When you’ve been selling your products for an extended time, it is easy to get caught up in traditional ways of marketing. Sometimes you need to inject some excitement into your business to get customers motivated to buy sooner than later.

Instead of taunting how great your product is and the special, limited time offer, how about promoting a contest instead?

While looking into some creative ways of promoting brand awareness for a client, I came across an interesting retail website that allows for visitors to design their own hooded sweatshirt with many design patterns. The person with the best design, based on specific criteria, wins a shopping spree from the internet retailer to spend in-store or on the e-tailers ecommerce website.

Contest can be fun for your customers. It also allows your business to collect leads that you could send emails to that encourage contest participants to buy from your website.

Have you experienced any success with contests in your business? Please feel free to share your experiences.