gordon's golden ticket theme? Like, should this now be Gordon's golden ticket to Italy or golden. Gordon's golden ticket to wherever. Like, do you guys. Are you switching up the branding or, or. Yeah. What's, what's your thing?

[Cody]

So we don't have like, we don't have a really cute name for it. Like we call it the Ridge Summer sweepstakes. The consistency is in the trucks so far. Like, okay, we're giving away like trucks or like really expensive cars every year. Colors, fonts, those things have not remained consistent. I don't think that needs to be. But it's just, how do you. If you're creating a moment, you want it to feel distinctive visually. And if you're doing that every. At the back half of every Q3 forever, like you're gonna build up credibility and recognizability, I think.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. Your consumers waiting for it at this point.

[Cody]

Yeah. You know, and this is like a little bit of a brief aside, but it's a big period for us. Like we've been, we've. It's become like a large commercial opportunity. I think if we do it right, it can be like a massive thing. Like I was, I've told my team for multiple years now. I'm like, I think if we can crack it, like, I want this to be like McDonald's Monopoly where it's like, you know, McDonald's Monopoly's back, people are participating. It's like by far their most successful campaign. So that's kind of like, like I said, kind of an aside. But like it works for us currently and I think if we build the mechanics correctly and the recognizability and the integrity or the credibility, then this thing could really, really pack a punch in that Q3 period. Foreign it's been a year since we migrated to Rich panel and I had no idea how impactful the right customer service tool could be. Here's what our customer service team has achieved since making the move. One, Our order volume continues to rise, but our support tickets have not. Our self Service portal helps 47% of website visitors help themselves immediately without having to contact their agents. 2. Their AI powered social media moderator is awesome. We continue to spend a ton on meta as a part of our marketing mix and it flags and replies to thousands of comments automatically to help us make the most of our ad spend. Like many of you, I've been cautiously skeptical about certain automation and AI use cases, but our support quality hasn't dipped at all. It's actually gone up. We're at an all time high of 96% customer satisfaction score. All this and it's still 50% cheaper than other platforms. No limits on AI usage or tickets and fair, predictable pricing each month. With market and tariff uncertainty, consumer confidence is in the gutter. You cannot afford bad customer experience or overpaying for older software tools. And migration is super simple. They handle your data import agent training and automation setup. You only need two or three calls and you're live in 14 days. They guarantee a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back. So it's a no brainer. If you want happier customers and a happier finance team, head over to richpanel.comdemo to book a demo today.

[Connor]

Do you think that you get to that, like McDonald's level of like that Monopoly campaign just by year on year on year on year. Consistency and like over time it's just going to continue to grow and grow and grow until you hit this like, this like runaway point where now it's like, holy crap, this, this is the eighth year and like you've just like really blown this thing up. Like that just has to happen over years and years of doing it and growing it. Or like, how do you think you get there?

[Cody]

Yeah, I think time is one component. I do think, and we'll talk about this later on, but like some of the gamification, the mechanics, how are you activating channels? Like, I think there's still a lot of value for us to unlock there. That's probably going to drive the needle more than simply doing the same thing every year. Like, I think us improving the way that we execute on it is, is for sure more important.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right, so that's, that's the second piece. So we got. What are you offering the winner? How are you giving this? You said use the, you said design language. Is that what you called it? Yeah, I like that. All right, so what's the design language? How are you like aesthetically making this thing feel different, feel special? All right, now we're getting, we're going to start, we're starting high level. We're getting more and more granular. Right. So campaign gamification. You shouldn't run a cam, you shouldn't run a sweepstakes just to run a sweepstake. You shouldn't run any campaign just to run a, run a campaign. Right? Like at the end of the day you need to be aligning something fun and cool to the consumer. But it has to be driving your, the campaign is a drive for your business objectives. Right? Like, how are you setting up Your sweepstakes to do that, like this is arguably maybe even more important than what the offer is. We wanted to drive just this is not the only way we structured our. Our. Our sweepstakes and how people could enter. But one example is like, we really wanted to make a push in some of our new. Non. Not new, but just some of our non cookware categories, both existing and new. So how do we do that? Well, we gamify it. In order to do that, we say, hey, you're getting two entries for a dollar spent in knives, you're getting three entries for a dollar spent in aprons, you're only getting one entry for a dollar spent in cookware. And if you look at our non cookware growth rates during our sweepstakes, like, they're way higher than they were outside of the sweepstakes period. So we set our gamification up very specifically and strategically to drive forward a business objective. It wasn't just, hey, come opt in to our email list, which is fun and all. And that is a. That is one of our objectives. But like, we're an econ brand. We're trying to sell products. We're trying to drive revenue. So how did you. How do you guys think about gamification of the sweepstakes in terms of how people are getting entries and how is that driving forward your, like, specific business objectives?

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. So like, a quick step back. Let's just describe like the simplest form of. Of a sweepstakes. The way I've seen most of them work. And you know, Ridge has an. Has many examples. Hexcloud has an example from last year. I really like. I've sent you some of these. I think forged 4 by 4 is a San Die company that just runs sweepstakes. They do a great job. There's one here in Utah called 880. They do a good job. And basically the way that they work is, you know, you can enter for free in some capacity. And then let's just say for every dollar you spend, you get one entry. And then what you're describing is like, additional gamification to like, shape demand around what you want to drive in the business. For you guys, it was like non cookware. So you had two x entries. For every dollar you spent, you got two entries on the hex mill. Correct?

[Connor]

Yep.

[Cody]

Yeah. So. So we do a similar thing. Like, we have focused on. We launch new products within the sweep 6. You get bonus entries on our new products. In years past, we've had Hennessy wallets paired with the Hennessy truck. And last year we had a cyber wallet and you got 4x entries on those. We also did like, we'll do 2x entries on everyday carry kits because we want to be driving up order values and things like that. Pretty basic stuff. And it can, it can change. I mean, we have rings and some other things. I will also say, I do think an important piece is having a, like a. You want your sweepstakes to be easily understood. I think people can overdo it sometimes with like all these crazy entries all the time. And it's different across different categories and it's like at some point you just gotta like make it simple for someone to understand. So we do that same thing. I'll list a couple other forms of gamification that we've done. So we run a sweepstakes for 45 days. We found over the years that like, that's a pretty long period of time. Our very first sweepstakes, we had a great start, we had a great finish and then there was like 12 days in between that are like a little stale. And that was for like, let's call it a 30 day campaign. So you can imagine that stale period's like even longer for 45 days. So we've introduced these bonus entry periods where for 24, 48, 72 hours, you'll get 2x entries on everything. And that's, that is, that's the equivalent of running a sale throughout the sweepstakes. You're generating all this intent. People are interested in what's going on. They might want to win the truck they haven't purchased yet. If they get 2x entries this weekend, they might convert. And we've typically seen that like drive performance throughout the sweepstakes and kind of like smooth out the excitement of it. So I think that's a key one. We have a couple different forms of like variability which I think are cool. So we do bonus entries on a mystery wallet and you typically are able to get a discount on the wallet. We are typically able to like move through the, the inventory that we have too much of or that we want to increase sell through on. So it like makes total sense from a supply perspective. On our end, it's a, there's a promotional aspect or a value aspect to consumers and you get this variability and bonus entries. And it's like, it's like the one time of year that we really do it. Um, similar idea. We do this like we tried this last year and I think we could better implement it. But we call them bonus crates where if you're checking out with a certain order value, you can get you, you'll get between 25 and a thousand entries and then that's revealed to you in checkout.

[Connor]

Oh, that's cool.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's like a loop box.

[Connor]

How do you, how do you select it? Who, what is it? Like, what do you have set up to?

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

So if you spend. What's the threshold actually? Is it like 300 bucks or something?

[Cody]

I forget what the threshold was last year it was like maybe 150 plus or something. We have a pretty low AOV, 150 bucks. You get the bonus crate. It's revealed to you afterwards. Technically it was a. You know, they have apps that are like mystery products. They'll have Shopify apps that allow you to do that. You could set up a number of products. You map those all to one other product. And then when someone purchases this, like, I don't think it's technically a digital product, but when they purchase that one, it's like remapped to something else. So basically what we did was we, we created a bunch of different Shopify products for 25, 50, 100, 200, 500,000, assigned different weights. You can say if they purchase the mystery crate, then you're going to get assigned at certain percentages to like each of these entry values and then once they check out that those values are actually revealed to them. So we kind of like hacked this like a Shopify mystery product into being this like mystery entry product and then use that to incentivize order value or purchasing in certain periods.

[Connor]

Okay.

[Cody]

And I think I, I've probably said this on a previous episode. We're being very experimental and this was like, this was an example of it last year. I also can't help but think E Com brands will just get more gamified over time. Whether it's in or outside of sweepstakes. It's just like figure out way to do whether it's like loyalty points or like some interesting way of doing referrals or getting access to limited edition products. Like, I just think we see that probably 10x over time. So I won't be at all surprised when shopping from Ecom Brands doesn't feel more like playing overwatch or something.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100. I mean we're, we don't have a loyalty program, but we've spent some time thinking about it and we have no plans to have any sort of discounting in our loyalty program. But having it be entirely experience driven, like if you are in this tier, you're getting like a custom apron that you can't get anywhere else. Like you're getting a gold plated hex mail. You're getting like a gift card to, I don't know, a nice restaurant or something like that. Like 100%. We're not, we're thinking about it that way. What other ways do you, do you have any like visions in your head or like examples of how you think just outside of a sweepstakes? Just like Evergreen Shopping will become gamified.

[Cody]

Well, you know what I was gonna bring up at a later thing. Did you see what True Classic is doing here? Let me. I could even share my screen quickly. So I think this is super, super cool. And I think we've been talking about something like this for our sweepstakes. All right, so here's Ryan Bartlett, I believe, CEO, maybe president, co founder, True Classic. Great brand. They launched this thing where if you're signed in, you can play like Pac man and you could play, I think you could play it every day or maybe they do this once a week or something. You can play Pac Man. Score as high as you can. It closes in 24 hours. The top 10 scores get $50 in store credit. You only get one life to make account. You get to play one time for the chance to win $50 in store credit. They give away $500 in store credit in this 24 hour period. But you could imagine this happening like every day or every week. And it's like, I guess it's not the gamification of buying, but it's just like it's, it's gamifying your interaction with a brand. Like in this case, literally you're playing a game. But I think this is super, super cool and is a great way for like whether I'm buying or not. Like, yeah, I'll come in and play Pac man once a week to like maybe win some free T shirts or whatever. I think it's a really cool example and I think we see, I think we say see significantly more of it over time.

[Connor]

That's really cool. What I like about the this example is it's not a, like, it's not gamification just to be gamification. Like there is a purchase component here. You are getting 50 in store credit. So you are like, by baking that in, like attracting higher intent. I would bet that people that come in and get that 50 in store credit are, are spending a lot more than $50. There's. I'm going to share my screen real quick and share one that I liked recently. So Liquid IV is like partnering with F1. So they have this interesting, this interesting thing they're doing where. Let's see everybody.

[Cody]

Connor's typing in his email live. It's connorxcloud.com if you ever need to email him.

[Connor]

So now I go in. So it's kind of like a quiz funnel. So I'm like choosing my car. Yeah, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do lemon lime popsicle, firecracker. I gotta answer a few questions. All right. All the above. Yada yada yada. All right now, now let's race. And there's this like F1 race going on here, dude.

[Cody]

Awesome.

[Connor]

So this is kind of fun.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

You know stuff.

[Cody]

Absolutely.

[Connor]

Stuff like this.

[C]

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[Cody]

Actually this ties nicely into my second point around. I don't know if this is considered gamification but like obviously as you're putting together the rules you can, you get entries for spending dollars, you can give bonus entries buying certain things and you. So you shape demand around what you want to do as a business. I do think I have. We have multiple ways of getting free entries in order. I think priority number one is to just lock in like cheap and free distribution. Right. So you mentioned it's a big opportunity to generate leads going into Q4 and it's like yeah, you get emails at like a 2 to 3x higher rate. You get SMS is at a much higher rate. We're looking at doing like potentially wallet passes this year where we can send push notifications like how do you just simply get people to if they really want to opt in for free, how can you get them to do that easily and then have free and cheap ways to contact them in the future? I think is while also I think remaining simple. Like I said, I really don't want it to become like spammy like and you definitely run that risk. But balancing those things between like high quality owned channels I think is a, is a, is an important piece of like constructing the rules.

[Connor]

Yeah and I think, I think there's a like intentional merchandising of entries is really important as well. Like if you go and you looked at our Sweepstakes it was 15 entries for an email, 20 entries for an SMS subscription. So you can get what 35 entries without purchasing. We'll add in more non purchase ways to get entries this year like you know, go follow us on these channels, whatever, join our Facebook community. But then you're getting a dollar or an one entry for every dollar spent. In cookware. Our most popular product is the 12B set. So we are, we're if we were to say hey you know an email is 200 entries, 300 entries. Well all of a sudden the quality of that list is going to be way, way, way lower. Like our, our conversion rate on our opt ins was just as good as a lot of our evergreen opt ins because of how we merchandise it. So I think that's really important is like make sure you're incent again, make sure you're incentivizing to. Yes, it's important for brands to grow their list, but the reason brands want to grow their list is to get them to order eventually. So make sure you're not like incentivizing low intent opt in by not having higher merchandising of people buying your products I think is really, really important.

[Cody]

Yeah. Because we talked about this a bit last year. We really don't think of it as a lead gen. It's not a lead gen first campaign for us like we are. It is a direct response campaign. We're able to generate revenue in the period we're running the sweepstakes. You guys going into it were like a little split, but it sounds like it ended up being people converted it just as high of a rate. So you captured a bunch of leads but like you drove revenue in the period that you were running the. The campaign.

[Connor]

Yeah, like our, our opt in to order conversion rate on the sweepstakes pop up was actually a little bit better than the offer that we were running right before it, which was like, like a second order incentivized offer. So it's like great high intent person, average first purchase value is actually higher. Lifetime revenue pretty similar like revenue per email, pretty similar. Repurchase rate better as some of them. So yeah, it was, it was pretty on par. Which was the big thing we were looking at here. Host sweepstakes is just like making sure that this list quality was not just absolute garbage. You know, one thing is. I'm.

[Cody]

Yeah, one thing I'll say quickly. This was a lesson that we learned because this is another thing where it's like this would be two years ago when we went into the period testing this, but like just like a pure lead gen goal for certain campaigns. Like what would happen if we were just driving to. If we were like capturing leads from Facebook or driving to a page that was like mostly about capturing leads, could we drive down our cost per. Obviously the quality is going to go down and that's the point that you made. Quality is going to drop significantly if that's really what you're optimizing for. But could we get them at such a low rate that like it would end up penciling and could we grow our email and SMS list like, like really quickly and really affordably? So we tried that for a bit and we just found like the quality was so low that it didn't make sense. We learned that within the first like 10 days of the campaign, which is Was a bit of a bummer because I thought that would be one way to hit, you know, McDonald's monopoly scale is if you could, if you could get just massive lead gen, like top of funnel sort of strategies to pencil, then that would be a great way to do it. But we at least so far have not been able to do that.

[Connor]

Yeah, we're. We're hoping to take some of the learnings we found with our non purchase conversion campaigns in the last few months, which have been incremental and at a, at a solid profitability clip as well, and apply that to next year's sweepstakes. So we can ensure that, yeah, we have our purchase conversion campaigns in with our sweepstakes ads, but we also have our like upper funnel like view content campaigns that are presumably going to reach more net new people and get more people into the funnel versus last year, which was like, it seemed to be a great way to convert people that are already in the funnel at a higher profitability clip than our evergreen ads. So that's something we're gonna, we're gonna try more next year is like what is running reach campaigns, view content campaigns, all these non purchase conversion campaigns. Hopefully we'll have a few more of those proven out by the time sweepstakes rolls around and we can have a good quiver of like purchase conversion and non purchase conversion.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. 100%.

[Connor]

All right. I think that's a good, that's a good one on gamification. All right, number four here. Are you a law abiding brand? There are important 1.

[Cody]

We could have moved this up a little bit. Let me quickly. We just talked about a bunch of very complex rules that I. It would be bad if you just sat down and wrote them on a document and then started running a sweepstakes. So run through the importance of being law abiding.

[Connor]

Yeah, there's a lot of rules around sweepstakes, guys. A lot like, and things that you would never think of. So you're likely going to want to hire a third party resource to help you draft the rules. So they draft the rules. They do. Like each state has different nuances. Like you have to do bonding in different states. I don't even know what the hell that means.

[Cody]

So I, I looked into it before the episode because I was like I should be a more of an authority on the matter. But basically I think it's New York and Florida are the ones that I were looking into that are the strictest. Where they want you to put a bond against the prize value and Then they want you to provide a list of the winners because they just want to guarantee that if you're running the sweepstakes in the state of Florida or New York, that one, if one of their constituents, you know, residents, wins that they know it from the list and they can guarantee that they get that prize money. So they have the bond against it as like a safety measure. So they don't want you running any sweepstakes without doing this bonding, which you should pay someone to figure out for you.

[Connor]

Yeah, don't do it yourself. You're going to waste all your time. You want to be focused on the. On the marketing of it. They're not that expensive either. Like, for how much revenue and value we got out of the sweepstakes, it was, I think, a pretty fair rate. And then they handle.

[Cody]

Extremely fair. Yeah, I don't know the number, but like under 10 grand, which I think is just a bit to have it to run a buttoned up, like, multimillion dollar campaign is a really good value.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. And, like, so there's all the back end stuff. There's also front end stuff. Like, hey, you need to link out to the rules in these different places. Like, they'll just help you figure out all that stuff. And then you can focus on the fun stuff about. About marketing. So I don't have much more to say about that. I don't know much about it because we hired this third party agency and I just did what they told us to do. Anything else you want to add on the rules or should we keep going?

[Cody]

Yeah, well, one thing I would say is, well, did you give the name of the legal partner we've both used?

[Connor]

I did not. But we could.

[Cody]

We could. Because if whenever anybody asks, I refer them to Martin Kane, that's like, that's who we've used four years in a row. That's everybody's question is like, well, how do I do it? Rather than googling, we're giving you the answer here. So I'm a fan of Martin Kane. The one thing I'll call out, which I think is interesting is, you know, we're using the phrase sweepstakes. A lot of people use giveaway. And like, I was looking into, like, I know you can't call it a giveaway. First thing Martin Kane will tell you is like, it's not a giveaway. Giveaway is just a marketing term. Sweepstakes is like a legal term and has a framework. So you have to say winners are selected at random. So someone like Martin Kane is Actually selecting the winners for you, which is helpful. Randomized above board, all of that. No purchase necessary is required in order to enter or win. Martin Kane does stuff like you have to be able to receive mail in entries. And so, like, Martin Kane will, like, provide the address and, like, accept those mail in entries for you. So you don't have to, like, send them to your office or whatever. And then. Yeah, I've got here. Must comply with federal and state laws. That's bonding or registration in some states. So they, like, do all of that, which is extremely important.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, Martin Kane. They make it easy. Hit them up if you're. If you're running a sweepstakes. All right, moving on here. I'm actually gonna. Would you want to go through the funnel building or do you want to talk about entries and, like, tracking awareness first?

[Cody]

Let's do that.

[Connor]

The ladder.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Yeah. Cool. So this is. This is a fun one. Luckily, Connor and his team were kind of like a design partner with Revo this year in building out a lot of this net new functionality. So we were able to, like, also implement a lot of the things that they had built for you guys. But part of the. Part of, like, one of the most important parts of a sweepstakes is a, like, just tracking the entries. Like, you cannot, as the brand, choose the winner. The third part, like, you're. You're the legal partner has to choose the winner or someone else has to choose the winner. So it's unbiased. I believe it's like, Martin Kane will choose the winner. So you need to track entries, of course. But maybe even more importantly is like, everyone's had the experience where they were, like, buying from a brand that they buy from a lot, and it was like their fifth order, and then they're in their car and they're like, oh, wow, like, free gift. And you get this gift that because you're part of the loyalty program that you had no clue you were a part of, and you're like, that had no input on me buying, but I bought anyways. I think it's really important to. It's really important to make it easy for your customers to know how many entries they have. So, again, you want to incentivize as many entries as possible. If you can say, hey, you have a thousand. And if you buy this thing, you're going to be at 1400. Like, you're. It's the gamification piece. Like, you can't really gamify something unless you're actually showing someone points like you wouldn't play a video game without seeing how you're progressing in the video game. Like, that's a huge component that's very, very important. So we spent a lot of time, I know Rich spent a lot of time thinking about, like, how do we, how do we make it really easy for someone that has done something that has given them entries to make it known how many entries they've had, they have, and like, what things they've done to get those entries. So Connor, can you talk about like, how you guys built out your marketing stack and like, what technology you use to. Yeah, totally. Awareness around this.

[Cody]

Yeah. So we've talked about all these like, and frankly you hear the list that Ridge is doing and it's like, it's definitely. We're past the point of being simple. So imagine being a consumer and you're getting multiple products that have multiple different entries. You just signed up for email, sms, maybe you downloaded a wallet pass. Like there are so many different ways that you could have generated entries. And honestly, for the first couple of years of our, our sweepstakes, you check out and you just not know exactly how many you had. You could know that you have a lot, but there was no like, clarity and no assurance that you in fact did have what you expected. So we were looking at ways to solve that. And this is the sort of thing where I'm like, why would any E. Com brand ever need this functionality? And this is like, this was a couple of years ago. So like, there's not that many brands running sweepstakes. There's not. There's not. There's not like an out of the box Shopify app that like tracks sweepstakes entries. It's just like largely unexplored. So we were talking to people to try to better figure out how we could do it. And what I realized was loyalty platforms are like, not all that different, right? Loyalty programs will give you points for certain purchases or certain behaviors following on social, etc. So loyalty programs have this like ledger attached to their customer database that says like, hey, this person [e-mail] like has these amount of entries. Me just doxing you a couple times.

[Connor]

So hard. I've already got 500 new emails.

[Cody]

Yeah, funny, funny. So loyalty programs already have this like, ledger. So I was like, hey, can we just like repurpose this ledger to, instead of tracking loyalty points that you can redeem for store credit, can we just track sweepstakes? And then that becomes like our source of truth for how many entries A given person has. And that's when we started talking to a number of loyalty platforms and moved forward with Revo to like build out the functionality in order to do that, which was really just kind of like reconfiguring something that they already did. And it was like my favorite part of the this week's take. I thought it was really cool the way we came across the solution. The fact something already existed and then knowing how many entries you're getting, like, as you're checking out, and then you could log into your account on ridge.com, see how many you have, I think is really awesome. And I actually have another stat here because I think we saw a lot of success with this. It's just a better experience of being a customer during the sweepstakes period, which we have for years now been trying to improve our ltv. And I just think like, square one is just like, let's just make it a better experience to be a customer. So let me drag this one over. This was a tweet I. I said last year. Last year was the first year. We did a number of different things for retention, but the signed in shopping is one of them. And the thesis was, hey, if you're a customer, you know how many entries you have, you have clarity, you have assurance, you're excited about it, etc. Etc. Does that clarity make you more likely to purchase? And like, this was not a scientific experiment by any means. But you can see some of our data here. Our under 30 day repeat purchase rate during sweeps, so someone buys on day one and buys again within 30 days, was 75% higher during the sweepstakes than the average for the year and then year over year because again, obviously it's going to be. Or not obviously, but there may just be a chance that it is naturally higher during sweepstakes. But then if you look year over year, we increase 45%, which is really cool. So like, we put in a lot of effort to. Once we get a customer during this period, how do we make it a great experience and how do we incentivize them as much as possible, not even incentivize them, make them as comfortable as possible to purchase and excited to purchase within this period again. And we saw like massive wins here year over year. And I think some of that ties back to the ledger or the. The ability to track and see entry. So it's an important part of our tech stack that like, I have been geeking out about. I am super excited to tell you about our newest Sponsor Revo. They are a retention platform for Shopify plus brands. They start with Signed in shopping via accounts and get into loyalty referrals, memberships, cashback, much more. They're constantly launching new features. I personally am super excited about the future of signed in shopping for E commerce brands. And really accounts being the beachhead for just awesome loyalty and customer experiences and Revo playing a part in making it a better experience to be a customer of your brand. And Ridge isn't the only brand using Revo today. Hexclad, true classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather Goods Princess Polly Kitsch Pit Viper and hundreds of more brands are using Repo on their Shopify plus accounts. That is like a billion dollars in gmv. That is a insane list of brands to be listing off. Stuart Chaney, founder led. He's all over Twitter. He's hands on in Slack. Great team to work with. I also think they're kind of the next wave of SaaS. You'll see Stuart talking on Twitter about being incredibly AI oriented in their development and they're shipping better features faster than ever before. So excited to see what comes of Revo. I suggest you check it out at Revo IO that's R I V O I O.

[Connor]

We ended up then taking that and doing something similar. So we had like, we had like a banner at the top of our website that would follow you everywhere the same way like an announcement bar does. We just added in like a sec, a second announcement bar that was like you know, log in to see your entries again. You'd click log in. It would take you like you enter your email. Revo just emails you a code, you input the code and then you're in logged in state. And then it would say you have 1500 entries right at the top and it would follow you around the entire time. And then the second touch point we had was actually on the landing page. So we had a, a landing page experience as well to like opt in to create your account and then that in that experience you would actually see the itemized like what you've done to get entry. So the banner was like your total entries, you got 2,000 entries. And then on the landing page in the logged in state was all right, you bought a seven piece set, you bought a, a 12 inch pan during a 2x blitz period on cookware, you've opted into both email and SMS itemized which is just like a really fun, cool way to be like oh, here's exactly what I've done. So I think that's it. Yeah, Revo is so innovative. Like it was really cool to see them take that kind of existing technology and, and plug it in for like a front end sweepstakes awareness and, and.

[Cody]

Yeah 100% and you can imagine. That's why I'm excited. Last year we were talking to loyalty platforms about also more gamification because there's, there's platforms doing some cool stuff. We didn't implement any sort of game last year but you can imagine having like a like the true classic Pac man game and for 45 days we're getting people to log in every day or every week to play the game. They see their entries like that's the sort of experience that I think will be just be really sticky and lead to like habitual actions and like we'll just get more people bought in. We'll be top of mind more frequently. So that's what I think the, that's what my vision is for Ridge as well as like it's just where all sweepstakes I think will eventually trend and.

[Connor]

And like this is like this logged in state that we're talking about. We it was built for the sweepstakes but to your point earlier like this is that will be the launching off point for our eventual loyalty program. It's like cool. Like how do we build awareness about where people sit in our program based on their past, you know, order history with us. That's it right there. It's like let's get them to log in and then there's like some sort of logged in UX that says hey, you're in this tier because you've done this. Here's what you get, here's what you need to do to get to the next tier. Here's where you get for being in the next tier. Like it's all comes down to this logged in state. And I think that's something that is no duh. But it's like no, yeah, I don't see that many good loyalty experiences to have like a good logged in state 1000%.

[Cody]

So this was and I've probably said this at some point too because we started like our business is so customer acquisition oriented. Like most guys only own one wallet. Ours is guaranteed for life. There's not a lot of like natural repeat purchase rate. So we've been so customer acquisition heavy. But one of our biggest opportunities is like how can we get people to buy more from us. Like did the super duh sort of insight here. But we started with outside of sweepstakes. Like let's just make the experience of being a Ridge customer better. And I think, I think accounts and signed in shopping are like vastly under explored by brands. And I've been saying this since it's like two years now is we signed up for status originally, which status ended up going out of business later last year. But they had a bunch of big Shopify plus brands and I was like super bullish on them frankly. Frankly at first I was like, look, I just think, I think better accounts will be a key part of the retention stack. And we're like kind of talking Revo's book here. But I've thought this for like before I ever met Stuart was like just sign in more people. Make that experience of, of them being on your site better because they're signed in, you know who they are, you can serve them more relevant information and if those things are all better then they'll naturally begin repurchasing more from you. So you talk about the logged in state. It sounds kind of like a dumb moment. But like I think very few brands are really thinking about it within the like retention stack which I think is super, super key.

[Connor]

Yeah, I think, I think for us too especially because like there's so much content we can serve someone to have them get the most out of their knives or their cookware or their hex mounts. Like if I know if you're logged in and now I know that you've bought a seven piece set. Cool. Like maybe I'm, maybe I have like something like a fun content plug to like a knives use and care video or like knife tips and tricks from Nancy Silverton or, or if you bought, if I know you bought a double burner griddle. Like I can plug certain recipes that are using that product. Like it's just, it's an experience thing. At the end of the day it's just going to make it way better. And it's a personalization play.

[Cody]

And that's what's, that's what's also funny. And then we can move on because we've been on this point for a while. But like when people think about like on site loyalty, they just think about like your typical loyalty program which is like get points, refer your friends, whatever, like immediately. Just like it's kind of like blunt instrument like gamification. And I just think what we'll come around to from like an industry perspective is exactly what you described. Just hey, you know who these people are because they're signed in, they're on your store. Actually the best thing you can do for like true loyalty is literally just give them a great experience, give them the information that they need, the relevant videos, the easy access to order, tracking returns, whatever. It's just like make that great and people will buy from you more. And it's like that is not rocket science, but feels underappreciated.

[Connor]

Yeah. And it's like less brands saying, give me more, give me more, give me more. You're saying, hey, yeah, I want you to give me more. I want you to spend another 400 bucks. So you go from tier two to tier three. But you're probably more likely to do that if I've sent you a bunch of recipes and product using care and a bunch of stuff to help you get the most out of the things you've already done. Like now the brand is giving and providing free value and I think that customer is a lot more likely to be like, you know what? I do want to be in Hexclad's Tier 3 loyalty program because I'm getting really cool stuff out of tier two. Let's do it. All right, I'm going to go buy that product that maybe I wasn't going to buy otherwise 100%. All right, let's, maybe this will be the, the place we, we end here that we have a few more things. But I think this is, this could be a good wrap for, for like a part one. This is the fun stuff. I think this is what our, our listeners will, will really wanna, will really enjoy getting in the nitty gritty of. I know this was like the part I had the most fun with last year. Like how are you building funnels for your sweepstakes? So you have your, you have your offer, you have the branding, you know the actions people can take to get entries. Your rules are written. Like, how does the campaign come together? This is a cross channel activation. This isn't something you just build like a few ads for that lands on your homepage or a collection page or a product page. We've had sweepstakes touch points across literally every channel. You know, our core channels. At least it was across paid, it's across own media. It was, we had, we had touch points on literally every single part of our website from homepage to collection to product. We had our own landing page. There's mentions of it in the cart at checkout. There's post purchase emails saying here's how many points you got. Like every single touch point on site is, is messaging this activation that's going on. So like what, what, what things are you thinking about when it comes to funnel building, is there anything like I mentioned that it's a pretty cross channel activation. Is there any nuance or like think specific things you would recommend people think about.

[Cody]

I'm, I'm way more curious in your answer on this one frankly. For our experience so far has been how I often talk about the business. We've got like our general sweepstakes experience which is like product category agnostic. How are you landing on the homepage, learning about the brand, getting navigated to luggage or wallets or rings. And then we build out, and then we build out funnels for each of those categories. So like if you're clicking on a wallet ad, you're getting pushed to like a wallet specific funnel. And then we try to make that experience as easy as possible to like you land on the page. We really do try to get you opted into email, sms, you're on the page, you're shopping, make that as seamless as possible. And then we'll have some, some like subset funnels. Like we were just, I was just going over it. We're, we're preparing for it now. We had a ton of success last year with our mystery wallet. So we had a funnel specifically built around that. So you have like general wallet category as well as like, like the mystery wallet category. And frankly like my note reviewing last year, this was in our postmortem but like we were almost too successful with the wallet. With the mystery wallet we've gotta like better figure out how to crack wallets generally. And so that's how we're thinking about it going into this year. Like what are the funnels? Are there, is there any sort of offer aside from the sweepstakes attached to them? Maybe that's via bundles and things like that. So that's how we're approaching it. General product category specific. I'd love your answer though.

[Connor]

So I, I always start with the website. Like my goal is to get. First off, I don't, I think like I don't. If you come from a marketing comm or direct to our site like you should have a really good feel for what's going on. So I always like to start with the website. Specifically we have this hero landing page that is the like all encompassing explainer. It's actually still live on our site. If you go to the footer you can see it. It's a watered down version because it's like a post sweepstakes version of the page. But I wanted to start there like can someone hit this page, read through it and understand what we're giving away, how they get entries, get all their questions answered. This is where we have like a hero video of Gordon doing like a 90 second, like single shot explainer of the sweep sites. Like, there's really no way you could. If you read through this whole page, you should have a very good feel of what we're doing. And then from there we're just like making sure there's touch points along the way. So from the page, then you then go to a collection page that was organized by entries. So you had like a single collection, but then there was three sections on that collection with sticky nav buttons where it's like 1x entries, 2x entries, 3x entries. And then as you get further and further away, like, like closer to conversion. Now you're on the product page. Okay, now there's like a, there's less of a activation about the sweepstakes on the product page, but there's still a little block box that's like, this product's worth X entries. And then same thing. Now you're in the cart. There's a little thing at the bottom that says your car's worth X entries. Now you're in checkout. Same thing. So we're really starting with that landing page and working our way out. Then we're like, all right, now we're in our ads, now we're in our emails. And from there it kind of takes care of itself because once you've really built out the website messaging, it's a lot easier to like create ads and emails that are really cohesive with that experience. So we would do stuff like if we're promoting knives in the email or knives in the ad, we would have it like sticky anchor to the, the knives section of the collection page. But for the most part, all of our, like, general sweepstakes messaging would land on this sweepstakes page. I mean, we drove hundreds of thousands of visitors to this page. And then they can kind of choose their own journey from there. Like, there's different CTA is on that page for email, for sms, there's a shop CTA that takes you to that collection page. We're really trying to get people on this landing page, have them learn about it and then go buy the products they want to they want to buy or do the things they want to do. But I like this constraint of if you were only doing this on your website, would it work? I actually think that's a really constraint to take to a lot of activations. Like we, we I take that constraint with sales with new products. Like, in theory, of course you're always going to run marketing, but like, if your website's buttoned up, all your evergreen traffic should be able to take advantage of a sale or a sweeps or a new product.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Connor]

That's our approach.

[Cody]

That's a great point. And I. You hit a lot of. Really. That's also something that we've gotten you guys nailed right off the bat and we've gotten better at over the years is like, what is the implementation on the site? It. And there's a really good way to say it. You have so many. If you look at like landing pages on your site, you're gonna have so many people landing straight on a collections from SEO or straight on a PDP from search or whatever. So you have to think about like, depending on where they enter, how are they getting introduced to this idea of the sweepstakes because you want to be extracting value as much as possible. So. Yeah, no, I, what you just said, I think is super, super important.

[Connor]

Yeah. And we had like, we had every, at every touch point, we had the ability to. You had the ability to go to the landing page. So like, let's talk about your product page example. We have a like 12 piece sets, our hero funnel. We drive a lot of people to a, to a 12 piece set landing page that's more like information heavy and that then goes to a 12 piece set product page. On that 12 piece set product page, there's that little, that little module, like I said, that's like this product's worth X entries. There's also a learn more button. It's like, what is the question was, what is Gordon's golden ticket to London? Like, with like a clickable ui, you click that, it brings up a module that like has a paragraph on it. And then if you want to learn more, there was another CTA that would take you to the landing page in a new window. So to your point, we were definitely thinking about that. Like, what is the person that is landing on the product page or the homepage or the collection page. Like, how are they going to learn about this thing? It doesn't have to be like, it just has to be intentional and like, it's got to be there in a, in a smart way. It doesn't have to be like this insanely massive, like headline or pop up or something like that. But I think that's a really good thing to think about is not everyone's gonna like perfectly land on the page. That explains everything. So how are they gonna get there in a way that doesn't distract them from what you ultimately want them to do, which is go buy things.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%. Well said.

[C]

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[Cody]

Let me talk through like a couple of these points. These are my focuses. This episode will end up being a nice mix of tried and true best practices. And I think you and I both kind of end up talking about things we want to focus on in the future. So at least where our heads are at in terms of where these things can go, my main things are, oh, we've hit a couple of them. One, I'd like to do tighter funnels. So like if you look at like a forge 4x4 like they have a insanely tight funnel. Like just these crazy landing pages built out. I'd like to figure out something like that. I've got one key thing for us and I don't know if you guys are going to approach this any differently going into the sweep six this year is partnership content. So YouTube integrations, Instagram posts, things like that perform so well. If we can get the had our cars like integrated into the content. So we spent a lot of time last year we shipped these two trucks. It was in Salt Lake, it was in la. We shipped it up to Reno at one point, like we moved them all over the place in order to get a bunch of influencer content. Because all of that performs like two to three times better. And it performs two to three times better, you end up like covering a lot of YouTube. Like I think we served probably 50 million plus views across YouTube with the trucks inside of the videos and then we get rights to all that content. So some of our best performing ads were like mashups of the creator content because I wanted to create this feeling of like what is it like ubiquity, right? Or just like how proliferated the campaign really was. So that's a really key thing for us. Where I think we can get better coming into this year is like it either needs to be really interesting and impactful content or it needs to be a large integration. We spend a little bit too much time and energy getting the trucks into low impact content with not a lot of views and that's not worth the coordination and isn't all that valuable in ad creative. So we just want to prioritize one or both of those things and like understand, like understand what we're getting into when we do that. That's one I, I said earlier I think we need to crack like virality slash referral. Like I think that will be a. If we're gonna make this like a. I, I think I've also said I think this could be like in the future a 40 million dollar campaign for us. I think it could be abso. That will require some amount of like enhanced word of mouth. And then I said the, like I have it written down here as engagement retention, which is really like that true classic example. And that vision I explained earlier, where you have people answered, you have people interested, what is the thing that they can come back and do on a daily or weekly basis. So when people see the sweepstakes this year, hopefully, hopefully we'll have crack the code on at least a couple of.

[Connor]

These nice I, I, I really like your point about partnerships. Like we had Gordon, but it wasn't like Gordon was the, the, the thing we built this around and he announced it and he had that hero video. I want to take a playbook out of our, out of our super bowl campaign actually this year and have more people commenting on it. Like, hey, we had 15 influencers that made a video that were yes, yes, yes. Dang. Did you see what hexclass is doing right now? Like they, it's not centered around them. Like it, it's like it's centered around Gordon. But do you see what, what Hex class doing right now? Like they're doing, they're giving away this, this and that. Here's make great clips to cut together in ads. Like we, we did do a cut down of that Gordon video last year and that was a top performer. But yeah, I want to activate more with our brand ambassadors and people that aren't in our, in our brand ambassador list just to like create some more buzz around it. I think that'll be really effective just to like have the launch of the sweet like have, have like a just the impression arbitrage on it.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

I think is, is what we're going for there. So yeah, that's something I think we can do a lot better this year. I have more non purchase conversion ways to get people to entry. Like I said, following our socials, joining our Facebook community, you know, sharing with a friend, whatever it is. Those are the big ones. We haven't started ideating yet for this year. I think it's going to be similar to last year, but I'm sure a lot more ideas will come as, as we get into like the, the intentional like. All right, let's write out the things we want to do this year.

[Cody]

100%. All right, cool. Yeah, I think we have pretty good coverage on sweeps. Hopefully people find this useful.

[Connor]

Oh yeah. All right, cool. All right, that is a wrap on this episode of the Marketing Operators podcast. Really fun deep dive here on sweepstakes. We also did another sweepstakes episode a while back. That is episode 17 if you want to go and check that one out. Probably a good one to listen to before you listen to this one or after. Really doesn't matter. But if you want the full run through of sweepstakes episode 17 and this episode. Thank you to the sponsors. Motion Revo Prescient after sell enrich panel. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, make sure you like, make sure you subscribe and make sure you share it with your marketer friends. Thanks.