I’ve always said that a great way to build your database (and even to reward existing clients, customers, or patients) is to offer a big prize. And a big prize is when you offer either a year’s supply or, better still, a lifetime supply of your products and services.

I was reminded of this when I noticed McDonald’s are currently offering a prize of a year of free coffee to celebrate 25 years of McCafe.

Now this is a great prize because when the winner can have food or drink every single day for a year they soon get sick of it! So there is no way Maccas will give away 365 cups of coffee; maybe the winner will have a cup every day or two but even then the chances are their enthusiasm to collect will diminish… not that it matters! The appeal of such a great prize helps build the Maccas database because entrants have to go to a web site, enter their details, agree to further contact and then punch in a code on their receipt.

I’m reminded of a very successful promotion we used for an ice cream shop ages ago when we offered an ice cream every day for a year. The young fella who won it lasted about a fortnight of having an ice cream every day coz he found out that too much of a good thing soon made him sick of it.

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However, the promotion was extremely successful as we got hundreds of entrants and encouraged those who didn’t win to use a voucher for a free ice cream. Of course, when they came in to collect their free ice cream not only did they find that it was delicious but they were up-sold, add-on sold and cross-sold like the blazes. And, locked into the database.

I see that an internet provider is doing exactly the same thing and offering a prize of a lifetime of internet service.

Now, really when you think about it, this is not a big expense to the provider but has real perceived value to people currently using the opposition. The company will get a huge number of entries and all losing entrants could be offered a consolation prize of “one-month-free-to-try-service” or, at least, go into the database for further offers.

This concept of offering a big win of products or services can be applied to any business, your business too! What’s wrong with an accountant or dentist offering a year of free services or any retailer offering a year’s supply of products? The way to guarantee the cost benefit of the exercise is to ensure the offer is promoted very widely to maximise the number of entries and thus the people that get into your database.

So why not try it? Done right, you’ll love the results!