Ten $50 gift cards instead of twenty $25 cards: +31% sign-ups
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsOffering a chance to win one of ten $50 Amazon gift cards, instead of one of twenty $25 cards, brought in 31% more email sign-ups.
Response Capture ran the test, and it was published as a MarketingExperiments case study.
Both prize pools cost the same $500, so the lift came at no extra cost.
- Email sign-ups rose 31% with the fewer, larger prizes.
- Prize cost was identical at $500, so the extra leads were free.
- Sample size, duration and confidence level were not shared.
The change
Same $500 prize pool, split into fewer, larger gift cards
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
Visitors were offered a chance to win one of twenty $25 Amazon gift cards in exchange for their email address.
Variant
Visitors were offered a chance to win one of ten $50 Amazon gift cards instead. The total prize budget stayed at $500.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- People tend to judge a prize by its size more than by their odds of winning it.
- A $50 card may feel worth the effort of signing up, while $25 can feel small.
- Twenty winners versus ten is hard to picture, so the doubled prize value was probably the clearer signal.
Caveats: The sample size, test length and confidence level were not shared. The test date is also not stated; the write-up was published in June 2016.
Who ran it
Response Capture ran this test and published the results (MarketingExperiments). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Response Capture →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we offer fewer prizes of higher value for the same total budget, then more visitors will enter because a bigger prize feels more worth winning than better odds on a smaller one.
- Primary metric
- Email sign-up conversion rate
- Guardrails
- Lead quality or later engagement
- Unsubscribe rate in the first weeks
- Cost per lead
- Who should test it
- Lead-gen businesses and SaaS companies that use giveaways to grow a list. It matters less if your audience is driven by the product itself rather than the prize, or if a giveaway attracts people who never become customers.
Questions
Is it better to offer many small prizes or a few big ones?
In this test, fewer and bigger prizes won by 31% at the same total cost.
A natural next test is a single large prize against several mid-sized ones.
Do sweepstakes leads convert into customers?
Not always. A prize can attract people who only want the prize, so check engagement and sales from these leads, not just the sign-up count.