Month: March 2019

Today is opening day of the 2019 MLB season, the earliest day ever. All 30 teams will be playing today. It’s been five months since we’ve seen a MLB game when my team, the Boston Red Sox, winning the World Series. The best Red Sox team ever! We’ll now see what teams rise to the challenge this year.

To help celebrate this season I wanted to write about a new client that we are assisting with their sweepstakes. Herr Foods which is based in Pennsylvania has a sponsorship with the Philadelphia Phillies. They are running the “Score Ed Herr’s Tickets” Phillies Ticket Giveaway Sweepstakes which will award three Grand Prize Winners each four tickets to a Phillies home game, plus a year’s worth of Herr’s chips. The first sweepstakes period already ended and we have one lucky winner, Stanley Blazejewski from Philadelphia, going to today’s opening day home game against the Atlanta Braves. The Phillies have upgraded their team quite a bit this past off season and are now one of the teams in the NL East to watch.

The next sweepstakes period is scheduled to start on April 8 and run till the end of the month. The prize will include the four tickets to a Phillies home game on May 5 along with the option for the winner to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.

The last sweepstakes period is scheduled for later in the season to run mid-August to mid-September. So all you Phillies fans have a couple of more chances to score these tickets. However, only residents of the Philadelphia, PA, DMA are eligible to win since the winners have to get themselves to the stadium.

We are again using the Shortstack Application to build the entry form and collect all the entrant’s data for each of these sweepstakes periods. All of Shortstack’s entry pages are mobile friendly from the start with Shortstack’s “One Campaign for any screen” design philosophy.  Last year they added an easy way to include CSS coding which is great for those of us that don’t have much programming experience. If you would like more details on how to set up a promotion utilizing the Shortstack platform, please feel free to contact me. It’s a great tool and it also includes a great team of support people.

Here’s to a great 2019 MLB season. May the best teams make it to the playoffs!

Here’s a new text-to-win sweepstakes that just launched. It’s called the “Derby” Sweepstakes and it’s to help celebrate the upcoming Kentucky Derby taking place on May 4. Last year’s winner, Justify, went on to win the Preakness Stakes, then won the Belmont Stakes to also win the Triple Crown title. Justify is now enjoying retirement, so we’ll have a new winner this year.

Four Hands Winery is an official sponsor of the 145th Kentucky Derby and their wines are being promoted with this sweepstakes. Their winery is located in Washington state and they claim that 14 Hands wines are inspired by the unbridled spirit of the wild horses that once freely roamed eastern Washington. Measuring just fourteen hands tall — a “hand” equivalent to the width of one’s palm — these tenacious little horses would travel down from the hills every day to drink from the mighty Columbia River and graze along the riverbank, then retreat back to cool off at night.  So it’s a great brand fit for 14 Hands to be sponsors of the Kentucky Derby.

The Derby Sweepstakes is running now till the end of April. To enter participants can text “Derby” to 6507 where they will receive a text message back with a link to a mobile entry form that they need to fill out and submit to earn an entry. At the end of the sweepstakes period we will conduct a random drawing to determine a grand prize winner who will receive a custom hat or bowtie from the House of MacGregor Millinery that is valued at $500.

We have been working with the Republic National Distribution Company, distributors, of these wines. They have produced in-store point-of-sale materials to promote the sweepstakes that consists of a necker that goes on the bottle and display header.  Setting up a text-to-win sweepstakes is a great way to encourage in-store displays.

We worked with the same distributor earlier this year to help promote Botanist Gin with another text-to-win sweepstakes that ran the month of January to help kick off the new year. Here they gave 40 Grand Prize Winners each a healthy Hello Fresh Pre-Packaged Meal Plan valued at $60. They got in return some additional in-store signage as well that you see here.

We hope to continue doing more of these types of mobile friendly promotions as the year goes on!