Capturing Time and Attention: Minnesota Lottery Successfully Engages Customers With Social Contests and Quizzes

What comes to mind when you think about a lottery? Mega Millions? Powerball? That friend of a friend who won $1,000,000 in an office lottery pool? State-run lotteries are often associated with life-changing sums of money, but they also offer smaller prizes through games like scratch tickets.

The Minnesota Lottery leverages social media to find new ways to engage customers. The social media contests and quizzes the Minnesota Lottery run give them a unique opportunity to grab and hold the attention of its customers. Discover how Minnesota Lottery’s use of interactive marketing campaigns wins over its customers.

Minnesota Lottery x ShortStack

The Minnesota Lottery offers scratch tickets, lotto games, print-n-play, and raffle tickets at approximately 3,000 retailers throughout Minnesota. The fun, innovative entertainment provided by the Minnesota Lottery helps raise money to support vital state services and environmental projects in each of Minnesota’s 87 counties. By setting aside a portion of every dollar played for these projects, the Minnesota Lottery has contributed more than $3.5 billion since 1990 to preserve and protect the environment; fund education, public safety and health and human services; and support work to help prevent and treat problem gambling.  

The Minnesota Lottery has been a ShortStack customer since 2014. Sierra Hawkins is the Digital Marketing Coordinator at Minnesota Lottery. She said, “The Minnesota Lottery Digital team utilizes ShortStack a few times a month.” Her team uses ShortStack to gather social media sweepstakes entries, host photo contests, run hashtag contests, and collect form-based contest entries.”

“We use the social import tool a lot,” said Hawkins. “ShortStack makes our social sweepstakes drawings so much easier. It only takes a few minutes of set-up, and after we hold a drawing, it is very easy to find winners in hundreds of comments.”

A couple of examples of social sweepstakes the Minnesota Lottery has run include: 

A St. Patrick’s Day comment-to-enter contest on Facebook that gathered over 900 comments.

An Instagram hashtag contest asking entrants to share their “True North” experiences.  

In addition to running contests, Minnesota Lottery engages its customers with quizzes embedded on the website. “We originally had a different platform to house quizzes, but we have now switched to ShortStack.” Read on to learn more about a recent quiz Minnesota Lottery created around their MONOPOLY® Doubler scratch-off game.

Minnesota Lottery’s MONOPOLY® Doubler Quiz Campaign 

The Minnesota Lottery made a classic game into a scratch game. For just $5, folks can play for a chance to win up to $100,000. Those who didn’t win instantly have the opportunity to enter and win MONOPOLY® Doubler merchandise or cash online. 

The Minnesota Lottery Digital team decided to create a quiz around the game. “Our goal was to create some extra fun surrounding the ticket, to engage viewers, and keep them on the landing page longer,” said Hawkins. Thus, the What’s your lucky MONOPOLY game token? quiz was born. 

Quiz-takers answer questions like, “Do you like to be outdoors” and “Do you have a favorite hobby?” After the questions are answered, a game piece based on the responses is displayed (I’m the Car 🚗). 

Quiz-takers can share their results on Facebook and Twitter, bringing even more people into the fun. Hawkins mentioned they promoted the quiz via in-feed posts and stories on their social media channels. Promoting the quiz on social media furthers their goal of engaging their customers and increasing the time on their website.

Results

The “What’s your lucky MONOPOLY game token? quiz didn’t collect leads. Instead, success was measured by how many people viewed and took the quiz. There were over 67,000 campaign views, with 2,755 people completing the quiz. “We were extremely happy to see the number of views and how many visitors took the quiz – over 2,500!” exclaimed Hawkins. 

For Some, Engagement Trumps Leads

Customer engagement helps to increase brand awareness. Marketing campaigns like quizzes and social media contests encourage participants to share with their families and friends, which helps to spread the word about your brand.

The Minnesota Lottery has seen a lot of success by focusing on grabbing its customers' attention versus collecting lead information. Focusing on social media contests and sharable quizzes has helped the Minnesota Lottery engage with their customers, keep their product on customers' minds and increase time with their brand.

Interested in engaging your customers through quizzes or social media contests? Set up a call with our sales team to learn more about what ShortStack can do for you.