No Purchase Necessary Sweepstakes: Can I Require a Purchase for Entry?
Yes, but there are a few steps to take to ensure it isn’t ‘consideration’, the main characteristic of an illegal lottery.
Sweepstakes are a great way to incentivize a purchase and trial of new products. If you are using a purchase as a qualifying entry, you must have a free means of entry set up to accept entries.
We refer to this as Alternate Means of Entry or (AMOE). This is a fully managed service we offer in our standard compliance package. The process looks like this:
- We become your sweepstakes administrator and draft your official rules.
- We set up a mailbox to accept mail-in entries.
- We wait for 5 days after the end of the promotion for all mail-in entries to arrive (for compliance purposes)
- We merge the database of mail-in entries with your online entries.
- We conduct your winner drawing (removing any last possibility of consideration from your sweepstakes).
- We can verify and notify winners or you can choose to.
