Customer engagement and data collection are important facets of a successful marketing campaign and over the past 5 years we believe we’ve found the silver bullet that keeps website visitors coming back week in and week out and happy to part with their personal information – Sports Tipping!

Last year 7,579,000 people (or 40% of the Australian population over the age of 14) identified themselves as an AFL supporter in a Roy Morgan Reasearch study. As any AFL supporter knows, a match’s outcome depends not only on talent and teamwork, but also luck. Perhaps this explains why, in any given three-month period, footy fans are:

• 45% more likely than the average Australian to have placed a bet
• 49% more likely to have gone to the races
• 24% more likely to have visited a casino

So what if you could align your brand with seven and a half million plus potential customers? Hosting a footy tipping competition on your website helps you do this along with a host of other benefits including:

• Ability collect demographic information about tippers
• Increase website traffic for the duration of the competition with website visitors coming back to your site to tip and check results a minimum of twice a week. Our results show a consistent doubling of site traffic on tipping and result days throughout the lifetime of the competition.
• Engaging with customers via email 2-3 times a week with result and tip reminder emails
• Align your brand with the marketing power of some of Australia’s most successful sporting leagues

Harmonic New Media have been running footy and rugby tipping competitions for the last five years for clients including Dodo and Local Liquor and the benefits have been proven year in and year out. So lets take a look at how to run a successful tipping competition.

Running a successful tipping competition

Below are our tips and findings on how to make the most out of your annual tipping competition.

1. Prepare early

Footy seasons (for example) start in March/April each year but you want to allow yourself enough time to customise your competition (see branding point below), prepare related marketing collateral and sign up as many tippers as possible. We suggest starting your planning process October/November for a February/March launch.

2. Have a custom branded competition (also called white label) that is not obviously hosted by a third party

You want to be driving traffic to your website rather than to someone elses. So the ability to integrate a tipping competition directly into your website is essential. You obviously want to do this visually but also technically so that users cannot simply bookmark an external URL and never return to your site proper. In addition, place the tipping competition link/login prominently on your website and close to other promotional material or special offers.

3. Give away desirable prizes

Relevance and desirability of prizes are important to drive users to sign up and continually check back in week to week. Our most successful sports tipping clients offer smaller prizes week to week as well as a large overall prize (such as a trip to the grand final). Also consider a wooden spoon prize to keep those who have disastrous tipping weeks in the game.

4. Consider round by round vs future tipping carefully

A good sports tipping system should allow customisation of how a competition is carried out. In particular whether you allow your tippers to tip every round from the start of the season to the end, or only week by week. The obvious advantage of week to week tipping only is you are guaranteeing weekly website traffic as tippers have to login the week before the game to tip, the downside however is the risk of catching some tippers offside. We do get a small number of tippers who have legitimate reasons for not being able to tip in a week (holidays for example) who find this restriction unfair.

5. Use result and reminder emails to further promote your brand, product and service

Any emails that go to your tippers are further opportunities for brand recognition and promotion. Our most successful competition administrators include special offers and promotions (or description of the weekly prizes) in their email outs to further entice tippers to login, and to purchase.

6. Get to know your customers

By offering desirable prizes and appealing to an AFL supporters tendency for betting and tipping you have the opportunity to collect more than the average information from a customer when they sign up to a tipping competition. Be sure to add demographic information as well as any specific requests related to your marketing requirements (favourite products, location, etc).

If you are interested in more details on setting up your own sports tipping or footy tipping system visit our product page at http://sports-tipping.com.au.