EP 05: St. Pats Bar Promotion: $10,000 Pot Of Gold Giveaway

Description:

If you’re looking for a totally new promotion, that will grab the attention of everyone in your area, including the news stations, and that will make you stand out from EVERY one of your competitors – you must listen in on this episode where Nick reveals how you can give people a chance to win a $10,000 pot of gold!

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• How to make sure that when and if people when the $10,000, none of that money comes from you pocket.
• How to make everyone a guaranteed winner – not of the $10,000 but of another prize that actually puts more money in your register
• How to get new and existing customers in the door for this promotion, spending money, before the big St. Patty’s day celebration
• How to promote this event to get the most exposure and highest ROI!

Links Mentioned In This Podcast:

Example of lead capture page used for this promotion – Please note: opt in box doesn’t work, this is just to show you the layout.

Get Nick’s #1 Selling Book For Free By Clicking Here.  Just cover shipping and handling. 

Interactive Promotions – company who sells the insurance

Transcript

Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome to Episode number five where we’re going to talk about the St. Patty’s Day Pot of Gold promotion.

This is something I started running a few years back at one of my bars, Casey’s Pub. And I was sitting there one day thinking, what can I do differently than the competition? Usually, we’re packed on St. Patty’s Day. Most bars and restaurants are, especially in our area, but I still wanted to do something different, something unique.

And I came across a company called Interactive Promotions, and they have a bunch of different games that you can use. And I think we’re actually going to have them in on a future podcast to go through these different promotions that you could do with them. But specifically, I wanted to talk about how I took an idea of theirs that they’re doing and turned it into this St. Patty’s promotion, kind of like my own creation.

So they have an envelope game where you get three different sets of envelopes, three games, and they consist of 20 envelopes a piece. And then in each of those sets of security sealed envelopes, there are three grand prize winners in there.

So the way that it works is we bought insurance for up to $10,000 dollars. And the way that you win the $10,000 dollars is if you pick the three grand prize winners from one of those packages, where all of the other security-sealed envelopes are not open, from the 20, but the three grand prize winners are open, you win that $10,000 dollars.

And so when I saw that, I was thinking, what can we do with St. Patty’s Day? Let’s call it the Pot of Gold. So pretty much what we would do is at 6:00 o’clock, at 7:00 o’clock, and at 8:00 o’clock, we would do one set of games. One person would be called out. And I’ll explain exactly how I ran the promotion in a second. I just want to give you a brief idea of how this works first.

But pretty much, we would put them in another envelope. And we would take a printed picture of a pot of gold, and we would write one through 20 on them, and we’d put them up on the wall.

We’d call somebody down by pulling out a ticket, one lucky winner, and they would get to go up to the wall and pick the first three envelopes. If the first 3 they picked out of the 20 were grand prize winners, they would win the $10,000!

Obviously the chances are in the house’s favor, which is obviously why we buy the insurance for the $500. Nobody has ever won it, but to keep it going and make it exciting, Interactive Promotions will let you put other prizes in the envelopes. They actually print off a piece of paper and put them in the security envelopes for you.

We’ll put gift cards, free T-shirt, free drink, a free meal, a free shot, whatever it may be in side the other envelopes. This way, if they open up the first envelope and notice it’s not a grand prize winner, it’s not just done and over with, they can keep selecting up to 10 envelopes.

So, that’s kind of the basis of the promotion of how they win this $10,000 dollars and why we call it the Pot of Gold promotion. But now I want to tell you how we promote it, how we run the entire promotion to create awareness for it, but also how to get people in our doors days before the promotion and also how we build our email list, our contact list, our customer list, which is our most valuable asset we could possibly have.

So let me go through that with you.

The way that we set up this promotion is we start running it two weeks before St. Patty’s Day, and we will run Facebook ads. We send out an email to our email list. We always start with our customer list first, by letting them know about the promotion and what we’re doing, and we take them to a lead capture page.

A lead capture page is a one-page website that has one goal and one focus only, and that’s to capture somebody’s information, to get them to raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested in this offer. I want this offer. I want to sign up,” or it may be a giveaway like what we are doing here.

So we take people to this page, and then we also run cold traffic. And what I mean by cold traffic is we run Facebook ads and Instagram ads, and we would target people who purchase beer, wine, liquor and meals at other bars and restaurants on their credit and debit cards. We’d run ads to those who did not ‘like’ our Facebook page or who were not on our email list. And we drove them to this lead capture page as well.

I’m actually going to have a link in the show notes on this so that you can take a look at what that looks like and what we did for a client of ours last year. It’s the same page that we use for ourselves, but it did really, really well with this.

So pretty much we would run ads to cold traffic and our existing list telling people, “Hey, you’ve got a chance to win $10,000 dollars and everybody is a guaranteed winner.” And the way that we did this was we said, “Hey, sign up for a chance to win the $10,000 dollars. You’ve just got to be here on St. Patty’s Day.”

We explained exactly how people are going to get called out, which is no matter what, everybody has a chance to win. If they walk in the door, they get a ticket. For every drink they get, they get a ticket. For every food item, they would get three tickets. And then those tickets would be the ones we would pull to see who would have a chance to go for the $10,000 dollars.

Now, the way that we made everybody a guaranteed winner was we said, “Hey, just by signing up, you’re a guaranteed winner. You’re either going to win A, a $5 dollar gift card or B, a free meal or a free drink” or something like that.

The way that this worked is we wanted to just get people to sign up, even our existing list of people who we already had their information for. We just want to re-engage them. We want them to sign up.

We want to make things fun for our customers, give them a chance to win certain things. But also for the cold prospects who we don’t have on our email list or on our text list or whatever, we want to keep building and building that list, because obviously that list is what makes our promotions much more successful in the future.

So the way that we do this within our marketing system is anybody who signs up, who is already on our email list will get the $5 dollar gift card. Anybody who is brand new, who we don’t have their information, we’re going to give them the free meal.

We do this based on restrictions with the free meal, like you’ve got to have a couple of beverages so we at least break even and we’re not just getting the coupon cutters who just want to come in and get this and have a water and leave. Those aren’t the types of people we’re trying to attract.

And then for the $5 dollars, we say, “Hey, spend $20 and get $5 dollars off,” so that’s how that would work. From there, after they sign up, they would get their email based on whichever they won. And then we would put a five-day expiration date on it that they had five days to use this. The way that our software works on this is like if somebody signs up on the first, it’ll expire on the sixth; if they sign up on the second, it’ll expire on the eighth.

It gives them what I like to call and ‘evergreen expiration date’ based on the date of when these people sign up. So this way, we’re able to build up our email list, we’re getting people to hand over their information for being a guaranteed winner. But, we’re also getting people in the door before the big promotion by putting this expiration date in there. And we let people know these are not good the day of the promotion, because we’re giving people the chance to win the $10,000.

This way, we’re making money before the promotion happens, and then we’re also getting all these people in on the day of the promotion. And so we would send out email and text reminders to people two days before and the day before St. Patty’s Day, saying, “Hey, remember you’ve got a chance to win $10,000. Come in.” And like I said, so it’s 6:00 o’clock, 7:00 o’clock, and 8:00 o’clock is when we would do this, and then we would just pull a ticket and people would come up for their chance to win.

That’s how the promotion worked, and it costs very, very little to promote this. You could even do a press release for this. I mean, if you’re giving people a chance to win $10,000 on Pot of Gold, your newspapers, radio, maybe even the TV stations, will come out for something this big, because it is newsworthy and it is going into a holiday. And that’s what these news stations are looking for. They want to see what’s new, what’s going on, and what’s exciting, especially when you can tie it into a recent holiday that’s coming up.

Now, a couple of other things I want to go through with just the promotion is how you can do this in a way where you don’t have to come out of pocket for that $500 dollars to go to the insurance company. Reach out to your liquor company. Reach out to your beer companies, and let them know about this promotion and see if they will cover half, if not all, of that money that goes to the insurance company.

From what I know, in a lot of areas the liquor companies and beer companies can pay money to third party agencies to help build their business.

So you would put their brand, their beer or whatever it is, on special that day. Obviously they’re not going to just say, “Hey, here’s the money,” if you’re not doing something for them. They pat your back. You’ve got to pat theirs as well. So you put something of theirs on special, and now you can get all of this taken care of for you for no money coming out of your pocket besides the ad cost.

The other thing I want to bring up too is just about retargeting. I won’t get into too much detail on this, but I just wanted to go through one other strategy that we implemented into this. All the traffic that we took from telling people about this in house, on our TV screens, on social media, within our email, all the people who hit that web page – and again, you can get the link and you can see the webpage in the show notes below here on the web page. But all the traffic that would go there would be retargeted.

What that means is that Facebook and Google Adwords have a piece of code that they can give you that you put on your website. And anybody who hits that page, it will build a list of all those people. So think of this as like building your email list, but you’re not asking for their information; you’re just automatically getting it. What this allows you to do is it builds what we call a retargeting list.

And then we could run banner ads on thousands of different websites. We can run ads specifically on Facebook only to the people who have hit this webpage to show them reminders about that specific promotion, and I mean, you can get thousands of impressions for $2, $3, $4, $5 or $6 dollars. So that becomes very, very inexpensive advertising to remind people, because let’s say they don’t get your email or it goes to spam or it goes in another folder and they just forget about it.

Again, remember, we live crazy, busy lives. People could forget about this. They signed up for it two weeks ago. Maybe they didn’t see it, but we know that they’re on the internet, because they went to that page, they’ve signed up for this, or maybe they even went to the page and they didn’t opt in.

Well, we know that they’re on the internet, so we could put these banner ads in front of them on thousands of different websites that are tied to Google’s advertising platform because they get paid from these ads going on their webpage. These could be popping up in front of thousands of people, hundreds of people who hit this page, for pennies on the dollar. So that’s another strategy that we implemented into this that cost us an extra $10 to $15 bucks to brand this to remind people, hey, we’re giving away this promotion.

So I just wanted to give you guys a quick idea for St. Patty’s Day, how to stand out, be completely different than the completion, a way to get some free publicity, a way to get people in the door beforehand, a way to build up your email list, to build up your retargeting list in order to use that for the future for other promotions and specials.

For any of you guys that have been following me for any amount of time, you know that capturing people’s information is my number one focus, because these people are more profitable to market to than anybody else on the planet. They’re telling you that they like you and trust you and want to do business with you or they wouldn’t be handing that information over. So who better would you continue to market to than those people?

So again, this is just another example of a promotion we run during St. Patty’s Day, but it’s something that just stands out from the competition, because you’re doing something completely different. And it really grabs the attention of everybody when they know that they have the chance to possibly win $10,000 dollars.

If you guys have any questions or things like that, you can put those in the comments section down below on the blog post here. Hope you guys have a great St. Patty’s Day, and we’ll see you on the next episode.