Are Giveaways Good To Increase Your Sales?
Giveaways can be used to market your products and services online or offline.
Online giveaways are easy.
You are then given the prize and begin to market to your subscribers by email.
Many giveaways have been successful.
Is it worth the time and effort to run giveaways? Let’s get started.
Hosting a giveaway
1 Find out the benefits and drawbacks
Giving away giveaways doesn’t always work. It is possible to spend lots of money but get no subscribers.
A free product is not enough.
Some industries or websites are not able to share their content in large numbers. Products of mass interest like a free iPad will struggle to get noticed or reach the right people
Spy tools are useful for setting expectations. Review previous giveaways first before planning.
2 Get the basics, and then set your goals
You must clearly define your goals, and where your giveaway falls within that scope. It is important to clearly define your goals if you are trying to increase sales or subscribe to email lists.
3 Choose an Audience or Product
You must also determine your target audience and the product that you use.
An Apple Watch or iPad could be given away to nearly unlimited people. It means anyone can be attentive.
You can target similar audiences with the product or connect deeper with your audience. But, it is up to you to decide what your product allows.
You could only give away Ahrefs subscriptions to advanced search engine tools. However, this would limit your audience.
A SEMrush subscription or web hosting account could be given to a greater audience.
It is a general rule that the prize should be equal to the potential audience If the prize is to be targeted, it must be more coveted and targeted.
People should love it, but they shouldn’t use it every day. This would be a good idea for collectibles or brand-name items.
4 Map and define a promotion program
As with all content, you must create a promotional plan. Most people know that there’s always a catch ).
If you have existing audiences, it is possible to start by reaching them.
This double announcement is more pertinent to the site’s media section.
5. Install your infrastructure
Software is required to gather entries, run the contest, and choose a winner. The software should also offer a smooth, optimized user experience.
You could build this product.
It doesn’t matter which product you select, setting up KingSumo is easy.
5a. Get the plugin, and then buy it
5b. 5b.
5c. Set your settings, and then write the copy. (located under WordPress Sidebar Settings-> KingSumo).
5d. Links to email capture platforms, like MailChimp
5e. 5e.
Log into Google Analytics to find the UA code.
5f. Polish design
Be sure to have the correct images, and include them in your giveaway.
5g. 5g.
Configure giveaway settings under Settings. You can manage individual giveaways by using the KingSumo link in the Dashboard.
6. Run it!
Once you have published your page you will be able to go to your promotional plan. The rules and confirmations of email addresses are what determine final approval.
Send a notification to winners and the winner announcement, then deliver your prize.
For final share metrics, you will need to run the URL through a sharing program like Experier.com. Also, your analytics can be viewed to see total sessions as well as your email platform’s submissions.
My Giveaway Experience
Here’s how to run a giveaway. What happens behind the scenes?
A giveaway was held on this site as part of the 100th-anniversary issue of our newsletter. There were three objectives.
Our goal was to show how giveaways compare to paid channels. To get people to sign up, I’d pay far more than $1 for most subscribers.
Our goal was to have at least half of all newsletter subscriptions opened by Subscribers to our newsletter had to sign up for the newsletter.
The goal was to increase brand awareness. There are many ways to measure this. For example, if our baseline engagement on Twitter doubles, it would be considered successful.
I was selling a collection of Seth Godin books. People who learn are also valued.
My goal was to make a product that people love but don’t buy. Noah Kagan of Okdork.com ran the same giveaway with great success.
At the time, manual outreach wasn’t something that I was able to do. The promotion plan was heavily dependent on pay.
I promoted to our newsletter subscribers. In total, the giveaway cost $400.
Twitter Ads has a great feature called Tailored Users. Twitter analyzes your email list and creates a “Lookalike” audience for your campaign. The audience created will look very much like your uploaded audience.
100 tweet addresses were scraped by me from people who shared Noah Kagan’s Seth Godin promotion back in 2013. It is in the same vein as Twitter’s Tailored Account Terms and Services – you can use this tactic at YOUR own risk ).
I used Twitter to create a lookalike audience. Twitter sets a budget, approves it, and then creates the audience.
Twitter generated a total of 34 organic and paid entries with $131 in spending.
I used demographic targeting to target people who like AppSumo and Noah Kagan.
Facebook should have used the Custom Audience feature. Before launching the campaign, we set a budget.
Facebook generated a total of organic and paid entries 67 with $117 in ad spend.
StumbleUpon
Based on our previous StumbleUpon experiences, we thought a giveaway might be an interesting idea. I could also get a lot of traffic for $155
*Note: StumbleUpon has been removed. In hindsight, we would have moved the budget to Google Ads & Pinterest.
I designed a marketing campaign for the Entrepreneurship/Marketing Interest Bundle and let it go live.
StumbleUpon created 9 entries with $100 in total.
Results
239 emails were received and there were 179 contestants confirmed for the $503 prize. One subscriber was signed up when they pitched us to them.
We spent $2.10 on email and $503 per customer for quality.
The contest was an absolute failure …. due to our very tight objectives and quirky definitions of “repitching”.
The side benefits were many.
You can make someone’s day. This is intangible and should only be taken into consideration when marketing campaigns are being run.
I was able to network with some of my favorite marketers through the giveaway.
It was easy to feel a close connection with the readers. There were many wonderful emails and great feedback, as well as many interactions that I would have never imagined.
Inspirations for better giveaways
The traditional marketing funnel places giveaways under the “Awareness” category. It is an inexpensive way to capture email addresses and move people through your funnel. It doesn’t always work.
They are more aware that your products/services exist than they might be.
You can improve your giveaway marketing by making giveaways yourself or watching other giveaways in different industries.
Get in touch with your audience
Instead of trying to generate consideration/awareness among new audiences, make connecting with your current audience a primary goal. This is a reverse funnel, but it works. For the sake of building karma, build karma with your audience. This approach is described by Ben Chestnut, MailChimp.
Understanding relationships
This is a great way for you to build a relationship with another business. Promote your business or product by selecting a product from a new creator and sharing it.
A giveaway is promoting products.
Social Viralness
Sometimes it’s worth making social virality for the sake.
When you build up to a product launch, you might notice a “wow! This company is everywhere at once!” effect.
There will be lots of chatter on social media, blog posts, podcast interviews, and guest posts.
It is not an isolated tactic. This tactic works in conjunction with other channels. Giving away giveaways is a great option.
The EZ Dent of Athens, GA held a Yeti Cooler Contest that was restricted to their local area. Their goal was to increase organic reach on Instagram.
AdEspresso offers a detailed article about Facebook Contests.
Retargeting Audience
Based on how many people visit your giveaway page, you can create new data pools. This allows you to reach more of your visitors with different offers.
Retargeting audiences can be used to reach new audiences with Google. The email submissions can also be used to target lookalike audiences via Facebook and Twitter.
Email Captures*
This idea is very simple and serves the same purpose as an online giveaway, but there’s a caveat. Capture the emails and subscribe them to your newsletter/autoresponder/blog update list. Make sure to clearly state this in the giveaway. After the giveaway ends, remove unsubscribers and non-responders.
People are lazy and often ambivalent.
We can conclude that giveaways are a great marketing tool but don’t work for everyone.
Next steps
Think about whether you have the budget for a giveaway. Set goals and spend the majority of your time on promotion.
Use Plug and Play Software such as KingSumo.io or Gleam.io to Enter the Rafflecopter.
You should also measure the results against your goals, and develop an after-giveaway strategy, such as retargeting or retargeting. To get the best out of them.
