It happens a few times a year at Trevor Services: a promotion launches with a prize genuinely worth wanting, decent retail support behind it, and entry numbers that land well under what anyone hoped. The post-mortem always starts with the prize. It rarely ends there.
More often the problem is sitting in plain sight, in the entry journey. Somebody decided the form needed a phone number and a date of birth. Somebody else added a mandatory account signup because the CRM team asked nicely. Legal added a checkbox, then another. None of those decisions felt expensive at the time. Together, they quietly priced most shoppers out of entering.
What is friction in a promotion?
Friction is everything a shopper has to do between deciding to enter a promotion and actually being entered: finding the entry point, typing a URL, filling in form fields, photographing a receipt, verifying an email, creating an account. In the 3-Second Equation — reward plus belief, divided by friction — it sits in the denominator, which is exactly where you don’t want anything to grow.
The reason friction gets underestimated is that it never appears on a budget line. A bigger prize pool costs visible dollars, so it gets argued about in meetings. An extra form field costs nothing on paper. The cost is paid later, in entries that never arrive, and nobody holds a meeting about those.
Where entries actually leak
Start with when the entry decision happens. Research by Shop! ANZ and Vypr found that 87.6 per cent of grocery purchase decisions are made in-store, and the same study found 90 per cent of shoppers have bought a product purely because it was on promotion. So the promotion is doing its job at the shelf. But the entry almost never happens at the shelf. It happens later, at home, pack on the bench, phone in hand — if the shopper still remembers, and if the journey doesn’t hand them a reason to stop.
That gap between the shelf and the couch is where entries leak, and every extra step widens it. Ecommerce gives us a sobering comparison. The Baymard Institute’s checkout research found that 17 per cent of online shoppers have abandoned a purchase because the checkout was too long or complicated, and that the average checkout displays 23.48 form elements when 12 to 14 would do the job. Those are people who had already decided to buy something they wanted, in exchange for a certain outcome. A promotion entry asks for similar effort in exchange for a chance. If checkout length kills purchases, it isn’t hard to imagine what it does to entries.
In the campaigns we run, the leaks cluster in familiar places. Manual receipt entry is the big one: asking a shopper to key in the store, date, and purchase amount when a photo of the receipt could carry all of it. Mandatory account creation before entry is another, and it is worth noticing that account creation is also one of the top reasons people abandon online checkouts. Then there is the quieter stuff: address fields collected from every entrant when only the winners will ever need them, email verification loops that send shoppers to their inbox and never get them back, and entry URLs printed on packs that were never meant to be typed on a phone.
How do you increase promotion entries?
Cut friction before you raise the prize. Put the entry point on the pack — a QR code that opens a form already half filled in — ask only for what the campaign’s single objective requires, let a photo of the receipt do the data entry, and save the postal address for the people who actually win something. In our experience, the entry journey moves the numbers more reliably than the prize pool does.
The discipline behind this is the One Job Rule. If the promotion’s job is trial, every data-harvest field bolted onto the form is a tax on that job. If the job genuinely is data, then say so, design for it, and accept the smaller entry count that comes with it. What doesn’t work is pretending you can have both for free. Every field has to earn its place against the entries it will cost.
Effort and reward are also the same trade seen from different ends. A generous prize with a tedious journey fails the same way a stingy reward with an easy journey does — the shopper does the maths in a few seconds and walks. We’ve written before about the Insult Threshold, the point where a reward isn’t worth the effort of claiming it. Reducing the effort is often cheaper than raising the reward, and it comes out of nobody’s prize budget.
One honest caveat: not all friction is waste. Purchase validation, entry limits, and fraud controls exist for good reasons, and stripping them out to juice entry numbers is how promotions end up in trouble. The trick is where the work happens. Receipt OCR, velocity checks, and duplicate detection can run server-side, invisible to the honest entrant — this is much of what the Trevor Services platform does. The shopper’s thirty seconds should be spent scanning and snapping, not proving their innocence.
Walk the journey before shoppers do
The cheapest fix is the one made before launch. When we pressure-test a campaign — the process we’ve described as the Kill Sheet — one exercise earns its keep every time: do the entry yourself, on your own phone, starting from the pack. Time it. Count the fields. Count the taps. If it takes longer than a minute, or you feel a flicker of irritation doing it for a product you’d actually buy, you have your answer before spending a dollar on media.
Once the campaign is live, watch where people stop. Entry journeys fail at specific steps, not in general, and a dashboard that shows drop-off by step turns an argument about the prize into a fix for a form. It’s also the kind of pattern that compounds across campaigns — Trudy, our promotional intelligence platform, draws on thousands of past promotions precisely because the same leaks keep appearing in new packaging.
None of this replaces the strategic work upstream: deciding what the promotion is for and where it sits in the wider shopper plan. Bamboo Marketing’s recent piece on shopper marketing strategy for FMCG covers that side of the equation well. But once the strategy is set, the entry journey is where the campaign is won or quietly lost — and it’s the one lever that costs almost nothing to pull.
If your last promotion underperformed and the post-mortem stopped at the prize, it might be worth walking the entry journey with fresh eyes. We’re happy to talk it through.
