Recordsforce, in partnership with Octacom, is a leading provider in helping mail-in sweepstakes and AMOE companies go paperless. If you’re not already familiar, you may be asking what are sweepstakes? Sweepstakes or AMOE’s, similar to contests and lotteries, are a way for people to have a chance to win prizes. When it comes to mail-in sweepstakes, participants enter by mailing the sweepstakes company an envelope with their information in, and the winner is drawn at random from all the valid entries. This can average up to about 3 million envelopes being received by the sweepstakes company per month.
That is quite a lot of paper and information that needs to be kept organized, while also taking up precious office space. The best way to easily manage and retrieve those entries is by digitizing them and extracting the entrant data off of them.
So how do we go about digitizing mail-in sweepstakes entries? The process is the same as any other digital mailroom solution. The letters are mailed to a PO Box that Recordsforce checks on daily. We prepare the sweepstakes entries for scanning by removing the entries from the envelopes and organizing both the entry and envelope to move through the high-speed scanners. The documents are then scanned and quality reviewed for clarity. Next, we capture the data required by the company from the entries, such as first name, last name, address, email, postmark date and the name of the specific contest. Lastly, we deliver those images and data back to the company running the contest.
On the backend, Recordsforce stores the physical sweepstakes entries until a certain period of time after the contest has ended. We do this in case the company needs the physical copies to validate authenticity and equity of the contest.
In all, digitizing your sweepstakes process will drastically reduce the time and money spent on manually handling your mail and allows your company to save resources like office space. If you’re interested in learning more about sweepstakes scanning and data extraction, contact us!