Why Contests are So Powerful for Adding Emails To Your List

Earlier in 2016, the Powerball Lottery was up to $1.58 billion dollars.

The odds to win were 1 in 292 million. You had a better chance of becoming a movie star or an astronaut. (Fun fact, in my research I found out that it’s easier to become a movie star than to become an astronaut!)

Yet the entire country was ready to win, despite how improbable it was (yes, even I spent $5 on lottery tickets).

That’s the power of contests.

Humans are emotional creatures. Even in the face of great odds, we will try to achieve the unachievable. We will dream the unbelievable.

The thought when someone sees a contest isn’t “Oh, I’ll never be able to win” it’s “Oh, why not. Anyone could get lucky.”

When you combine contests with email lead generation, you create an amazing machine that could help you gain hundreds if not thousands of email addresses. Add in the viral sharing component via VYPER, and now you’ve got a recipe to really add more emails to your list.

Viral email contests do this:

Offer an irresistible “bribe” to join your mailing list.
Helps you collect real emails (and usually their best one) because people want to get notified if they’ve won.
Get your loyal customer base sharing your brand with others so they can get more entries into the contest.
Builds incredible buzz and brand awareness through social sharing.

In fact, Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo & SumoMe used contests to add 200,000 emails to his email list.

Screenshot from Noah’s AppSumo

Bryan Harris used giveaways to get 2,239 email subscribers in 10 days.

Screenshot from VideoFruit

Josh Earl used contests to add 187,991 emails in 11 days.

Screenshot from SPI, post by Josh Earl

And there are tons more examples out there of people successfully using viral contests to get more emails.

In all the examples above, they used KingSumo giveaways. That was a great tool 2 years ago, but now it’s dated and not even supported anymore.

Here at VYPER we saw an opportunity to come into the market and innovate on the idea of viral contests.

This is how we did it:

We took ALL the features of KingSumo giveaways, and added:
Opt-in bribes which increased conversions by 26% (learn more).
Automatic cheating detection.
Customizable landing page that fits your site’s look & feel.
Conversion-optimized template that we’ve A/B tested like crazy (including positions of buttons & more).
World class support that will help you set up your contest.

And we’re constantly adding new features (new templates coming soon).

Ready to create your first contest?