How to Create and Manage Your Dream Contest in Chatbot Creator

One of the most powerful marketing tools – a way to engage company clients and build a stronger relationship with them. Competitions, lotteries and quizzes. Either with prizes worth thousands of dollars or created on a smaller scale. They can be built and managed faster, easier and cost-efficiently in chatbots. Since you are reading this article, you’ll get to know what opportunities they offer. And how to create them step-by-step using the Chatbot Creator platform. 

A contest in Chatbot Creator platform – possibilities 

You can create and manage a contest within a platform in Chatbot Creator. The panel enables you to freely arrange and create columns for competition entries and as a result, collect entries from users. Using the platform you can:

1. Create a contest

Choose the type of contest, based on:

• text – you can save messages entered by users as entries for a contest,
• photo – to create competitions, in which the user submits photographs,
• video and audio file – to let people send you a video or musical works,
• combined – where you let users submit both text and other multimedia forms,

2. Manage entries in the Chatbot Creator competition panel

The Chatbot Creator contest panel allows you to easily and quickly manage competition works. Before the start, you can adjust the panel to your needs. Here you can:

• Choose what other users data you’d like to collect – whether it’s the time in which they responded to questions, or an e-mail address or location, depending on your needs and competition rules,
• Mark the winner(s) – you can choose how many places you want to mark, for example, if we have 3 prizes in a given competition (you mark 3 columns to mark individual places). 

3. Sending push notification to participants of the contest

You can easily set push notifications to participants in Chatbot Creator: winners, those who didn’t win, all of them, or those who started but haven’t finished the competition. It’s a great and effective communication tool. You choose the right target with one click and create a push message. Automatically and easily. 

What’s more, you can download all data automatically in xlsx (Excel). 

Setting a Competition in Chatbot Creator step by step

Creating a competition takes 2 steps in Chatbot Creator: setting a contest in the “competition” panel and creating a contest flow in the “build a bot” tab.

It’s really intuitive so with this guide you’ll be able to do it fast and conveniently. Let’s begin.

STEP 1: Choose the Type of your Competitiont – competition module

• Go to the competition bookmark. This is a place where you choose the type of contest and data you want to collect from users in the contest table.
  
• Click on the add competition button.
•  Enter your competition’s name – the name will be displayed only for you in the platform’s panel. It will help you find your contest among the others you’ve created.
  
• Now you can decide whether you want to start the competition manually – when you want – it or set a specific time range when the contest in a chatbot will start. The second option is a great help if the competition is about to start at a time during which you are normally asleep. 🙂

• Now you choose the type of contest: whether it is a competition for a photo, audio, video, text or mixed. It will work as validation for submitting entries. So when users upload the wrong format of work, the chatbot will inform them about it and won’t accept it.
  The user must actually send the type of file that was demanded in order to join the competition.
• After choosing the contest type, you decide if users can take part in it countless times, just once, once a day etc. So If we set 1 entry per day and the user who already sent it tries to submit another one, the chatbot will deploy a default message that this is not possible.

STEP 2: Set up the Chatbot Contest Table – competitions module

It’s about time to set up columns in the table, where your chatbot will place information from the contest participant. Your table by default will include the first and last name of the participant, the submitted entry and the date. The rest can be customized to suit your needs. 

The table will appear in the competition panel after your contest is published. Here you’ll see all of the submitted works and be able to mark people. It’s a crucial moment because the table is your contest management center. 

How do I set up a table in Chatbot Creator?

We are still in competition module. You simply add a column label (name) that will appear in your contest table. Then choose the type of information that will be collected. 

For example

If you want to hand over 3 prizes, you have to make 3 columns called 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place (or however you want) and then set a columns’ type for “check the winner”. Now you’ll be able to mark your winners and send them a notification about the victory.

You can also add additional columns and data from users such as: 

• time in which the participant answered a question (if we make “question” content)
• points they gained (if we made a quiz)
• location etc. 

You can create up to 10 columns. 

The last step you take in competition module is clicking on “add a competition button”. Voila. 

The next view is your contests’ list where you’ll see all the submitted contests. You can duplicate or delete each of them. All the about information when it starts/ends is found under the name of the contest (depending on whether it is active or not). From this point you can still change it, duplicate it or delete it. You can also enter the contest and view all users applications.

Now let’s move to the second part – creating a block with the contest to add messages that would be displayed to users in Messenger.

STEP 3 – Create contest Blocks – the Create a Bot Module

Start with adding a welcome message:

• press add element to a block
• message with a button and place it at the top of the create a bot workplace. 

Write what participants can do in the competition chatbot and explain what this is all about to them. By adding new messages you can create a conversation flow – here you can show them prizes.

You should also inform people about the terms and regulations of your contest or – if needed – set a gate which they have to accept to enter the competition. 

To collect entries you have to connect your contest created in competittion module with a bot structure. To do so, prepare the block to which users will be redirected if they agree to take part in the competition. Then within its structure:

• press add an element to the block
• click add an entry to competition
• choose the contest you’ve already created in the contest panel

Here you will see your additional column you’ve chosen in the competition module.

You have to set variables under which the data should be collected in the column. Let’s assume that you want to collect participants email. You simply add a variable eg. {{participants_email}} in the box next to the name of the custom column that you set in the competition module. Check out how we do it in the video below. 

In a conversation flow we have to collect data which are gonna be saved under your „extra” variable. In our case we’ ask a users for „email” before asking for uploading entry. We have to collect this data before the window with contest.

Now you can customize and change the chatbot’s default answers. You are provided with options, as seen below:

•  if the format of the entered application is wrong (e.g. someone sends an audio file instead of a photo), 
•  if only one entry per person is allowed and someone tries to submit another work 
•  if the competition has ended.

You can add buttons for each of the answers . If participants get this message they can move to other places (e.g. with the option of returning to the main menu). 

Don’t forget about adding a goodbye message. 

For example:

Thanks for submitting your photo. We will inform you about the results of competition.

Remember to save everything on production – if you don’t, work may disappear. Get into the habit of saving every step you take. If the chatbot is connected to a Facebook profile, the contest will be published at the date you set in 1 step. If someone submits an entry (in our case, a photo), it will appear in the contest table with columns in Chatbot Creator.

What does the Competition table in Chatbot Creator look like?

The contest table – as you saw at the beginning – is placed in the competition module. The table contains the participants’ data that we wanted to collect: 

• first name, last name, 
• the photo which they uploaded, 
• checkboxes, where we can manage winners works – mark first place, second place etc., 
• the additional variable we wanted to collect,
• the date when the contest entry was added.

Additional: Sending Push Notifications to Participants 

You can choose people who will get contest notifications from the level of your table. Everything happens automatically. We can inform participants that e.g.: 

• the competition has ended 
• they have not won this time
• the contest is still open and they can add another work

What’s really great is that we will also able to send messages to a specific group of people who took part in the competition. 

Options that appear here include:  

•  send a message to all people who took part in the competition (added a competition entry)
• to those who did not win prizes,
• who took 1st or 2nd place (which we have in our table).

After clicking, we are redirected to the broadcast (push notifications) panel and we already have the ID of the users to whom this message should go in the message recipients list. We do not have to do it ourselves, the system does it for us. All entries can also be downloaded automatically to xls – for example Excel. 

To know more about sending push notifications, read this article on the Chatbot Creator blog.

Why do Competitions in Chatbots Work?

We have come to the end of our journey. Now you can organize a chatbot contest creation in Chatbot Creator. Let’s talk for a while about the advantages of such a solution. 

It would take a few pages to describe the features of contests in Messenger chatbots. But why waste words. Let’s put it briefly – why actually organizing competitions in chatbot works?

1. It’s faster and cheaper than creating a contest Landing Page which needs the additional work of developers and designers; 
2. It is created in the same environment as your Facebook fan page – which makes it a good way of gaining more fans on your social media profiles; 
3. Managing the contest is easier – it takes place in one panel in the chatbot structure; you can review sent works, flag them, choose winners, 
4. You can encourage people by sending them push notifications; With a push, you can also send them information about a victory or the next part of the contest. 
5. It’s more accessible – due to Messenger’s popularity it’s easier to take part in the contest;

If you have additional questions – whether technical or connected to design or the copywriting part of chatbot creation, you reach us on Facebook or by e-mail.