Encouraging Customer Self-Nominations for Award Programs

Shelly Ryder · 2025-08-01 21:41:31.948783+00

Hi all and happy Friday! For those running customer award programs -- do you get most of your submissions from internal folks at your own company, or from customers who self nominate? We've done just one year so far of internal nominations and are introducing customer self nomination this year. How to get the word out to customers to encourage self nomination, when you have to compete with all of the other emails they're getting from your company?

Encouraging Customer Self-Nominations for Award Programs | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

Alexie Glover
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The awards program that I help with do both (and depending on your ecosystem, partners might also be a great pipeline for nominations). We market our awards program across social, on our main webpage, in customer emails, customer-facing teams have email signatures, and we also do ads on our login page. We share slides and email templates with our account teams so they can pitch their customers personally, but we also reach out to our advocacy program members and invite them to submit too.
Alexie Glover
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We have huge success with our supported nominations, where we invite customers for a 45 min interview and create both some sort of customer evidence (story, video, etc.) plus award nominations on their behalf. All they have to do is review and approve! We've had huge success with this pipeline as a lot of customers want to win but don't have time to work on their own nomination ... plus it's been a great pipeline for getting customers who wouldn't traditionally agree to a customer story.
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Shelly Ryder
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Thanks Alexie Glover -- great suggestions. Definitely will make an email template for Sales & CS to use. We are inviting partners to make submissions as well. We have a customer newsletter it can go in. Auto signature is a good idea and not so hard to do. A home page banner would be great too.
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Rachel Ward
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Customers who self nominate. But we set goals for each CS to have submissions I also run an incentive program. I’d a customer wins their CS wins $250 usd per customer winner
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Maura Frost
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We just did our awards program and I’d say it mostly came from CS nominations/nudges. But, to help with self-nomination this year, we used: incentives in our customer advocacy program, kind of like Alexie said, our Customer Education team volunteered to meet with customers to do an interview instead of a written submission if the customer said time was a constraint, we also allowed for video submissions from customers instead of just written as we’ve done in years past!
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Shelly Ryder
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Rachel Ward love the idea of incentivizing the CSM (and AE, or there will be fights 😆) whose customer wins.
Shelly Ryder
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Maura Frost we can certainly incentivize customer submissions via an Influitive challenge. Did you get any video submissions?
Maura Frost
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Shelly Ryder Yes, we did! We ended up surpassing our award submissions goal this year so something in there worked 🤣 we have a pretty cool “grand prize” this year too with a trip to Austin, TX which I also think sweetened the deal for some
Shelly Ryder
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Wow! We're not offering a prize. Just recognition at our virtual Global Summit in December. Whose budget covers the trip?
Maura Frost
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I think it was Marketing this time (it was a joint project for CS and Marketing, I’m in CS) - this is the first time we’ve done any kind of prize other than a custom trophy!
Shelly Ryder
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Oh that's right -- we also did a trophy.
Rita Caruso
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In our case is mostly via social, website and email campaigns but Customer Success really helped this year. Do you want to connect and talk about awards? Let me know and I'll share with you my Microsoft booking
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Shelly Ryder
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Sure thing Rita! Anyone else want to join? We can pick it up via email. I'm sryder@egnyte.com
Shelly Ryder
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Speaking of awards, what do you all do for gifts for the winners? We currently give a trophy, but would love to see us do something more -- like a gift for their team.
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Rita Caruso
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This year a trophy and I sent some vouchers for a follow-up campaign but next year I may think about trophy + branded merchandise! I am sending you an email now so we can connect :)

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