People love playing games, and they love winning prizes! Combining these two elements provides businesses with a powerful way to achieve key strategic goals. Traditional lotteries are highly effective for collecting customer data and driving web traffic, but they lack two crucial aspects: repeated interaction and instant gratification. This is where Instant Win Contests come into play—a true promotional engine capable of generating excitement and creating incentives for participants. Instant Win Contests can be defined as an engagement solution that helps businesses increase brand awareness, foster customer loyalty, and actively interact with users.
And what better time than the holiday season to offer your audience an engaging experience? This was exactly AC Milan‘s vision: to take advantage of the festive period to deliver an innovative and entertaining engagement experience to its fans.
To offer its fans an innovative and entertaining engagement experience, AC Milan launched an Instant Win contest with a final prize draw. The concept was inspired by the advent calendar: every day from December 1st to 24th, fans could try their luck to win a variety of branded prizes. The most exciting feature of this initiative is the dedicated portal where fans can access this contest and other engagement activities.
Powered by the proprietary Engage Studio platform, several contests were created and consolidated into a single portal exclusively designed for promotional initiatives and interactive activities. This approach allows the club to engage fans continuously, making the process more efficient and cost-effective than running occasional contests.
The portal is multilingual (Italian and English), with each contest hosted on a dedicated page. Another standout feature is the integration of the portal with AC Milan’s Identity Management system via Salesforce. This integration simplifies the login process, delivering a faster and more seamless user experience.
Moreover, the integration enables the organization of conditional contests. What does this mean? It allows the club to use engagement activities to strengthen fan loyalty and drive sales. For example, AC Milan can require fans to sign up for the MyMilan page or purchase branded products from the official website before participating in certain contests. This strategy not only deepens the connection between fans and the brand but also boosts revenue through increased product sales.
The Benefits
Instant Win Contests positively impact the company’s communication strategy and enable it to achieve a number of goals:
By creating an Instant Win contest and placing the game on the company website, visits to the latter will increase exponentially.
The possibility of knowing the outcome of the contest immediately triggers in the participant a degree of euphoria not found in traditional sweepstakes. Instant gratification represents that distinctive aspect of Instant Win contests that prompts the user to participate voluntarily.
Making content go viral is one of the key goals behind any communication and marketing strategy created by a company. A piece of content becomes viral when it generates such a strong word-of-mouth effect that the company could stop sponsoring the content because users are actively promoting the initiative on their own.
