Tips for winning on-pack and purchase necessary promotions
I love on-pack and in-store promotions where you need to buy products to take part, and have won hundreds of prizes over the years, including a car, £15,000 cash and several holidays. If you’re new to this type of competition, I suggest you have a read of my guide to different types of purchase-necessary promotions which explains all about winning moments, instant wins and POPs.
In this post I share my tips to increase your chance of winning prizes in unique code, on-pack and purchase-necessary promotions. If you’re really keen to get involved with what we call PN Comps, I would definitely recommend you check out my Lucky Legends membership, which gives you access to the Compers Shopping List and a forum with more than 170 purchase comps listed!
1. Choose your entry time carefully
‘I’m up all night to get lucky!’ is a great lyric for a comper. If the promotion is a ‘winning moment’ or an hourly prize draw, then you should enter when the least number of people will be taking part. For a 24 hour promotion, that’s usually overnight between about 1am and 5am. I’ve had lots of instant win successes between 5am and 7am! Be prepared before bed – write your codes on a post-it note, or use an app on your phone, so you can enter several comps if you wake in the wee small hours.
Years ago there was a great promotion on Nutrigrain bars where you could win £500 EVERY HOUR, 24 hours a day. Clever compers realised that most people would be texting in their unique entry codes during the daytime, so they were setting alarms for 3am to text their codes in the overnight hourly draws. The result? Lots of big cash prizes for my comping friends – I spent £100 on the bars and had a return of £1500!
These days, a competition with hourly prize draws will usually be restricted to a 9am-9pm or 8am-8pm time slot, meaning that there’s no advantage in entering overnight – but you’ll have a better chance of winning if you avoid lunchtime, when more people will be eating from promotional packs and entering codes! However there are still plenty of instant wins that run overnight.
2. Buy big
The more expensive the qualifying product, the less people will enter and the better your chance of winning – I once bought a washing machine, sent off the receipt and won a car. If you see a purchase-necessary promotion on bottles of champagne or spirits then consider stocking up early for Christmas gifts – but remember to watch your budget! Waitrose often do champagne and spirit promotions – and if you like books, Waterstone’s have some great prize draws when you pre-order.
3. Buy in bulk
Buying dozens of promotional products can be controversial – it’s the type of crazy behaviour that gives compers a bad reputation! Personally, I will happily buy in bulk if it’s a product with a long shelf life or that I can distribute amongst family and friends (not so easy with codes printed inside crisp or chocolate wrappers, but these are rare nowadays). Kitchen roll or toilet roll promotions are a good example. I won’t go overboard with unhealthy products like chocolate and crisps, but I know many compers that do, and have benefitted from big wins as a result.
Buy as many products as you can afford: £25 spent on chocolate might seem crazy but if you win an iPad as a result then it’s worth it – and don’t forget, you have the chocolate to eat too. If you know someone with a Cash & Carry card, see if you can borrow it to buy in bulk at a cheaper price. Be sure to check cashback apps to see if they’re offering discounts on promotional products – and try the Supermarket Comparison tool on the Latest Deals app to compare product prices in major supermarkets!
4. Be an early bird
Always look out for the word WIN on every shopping trip. Check the adverts in supermarket magazines, and keep an eye on websites like www.conveniencestore.co.uk to find out what on-pack comps are coming up and buy promotional packs as soon as you see them. Sometimes distribution of the promo packs can be delayed and they don’t arrive in shops until after the daily instant wins have kicked off: get hold of a pack early on and you might well be the only entrant for the first few days, and if unclaimed ‘winning moments’ instant prizes are rolled over, you might win several times.
In some cases you can take advantage of errors in the early days of promotions too – several lucky compers bagged New York trips as a result of a Bodyform Instant Win glitch. If you get lucky, buy more and try again!
5. Be organised
If you put your promotional packs away in the cupboard, you risk a family member using them and throwing the packaging away before you’ve managed to enter the code online! I always take photos of barcodes, batch codes and unique codes as soon as I get home. Using the iPhone’s built in text recognition tool, I select and copy the codes from the photos, and paste them into my Google Tasks app, along with the web address or text entry details and the final closing date of the promotion. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I have the codes ready to copy from the app.
Keep your receipts safe – but take a photo of them too. I snap a photo of the receipt next to each qualifying product when I unpack my shopping, then save it into a special ‘receipts’ album on my iPhone, then file the original receipt away in my ‘comps entered’ box. Usually if you win, you have to email a photo of your receipt rather than post it, so it saves scrabbling around in a panic looking for the original if you get a winning email, text or phone call.
Watch out if you’re entering a promotion multiple times too – occasionally if you win, the promoter will ask to see your losing receipts and packaging too! Check my tips on how to organise your POPs, receipts and quallies.
6. Join Lucky Legends
Lucky Legends is my membership club for dedicated compers. You can subscribe for £6 a month, or save £12 by paying £60 for a year’s membership. You’ll get access to the invaluable Compers Shopping List and competition chat forum, where you’ll find loads of PN comps along with advice on entering and winning. We find out about promotions before they open, meaning members can be prepared to win on the launch day. I flag recommended promotions on the forum’s special Star Comps tab, and there are monthly live broadcasts where I discuss the comps with the best chance of winning and share my tips! Find out more about Legends here.
7. Enter multiple times
Lots of people enter a competition once and forget about it. But the more entries you have, the more chance you have of winning! Some purchase comps allow you to buy a single product, then enter once a day – take advantage of that, and set yourself a daily reminder or add to your Tasks app. And if it’s one entry per person (rather than per household), can you get your partner to enter too? That will double your chance of a win!
8. Read the T&Cs properly
Check what kind of promotion it is (see my guide) in the T&Cs before you splash out – ensure you have a decent chance of winning! Sometimes you don’t even need to buy the product if it’s just the last 4 digits of a barcode or a keyword that you need to text, or a QR code scan, with no mention of proof-of-purchase in the T&Cs. You have a very slim chance of winning if the on-pack promotion is a Willy Wonka ‘golden ticket’ style, or is using an ‘instant win algorithm’ (look for the text ‘although all prizes are available to be won, there is no guarantee they will be won’ which is a warning that your chance of a win will be poor!). For more on this, read my post Which instant win formats have the worst chance of winning?
Keep in mind that your best chance of winning will usually come from ‘First entry after winning moment’ instant win promotions that run 24 hours a day. See my post what is a winning moment promotion?
9. Look out for litter
Wombling for wins can be fun! Codes on chocolate wrappers, crisp packets and plastic bottles could prove lucrative – carry a plastic bag in your handbag to collect them in (this is of course a great way to keep your neighbourhood clean and tidy too!), or simply snap a photo of the code and throw the litter in a bin. If it’s a unique code promotion you don’t usually need a receipt, as the packaging is considered to be proof of purchase. In the USA I hear people go ‘dumpster diving’ when McDonalds Monopoly is in full swing, in the hope of finding rare properties and instant win codes – perhaps a step too far for me though..
10. Keep an up to date shopping list
Always have a list of current purchase-necessary promotions on your phone, or in your handbag so you can quickly see what you need to buy in certain shops. I use Google Tasks to keep a simple regular shopping list, along with a ‘comps’ shopping list to check too. If you’re a Legends member, you’ll be able to access the Compers Shopping List on your phone when you’re out and about, and can filter it to a specific supermarket too.
Have you had much success with purchase-necessary comps? Let me know in the comments!
I only enter PN on products that i use. my first ever win was when i was 10 years old. i won an LP from Typhoo tea.
I have recently entered several times with the Nescafe win a salary.
I won a mountain bike on a PG tips instant win just before the competition closed. My husband had bought it and it was at the back of the cupboard. That’s my biggest PN comp win to date.
brill yes please
Hi Di, are the PN competitions on Lucky Legends any different to the ones listed on the likes of MSE & Loquax? Considering joining but would like to know if there is much difference in the listing. Thanks in Advance
On MSE you can only share purchase necessary comps if they cost below a certain amount (although I don’t know how much this limit is!) so you won’t find many posted there. I’ve just checked Loquax and they do list a lot, but they’re not as detailed or organised as on the Legends forum – plus the compers shopping list is the main advantage, which you can sort by date, prize, product and store easily!