Everything You Need To Know About Conducting Giveaway

Running a promotional giveaway is one of the most effective channels for a brand to connect with its customers. It’s because everyone loves getting free stuff. A successful giveaway campaign will lead to increased brand awareness and greatly improve traffic to your e-commerce store. Here are a few tips to deliver freebies profitably and ensure most social engagement.

Step 1: Have a crystal clear goal

You can’t know how to run a giveaway before you have a clear-end objective in mind. Having a specific goal is vital to all forms of marketing, and a giveaway is not an exception.  Pinpoint exactly what you are trying to achieve out of this campaign so that you can set up a plan to promote it properly. The options may include:

• Create rumors before product launch: giveaway is a pretty good place to kick off your marketing campaign for a new product. It generates up-front excitement and remembers to include friend reference as the rule of the giveaway. Thereby, watch your customers roll in.
• Increase website visits: freebies can bring a traffic boost to your online store including both constant visitors and new faces. Make sure to get your website ready for the increasingly huge number of viewers.
• Grow your email list subscriptions: your mailing list is a great way to keep customers posted with news and promotions, therefore, increase your sales. It is possible to tell your participants that the winner will be informed via email to be certain that they let you know their real ones.
• Do market research: free gifts help companies to gather qualify content generated from users. It’s a fun way that shall benefit both the brand and the joiners.
• Get more followers on social media: use a small giveaway to build your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever type of social network following, or all of them.

By accurately defining the giveaway goal, you are able to determine a suitable type and budget to promote your campaign.

Step 2: Figure out what kind of giveaway

There are 3 main types of a promotional giveaway, namely, contest, sweepstakes, and lottery.

If you are planning for a contest, it means the participants are required to produce a little effort to win such as sharing a photo or video, writing short essays, or tagging friends, etc. Meanwhile, a sweepstake is based completely on chance. The winners are decided randomly.

With the lottery-type, it is not recommended. It means contestants have to make a purchase or monetary deposit to join. In fact, there are some laws that restrict this type of giveaway. Moreover, it also reduces campaign exposure to customers.

Step 3: Where to run your giveaway?

Some viable options of the platform where you host your campaign are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your Shopify store, or email. Actually, you can run the same contest content on multiple platforms as long as you can manage it. That could make your customers participate more than once and increase your brand exposure.

Using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram as the primary platforms for your giveaways is highly suggested. As the people who follow you on social media are already interested in your business, a giveaway will stimulate their interest even more. Additionally, when they like, comment or share your post, you will be viewed on the newsfeed of their friends.

Conducting a giveaway only via emails or Shopify store may not help you to reach a large number of customers. However, you can still consider it an efficient channel to remind your potential consumers about your presence and do cross-selling, up-selling to existing customers.

If you are considering to hold a campaign to promote your Shopify business, check out these Shopify apps to see if they can help.

Step 4: Make sure the rules are easy to understand

Obviously, you don’t want to create any confusion during running a contest. Depending on your location, your rules may vary. Just try to make sure whatever you’re doing falls within legal regulations. Here are some points commonly stated as giveaway rules:

• Eligibility (age, location restrictions)
• Numbers of prizes
• Special dates (deadline to join, date of winner selection and notified)
• Criteria to consider (for contests)
• Privacy policy regarding participants’ information

If your campaign is hosted on a specific platform, make sure you’re compliant with their regulations as well.

Step 5: Choose relevant prize(s)

What are you going to offer to your customers for free? It should have a close connection with your brand image. For example, if you are selling baby clothes, and you give your winner a laptop. That big prize would attract tons of participants to your contest. But finally, the subscription you get is not your target audience. In this case, a free set of bodysuits would make more sense.

If you intend to give away a physical product, include a photo of it as pictures do speak louder than words. Accordingly, it’s quite influential to incorporate them into your promotion.

Step 6: Estimate the cash needed to achieve your goal

When setting a budget, you have to be realistic and include the cost of the prize(s). If the conditions to enter your contest is high, your conversion rate will be low and vice versa. For example, you want people to do a reaction video and submit it, which takes pretty much effort. The prize needs to be very appealing and costs more. In addition, you must also spend a significant budget so that information about the giveaway can reach a very large number of people. Conversely, if you just need participants to share a post on their social media, which takes a little effort, it’s possible to offer a small prize.

Step 7: After-giveaway activities

Once you’ve selected and verified the winner(s), contact them immediately and ask for permission to use their information or picture (if possible) to announce prizes for the contest. For the winner announcement, try to make it beautiful, don’t just send it out in a boring box. It will make the winner feel special and there is a higher chance that they will spread the words about your brand.

It’s pretty sure that you gain some results over the giveaway, make an analysis to better understand the customers in your industry and do it in a more superior way next time.