How To Use Giveaways To Gain Followers, Subscribers & Customers

Do you want to use giveaways to gain more subscribers, followers, and customers?

Giveaway is a marketing strategy that involves offering freebies or discounted rates to your prospects with hopes of gaining their attention and making sales. If done correctly, giveaways can be an inexpensive way to acquire customers and grow your brand.

According to Outgrow, contest emails have the highest average open rate of 8.8% when compared to other email campaigns, 33.3% of Giveaway participants accept to receive information about the brand, and 94.46% share the content immediately after they register.

But how do you turn this attention into profit?

In this article, we will walk through organizing giveaways that will convert and bring subscribers followers, and customers to your business.

How to Organize Giveaways that Generate Leads

Running a giveaway campaign is more than announcing a discount or a freebie to your customers or online followers. There are a couple of other essential things that you should keep in mind if you want to run a successful giveaway campaign.

This section will examine various critical components to help you run a successful giveaway campaign.

1. Set a Clear Goal

Like every marketing strategy, Giveaway campaigns are a means to an end. You don’t want to risk reducing your revenue without clearly defining the campaign’s purpose. Your goal explains what you want to achieve, within which timeframe, and the metrics you would monitor to ascertain that you have reached it.

As a rule of thumb, your goals must be SMART, which means that they should be:

• Specific: What do you want to achieve? Instead of saying you want to grow your business, be more specific. What area do you want to grow with the Giveaway? Is it your revenue, visibility, or subscribers?
• Measurable: Your goal should not just be specific but measurable. If you want to grow your revenue, state the growth rate.
• Attainable: Is your goal realistic? If you are introducing a new product as a startup, it is unlikely that you can use Giveaway to grow your revenue to X2 your capital. A more realistic goal is to focus on your visibility and followers.
• Relevant: While you must set clear and attainable goals, these goals must fit into your brand’s overall vision. Is your goal relevant? Don’t aim to increase visibility among the younger demographic when your customers are mainly older.
• Time-bound: Your goal remains a wish until you set a timeframe within which you want to achieve it. Do you want a 20% increase in subscribers by the end of the Giveaway, or do you want to see it while the campaign is on?

2). Define your target audience and where they are in the sales funnel

To achieve your goal, you need to identify your target audience from your target market. Your target market is the group of people for whom your product is meant, while your target audience is the smaller group of people who would buy the product.

For instance, if you sell children’s clothes, although your target market may be infants between the ages of 0 and 9 years, your target audience (the group your Giveaway campaign should be focused on) is their parents.

After mapping your target audience, the next step is identifying their location in your sales funnel. A sales funnel is a marketing model that illustrates your prospects’ journey as they convert from page visitors to customers.

The sales funnel includes:

i. The Awareness Stage: This is where your target audience comes across your brand for the first time. At this point, they are followers. If your giveaway campaign is to focus on your audience in this stage, the goal will be to convert them to the next stage on the funnel.

This will involve giving them enough content to consider buying from you. Explore Giveaways like free consultations or an exclusive peek behind the scenes of product production.

ii. The Consideration Stage: At this stage, your prospects are considering buying from you. To help them move to the next stage, your giveaway can include free trials or early access to a new feature.

iii. The Conversion Stage: At this stage, your prospects are sure you are the best fit and want to buy from you. Your giveaway should include exclusive discounts or personalized bundles to compel them to do this.

iv. The Loyalty Stage: Your prospects are now customers and have bought from you for the first time. A giveaway campaign focused on this stage wants to convert your first-time customers into loyal customers. The campaign can include Raffle-draws that give an extra product or free repair of a damaged one.

Defining who your target audience is and grouping them according to where they are in the sales funnel will help you choose the best-converting giveaway.

3). Choose a type of giveaway:

After setting a SMART goal and defining your target audience, you need to choose a type of Giveaway based on the sales funnel stage you are focusing on.

If the goal of your campaign is to increase your prospect in the awareness stage by gaining more followers, you should consider:

1. A giveaway with a simple entry requirement: this could be in the form of Raffle-draws where a page visitor gets a unique number to participate after following you. This type of campaign works because your prospects are not committed to your content in the awareness stage. They are likely to skip your page if your campaign has a strenuous entry requirement (even if it’s for free).
2. Product trials and free consultation; with this, they don’t spend money while getting first-hand experience on how your product works. This campaign is also a perfect fit for nurturing followers from the awareness to the consideration stage.

If your campaign aims to gain customers, your focus should be on your conversion stage. You can consider:

a). Exclusive discounts: Since this group has already decided to buy from you, offering exclusive discounts can give them the final push to complete their order.

b). Personalized bundles: For some of your clients, the reason for the delay in their purchase is how your products are grouped. If you can, give them a chance to personalize the grouping process.

4). Use compelling visuals and set a clear call to action

Words are not enough. Even the best copy needs compelling visuals to sell. Whether you are using visuals in the form of pictures or videos, apart from adequately articulating the message of the campaign, ensure it can also captivate the attention of your target audience.

Don’t assume that your prospects know the action you want them to take when they read the Giveaway campaign. Your CTA should be precise, understandable, and visible in your content.

5). Promote the Giveaway

After choosing a Giveaway type and creating visuals for it, the next step is to promote it. There are several options you can explore;

A. Email: This option is perfect if you already have a mailing list. This is because, with a segmented list, you can focus on the right audience or create various Giveaway content for each segment.

When sending a Giveaway email campaign, there are four types of emails you should send:

1. Launch email: This email informs subscribers about your Giveaway, the launch date, and criteria and asks them to share with their friends. You can make your launch email a countdown series to build your subscribers’ anticipation.
2. Engagement email: This email is just to remind your subscribers of your ongoing contest and how much time they have left. You can also use it to offer help and show your customer service enterprise.
3. Last chance to join email: This creates a sense of missing out and urgency. It reminds them of the giveaway deadline.
4. Winner announcement email: This email notifies all your subscribers of the contest winners. You can also offer consolation prizes to all participants of the campaign.

B. Social media: This option is a perfect fit if the goal of your campaign is to create awareness and grow your followers. Social media platforms make it easy to follow, refer, and share your campaign content. You can also use it to collaborate with influencers in your niche.

C. Advertising: This can be done on social media or search engines. Social media platforms encourage you to run sponsored ads that are targeted based on your description of the target audience. With this, you can reach people who interact with your competitors or those who like content that is affiliated with yours.

Search engine advertisements are sponsored posts that appear as the first article when a related keyword is searched. This option is perfect for reaching your target audience in the consideration and conversion stages.

Conclusion: After the giveaway, what’s next?

After running a Giveaway campaign, it’s important to analyze your results. Did you achieve your goal? How did your audience respond to the giveaway? Consider using A/B tests for your campaigns. This will help you track your audience’s preferences and optimize future campaigns.

Once you’ve analyzed the results, reach out to the winners of the Giveaway and discuss their experience with your product. This engagement can encourage customer loyalty and referral to your brand.