You control your own destiny. A common reason brands choose promotional giveaways over other forms of lead generation is because they naturally drive more engagement from participants. Remember, your prospects are being exposed to all sorts of noise and information when they are online.
Here are some promotional giveaway ideas for increasing engagement:. The best promotional giveaways are fun. They use elements of gamification to elicit feelings of intrigue and excitement in participants.
For example, 23 City Blocks Catering decided to give away 23 different prizes, on 23 different days. This is a crafty way to inspire curiosity and create engagement in a giveaway.
Gamification giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Multi-Day Giveaway Calendar template View and Create Your Own. The next promotional giveaway idea to increase engagement is to use interactive marketing techniques.
Below is an example from Grainfather Brewing who have used the concept of a wishlist to entice participants to engage with and enter their giveaway:.
User-generated content is a powerful force on social media and promotional giveaways are a great way to tap into this phenomenon. To think that your giveaway could be shared with other prospects of your business without your intervention is quite amazing.
All you need to do is provide participants the tools and encouragement they need to do so. A popular way of encouraging user-generated content from giveaway contestants is to run a photo contest.
The key to a successful photo contest is striking a balance between ease and effort. The photo contest giveaway from Perky Pet below does a great job of striking this balance by encouraging participants to decorate, take a photo, enter, and share.
User-generated content giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Photo Upload Giveaway template. View and Create Your Own. Leads and participants are very different things. If you want to get a ton of participants for your contest then give away a holiday or a car.
But if you want to generate leads, you need to make the whole experience relevant to your ideal prospects. Everything from the way you market the giveaway to the prizes you offer, should all align with the goals and interests of your target customers.
Holiday Parks New Zealand does a great job of qualifying prospects in the example below by using a quiz to narrow potential participants. Relevant giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Trivia Quiz template.
Urgency makes us act now, instead of later. When it comes to promotional giveaways, you can create urgency with participants by limiting the amount of time the promotion is running.
Visual triggers such as countdown timers or expiring prizes on your landing page persuade people to enter the competition. Urgency giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Multi-Day Giveaway Calendar template. Which is why the offer you present to giveaway participants is a vital part of lead generation.
Your offer needs to have a high perceived value with your ideal customers in order for them to want to enter the contest. If you want to make the most of the leads you capture from your contest then you need to also think about nurturing those leads and guiding them through the buying process.
Here are some tips for doing so. The best lead-nurturing campaigns are multi-channel. On top of social media, your giveaways and follow-up process should make the most of pay-per-click campaigns, remarketing ads, blog posts, email campaigns, and any other channel that makes sense for your target audience.
The goal is to generate visibility for your brand before the giveaway, during the giveaway, and then after the giveaway when you are trying to close sales. Creating a multi-channel experience for your prospects is one thing, but it needs to be consistent for it to have the biggest impact.
Your offer, branding , timing and messaging all need to align across every channel you use. Consistency is what instills brand recognition and recall. By the time you have a conversation with a prospect, they should already recognize your business. This creates a sense of familiarity and trust, which accelerates the sales process.
For example, you may test conversion elements at each stage of the campaign. With this information, you can improve the performance of your promotional giveaway next time.
Even though the virality of your contest is somewhat left to luck, there are a couple of things you can do to increase the chance of this happening.
Here are some ideas Before launching your giveaway, take a moment to conduct some research and identify a topic or idea that has a proven track record. For example, you could use a keyword research tool to determine if your giveaway topic has a lot of Google search volume.
If it does, optimize your giveaway landing page for SEO and try to rank in search. Ready to plan a contest or giveaway of your own? Based on Instagram's promotion guidelines as well as some of our own best practices , here's a list of rules we recommend you include in your contest or giveaway:.
Now let's take a look at some examples of Instagram contests and giveaways. Most of the examples are from small companies or bloggers since these are the kinds of folks who tend to not have huge marketing teams to execute their ideas. In other words, anyone could run a contest like the ones featured below.
What they did right: Rachel Off Duty posted right up front that her contest wasn't associated with Instagram. She also included clear instructions for how people could enter her giveaway. She asked people to share a genuine comment which she could eventually use to learn more about the kinds of activities her followers enjoy.
What could be better: To build an email list, rather than just collect new followers, Rachel Off Duty could have offered people extra chances to win by creating a simple landing page which she linked to from her bio. She could also use ShortStack's email marketing features to confirm entries and send other emails to let her followers know about upcoming events or even when she published a new blog post.
What they did right: Westy Co. Like Rachel Off Duty, they state clearly that the contest isn't affiliated with Instagram. What they could have done better: I'm not a huge fan of contests that ask participants to tag a bunch of friends for one thing, friends might not be the right audience for the brand.
Confession: whenever I enter a "tag to enter" Instagram contest I tag my daughter -- no matter what the product is. I'm allowed to annoy her : but I don't want to annoy my friends.
Instead, they could have asked people to share their own photos using Westy Co. What they did right: The University of North Carolina, Wilmington, used a contest to collect user-generated content from a very specific community and they included every necessary detail about the entry period.
What could be better: If UNCW wanted to use the UGC they collected on the school's website or in other collateral, they could have used software like ShortStack to pull all the entries into a gallery. The image also contains a lot of copy that would probably have been better if published on a landing page.
What they did right: Suezhomefaker lets participants know about entry restrictions, including age and location, and she tells them exactly when she'll announce the winner, right down to the time zone. What could be better: In order to receive extra chances to win, Suezhomefaker asks people to repost her image and tag her and the brand whose products she's giving away.
There's no easy way for her to check to see if people have actually done what she asked -- it's a manual process. To make things easier and more useful for her, she could have awarded extra points to people who navigated to a landing page from a link in her bio and filled out a short form.
What they did right: Honestly, this Australian coffee brand -- with a modest 4, Instagram followers -- is doing so many things right! They added a link in their bio which directed people to a landing page with details about their new product. The landing page also has a popup that requests an email address for people who want to receive their newsletter and news about special events.
A carefully designed email giveaway will boost all of your social media profiles and can lead directly to more sales. While any giveaway contest will attract attention, you should be extra careful about the gift.
The goal here is not just to draw attention to your brand, but to attract potential customers. However, unless you sell iPhone accessories or service mobile phones, that kind of attention will hardly monetize later. For that reason, gift products your target audience would love having, ideally something from your own roster.
But if you give away the full Harry Potter boxed set, you can be sure that both parents and kids will be interested! And even more importantly, once the giveaway is over that interest will remain. Since they fit your buyer personas much better, your future marketing efforts will be much more effective.
But that would be leaving so much opportunity on the table! Using tools designed specifically for giveaways and prize contests will give you more advanced options, including the option for contestants to collect points by sharing the giveaway— more on that later.
The first giveaway email should go to your existing email list. Not only will this email get you more participants, but it will also tell you who the most engaged email subscribers are.
Those who regularly open your emails and sign up for the giveaway when they learn about it are probably ideal customers. Note that information for your future marketing efforts.
Subject: BIRTHDAY GIVEAWAY — Earn a yearly supply of our product and other prizes. The countdown has started: 10 days from now, our birthday giveaway begins! Five other winners will get rewards, too. And each participant will get a special surprise at the end!
Stay tuned for an email with more details in the upcoming days. The launch day giveaway emails should not only have the right copy, but also be visually appealing.
Image source: ReallyGoodEmails. Just make sure the prize is mentioned in the subject line. The email body should include a thank you note, as well as the most important part of the whole giveaway—several ways for the participant to improve their odds of winning by sharing.
This can be anything from following your Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts to liking a specific YouTube video, sharing a giveaway link with friends, etc. This is another reason we recommend using giveaway apps, as they have plenty of functionalities integrated.
Image source: Woorise. The fourth giveaway email in the sequence is there to re-engage with contestants. This email should repeat how they can improve their chances of winning, especially because some of your recipients probably marked the thank you email as read without actually reading it— it happens!
Also, if you have a leaderboard, you can mention it in this email. This giveaway email should trigger the good old fear of missing out, or FOMO. Here, you need a compelling subject line to prompt urgency.
The body text should also prompt urgency , either by displaying a countdown timer or a strong call to action that increases the sense of FOMO:. The giveaway email announcing the winner is a tricky one, as most people will feel disappointed.
As a result, they might even unsubscribe from your list. To prevent this from happening, you can consider giving out consolation prizes.
Here's a step-by-step guide to throwing a successful Instagram giveaway, complete with tips for laying down the rules, promoting your giveaway We'll cover the basic types of Instagram giveaways and eight successful Instagram giveaway examples that get results 11 giveaways, 11 different marketing objectives. Use these real examples of Instagram giveaways to help plan your own
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