Organizing a lottery (the word might be different in various countries: raffle, sweep-stake, jackpot, etc.) is a campaign in which your customers receive a chance on a prize through a ticket with numbers or icons. The specific prize for them can be checked by scratching off a layer of the surface which reveals the ‘winning numbers’, or by checking numbers on a list or website or by listening live to a draw (‘bingo’). Unless they pay for the tickets, people generally know that you are trying to seduce them into doing things they might not want to do, but the outlook on winning a prize might seduce them to check their possible price anyway.

The strategy entails giving out prices in such a way that the participants feel the price is too good to ignore, and they will use it (as a discount) to purchase our products. Let’s look at the practical example: a retailer handed out 350.000 tickets. There was only 1 dream prize of EUR 1.000,-. The rest was divided in prizes of EUR 5,-, 10,- and 25,-, each as a discount on products to be purchased at the retailer who organized this campaign. The retailer distributed almost exclusively prizes of EUR 10,-. This had the effect that nobody either lost or got the ‘lowest’ possible price of EUR 5,-. This caused all participating consumers to think they were ‘lucky enough’ to win at least a reasonable prize, which would be a waste not to use. Conversion rates were significantly higher compared with a regular ‘EUR 10,- discount coupon’ sent to the same group before.

Now, who’s the winner?

Influencing styles; which one are you? And your company?

A checklist, nicely summarized: 9 Things to Know About Influencing Purchasing Decisions

Starbucks and loyalty: an evolving file. This time about mobile payments/loyalty.

The ‘other side’ of persuasion marketing. A (very) critical perspective on what we do. Very interesting read! Read the comments as well. By Alexander Furnas.

Research Theme from The Altimeter Group: The Dynamic Customer Journey.

Bit braggy in its language, but a project with nice results from Tier 10 Marketing: How they reached a high level of engagement.

Reflections on persuasion marketing and the empowered consumer.

This week, it seemed that IBM was all over the place with thir Smarter Commerce. They also presented the new 4Ps of marketing: persuasion, personalization, presence, & permission. We couldn’t agree more….

Behavior Change as Value Proposition. With very interesting graphs.

Interesting lessons to learn from Persuasion in Health: Conference Persuasive 2012.

The Power of Persuasion in Forbes, an article about PeerIndex.  There’s a White Paper with the same title, published by PeerIndex itself on Scribd.

How transparant are you? How transparant are your customers to you? What do you base your profile on? On what they say?

Ready for some deep reading? Personalized Persuasion in Ambient Intelligence in a PDF.

A PDF article from a loyalty veteran about how to build trust. Do you know how to do that?

Interesting list of persuasion picks.

That’s it for this week! Let me know when you have more links through Twitter or Google+ or add your comments under here!