They help brands grow their marketing lists, giving them the opportunity to transform one-off website visitors into engaged ecommerce leads and, eventually, paying customers. As with any campaign, the first step to planning a promotional giveaway is to define the objective s you hope to achieve.

Common goals include:. If they love browsing necklaces or buy a new bed cover every six months, you can hit their inbox with a targeted promotion at exactly the right time. Many brands use promotional giveaways to increase engagement on social media and grow their follower counts, just like in this example from our pals at Haute Hijab :.

Most of these contests follow a similar format, offering followers the chance to win a prize in exchange for:. This is an easy way to reach new audiences on social media—although, clearly, there are no guarantees that those people will follow you or engage with your content let alone buy from you.

Rather than asking customers to comment on your social posts or give you their email address, task them with sharing photos and videos of them using and enjoying your product.

Referral campaigns are typically about generating sales instead of leads. So they tend to offer more attractive, guaranteed rewards.

Rather than giving participants the chance to win a prize, you might offer a free product or even a cash incentive to both the referrer and the referred customer. Like any type of promotion, it makes most sense to launch your giveaway campaign during slower sales periods for your brand.

Beyond that, build your launch around times when engagement is highest across your chosen promotional channels. For instance, the best time to send emails is generally on Tuesdays and Thursdays….

Done well, promotional giveaways can grow your marketing list, generate customer referrals, and drive sales and revenue. Get it wrong and you risk devaluing your brand and turning off loyal customers. Here are five best practices to boost your chances of running a successful giveaway….

Or if you want to capture more email addresses, try targeting new customers visiting your website via onsite popups. The easiest solution is to give away your own products.

With a little creativity, you might be able to identify a theme and prize that makes for a more engaging contest. For a brand like The White Company , which sells luxury homeware and clothing, the most obvious strategy is to offer up a fancy duvet set or a botanical candle as a prize.

Instead, it gave customers the chance to win a mini-break at a luxury cottage on the English coast:. Because The White Company helped style the property, effectively creating a physical case study for its whole aesthetic ; something aspirational to inspire its audience.

As with the Haute Hijab example I shared earlier in this article, the most obvious approach is to make social engagement a key element of your campaign—prompting followers to comment on a post or tag a friend in order to enter.

But you can also leverage platforms like Instagram and TikTok to raise awareness of your giveaway and direct followers to register on a dedicated competition landing page. In the marketing world, simple is always best, and giveaways are no different. Sure, your legal team will likely want to cover your back with a bunch of terms and conditions.

But the overarching rules of the competition—how to enter, what the prize is, and when the winner will be announced—should be easily digestible. National lotteries are a good example.

They give away millions of dollars, yet all you have to do to enter is buy a ticket and match some numbers. Anyone can understand it.

As tempting as it sounds, offering a new iPhone in your giveaway will do little good for you. Because attractive but irrelevant prizes are spam magnets. Instead, keep your prize relevant to your products and your value proposition.

Before planning your next giveaway, make sure that it serves your conversion goals. Rather, it speaks to your buyer persona. With a relevant prize that resonates with your buyer persona, you can actually promote your online store, on top of collecting email addresses.

Take this example by J. Crew Factory :. The company hosts a spring giveaway on their site and creates a dedicated landing page for it. The big prize is a package that includes a gift card winners can spend on J. If you want to make the prize more desirable, you can combine a gift card with other things, as J.

Crew Factory does. This way, visitors will get the chance to try your products. And it increases their likelihood of becoming return customers. Notice how J. Crew Factory asks if you want to sign up for their email list as the last step and leaves it optional.

Give participants the space to decide for themselves, instead of preselecting the newsletter checkbox. One major advantage of hosting an onsite giveaway is the ability to customize every part of your contest.

With an onsite giveaway campaign, you can decide what actions visitors should take, which information they should submit, and where they should go next.

Writing compelling campaign copy and a benefit-driven call-to-action CTA are the two pillars of an effective giveaway campaign. Take a look at this example by Jysk Vin :. Unlike J. Crew Factory, Jysk Vin uses an onsite campaign to host their giveaway.

This way, they can inform all their site visitors about the giveaway without making them go to a new page. With a well-written onsite campaign like the one above, you can easily nudge your visitors to join your giveaway and give them a strong reason to sign up for your newsletter.

With Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year, the holiday shopping season is the busiest time of the year for e-commerce marketers. Adding a little twist to your holiday campaigns can help you stand out among hundreds of other festive giveaways.

Reusable containers and vegan food producers both have the goal of sustainability, while the wedding registry company and KitchenAid have crossovers in their industries. A post shared by Natural Grocers naturalgrocers. Create attention-grabbing—and informative— visual content to help spread the word about your giveaway.

For example, the Instagram contest below uses one long graphic posted as three separate carousel images. It creates a cool effect when scrolling, and also shares a lot of information about the contest and the prize without being too visually overwhelming.

A post shared by Bloomsbury Mill bloomsburymill. When it comes to social media marketing, videos are the name of the game in Try making a Reel to draw viewers in and advertise your contest. For the giveaway below, the creator made a Reel that first engages users with strong visuals and sounds an ASMR-ish cooking video and includes a contest in the description.

He keeps the format simple, just like his non-contest Reels. As a creator, paid partnerships are one of the best ways to make money on Instagram —and as a business, paid partnerships are a great method for expanding your target audience and getting some major street cred.

Partner with a trusted creator who has an impressive portfolio for the best results—for example, the adorable visuals in the paid partnership contest below.

If your page advertises products you can ask entrants to post a photo with your wares. You can also encourage your audience to post a photo that simply follows a theme.

Contests like these are also a great way to collect testimonials. Hashtags make for a great way to host giveaways. Like a user-generated content contest, hashtag giveaways require entrants to post to their page or stories under a specific hashtag you determine what that is yourself.

This format does not just allow you to easily keep track of entries. It also drives engagement with a specific hashtag, which the algorithm tends to take note of.

A well-performing hashtag will drive traffic back to your Instagram post and your page. Make sure to pick a hashtag that is unique enough that no one else is using it… for example, goatsarefamily. A post shared by Manna Pro Homestead mannaprohomestead.

Most of us totally forget about the contest post-entry. But sharing the winner helps prove your authenticity to users and might inspire them to enter your next contest. Use Hootsuite to run your Instagram giveaway.

From a single dashboard, you can schedule your posts, answer comments and DMs, and monitor engagement in real-time. Try it free today. Start your free day trial.

Easily create, analyze, and schedule Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels with Hootsuite. Save time and get results. It works like this: you come up with a theme for your target audience to use, which could be as simple as asking them to upload a photo of themselves using your product or service.

You could even turn it into a challenge, such as a clothing company asking its customers to show how they wear their latest designs. A video social media contest works in a similar way, only customers are asked to post videos instead of photos. In fact, our recommended tool for this type of giveaway, Contests by RewardsFuel, allows you to use hashtags as an entry method.

When you use this entry method, participants will not be entered into the giveaway unless they upload an Instagram post that includes a hashtag you specify. The contest post itself received over 25, likes, and the hashtag received hundreds of posts on Instagram.

You can create a variety of different hashtag challenges for customers to complete in order to be entered into a giveaway. For example, you can run a digital scavenger hunt by having participants upload a photo completing a specific action, all while using a specific hashtag. The challenge could be brand specific, but you can also make things more fun and interesting by having participants complete random challenges, such as having them take a photo of themselves holding a specific book in a bookshop.

Entry methods included following both accounts on Twitter, retweeting the post and tagging two friends. However, Investor NnKay also challenged participants by asking them to share why they believed they should have been chosen as a winner by using a specific hashtag in the comments of the tweet.

Your brand is already celebrating whatever accomplishment you achieved, so why not extend the celebration to your customer base by offering them a chance to win a free product or service? However, if you have niche-specific goals you share with your audience or customer base, be sure to celebrate those as well.

You could even tease a giveaway by challenging your following to get the word out about your brand, such as promising to give away a free product once you hit , subscribers on YouTube. Fortunately, the giveaway itself can be quite simple: just combine this theme with an engage to win giveaway by asking subscribers to like your giveaway post, follow you on all relevant social media platforms, subscribe to your YouTube channel, etc.

As for what you should give away, simply pick one to three copies of your best product or service to offer participants, or find a brand to collaborate with. To enter, participants had to like the giveaway post on Instagram, follow Janette on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and leave a comment about one thing she influenced her followers to do or buy or why they follow her.

The post received more than 9, likes, which was double the average number of likes Janette received at the time. A collaborative giveaway is a giveaway you host in collaboration with a partner, typically a brand that complements yours.

This could be due to your target audiences aligning or your products and services pairing well together. Hosting social media giveaways like this means finding a partner to collaborate with first and foremost. Use this when you pitch your collaboration idea to brand partners. If you are a brand, consider what products and services you offer, and search for brands or influencers whose products and services or content match yours or complement them.

You can put the same media kit together for your pitch, but fill yours with more details about your conversion rates and demographics of your customers.

To promote the launch of Diablo IV, video game company Blizzard teamed up with streamers to give copies of the game away. MrGM has over 50, followers on Twitter, and in eight hours, the post received , views, over 2, likes, over 2, retweets and over 30 quotes.

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.

This not only attracts more participants but reinforces that your topic is one of interest to people. Keyword research for giveaway ideas Another way you can determine if your topic has a chance of going viral is to look at other promotional giveaways on the same topic to see how they performed on social media.

BuzzSumo is a great tool for researching specific key phrases and seeing the highest performing content on social media:. Promotional giveaways almost always have an element of virality already built in. For example, you can give entrants additional entries for every other person they get to sign up.

All they need to do is share it on social media with a unique link! Like this example:. Incentivised sharing giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Refer-a-Friend Giveaway template View and Create Your Own.

The final idea for making your giveaway viral is to tap into the world of social media influencers. If you can find a group of micro-influencers who have an audience closely aligned with your target customer, they can significantly increase the reach of your giveaway.

If your promotion is a success it can be both a blessing and a burden. On the one hand, you have lots of new leads. But on the other hand, you have a lot of customer service requests coming in and need to be prepared to handle these with professionalism and speed. Here are some tips for doing so Make the most of new technology such as Chatbots to automate some of the customer service process.

This may be hard to do if this is the first time you are running a giveaway, but over time you will become familiar with the types of questions asked at every stage of the campaign.

By automating low-risk parts of your customer service interactions you create space for your team to handle the more important requests. Make an effort to connect with your giveaway participants using Live Chat on your website and contest landing page.

Live Chat not only provides a quick and easy way for potential customers to ask questions, but it also helps you engage with users and improve your conversion rates. Live Video is a great way to create a personal connection with your audience without physically meeting them.

Ok, now to the fun part - the prizes! Your prize needs to have a high perceived value. It needs to excite your prospects, and persuade them to engage with your contest. If you sell clothes, then this is an obvious one.

Clothing giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Giveaway template. You may even give away a gift card for another business, like Amazon for example. Bundle a few high-value items together! Just make sure the bundle components complement each other, like this Halloween movie-deal example:.

There is no better way to ensure that giveaway participants have an interest in your product or service than to offer it as a prize. KitchenAid followed this simple formula below:. One way to increase the chance of a participant liking your prize is to give them a choice.

Pick a prize giveaway example. Built with ShortStack's Pick Your Prize template View and Create Your Own. This giveaway prize idea is especially good if you run a service business. Instead of giving away a physical product, you could offer a free trial or bundle a package of the service you offer.

Anatomy did this with personal training sessions:. Food and hampers have been given away as prizes in raffles or sweepstakes for as long as any of us can remember, so why not now? Well, it depends on your business, but for this office catering company, it made perfect sense!

For event companies or entertainment venues, giving away tickets is the perfect prize that complements your business offering. But if you are in the travel industry like Topdeck, Busabout, and Etihad Airways, then they make perfect sense:.

Annual events are a topical reason to run a promotional giveaway and engage your audience. If you are running a giveaway for a specific event, then make sure you tailor the prize to align with the event! The final promotional giveaway idea on the list is to offer a prize that gives participants exposure.

This tactic is very common with photo contests when you have a big social following. Or, when you produce a collated output at the end of the giveaway which provides people with additional exposure.

See the example below from a pet company that featured photo contest participants in a yearly calendar:. Promotional giveaways are a great way to engage with your prospective customers, generate leads, and nurture those leads into paying customers.

We hope these 30 promotional giveaway ideas will give you a leg up on your competition! Get Started Today. Will Blunt is the founder of Sidekick Digital by Will Blunt - B2B Marketing Expert - Sidekick Digital , a publishing business that launches, manages, and grows brands with content marketing.

In an effort to improve security and the over-all experience of email recipients, Gmail and Yahoo have implemented new requirements for bulk senders.

Learn what they are and how to stay in compliance with this quick read. Learn how you can use query string parameters in your next entry form to collect better data and engage users.

Uncover the secrets to viral giveaways with 17 comment-to-win contest ideas. Elevate your brand effortlessly and attract a flood of new leads and followers. Join Fine tune your campaign. Design an interactive campaign fully tailored to your brand.

Engage your traffic. Get leads. Create the perfect interactive content to pull leads in. Streamline your workload. Handle several contests and analyze their data in one place.

Discover expert tips and trends for interactive marketing success. Get quick answers to common questions about Shortstack features. Explore our seamless connections to amplify your marketing campaigns. Contact Login. When posting about the giveaway on Instagram, it may be best to include the deadlines and promotion guidelines in the caption.

This will make them easy to find for your followers. When sharing the contest on your website, a dedicated landing page, or other social media platforms, include any important rules upfront. If your contest is only open to certain geographic areas, be sure to include that information clearly.

This part should be fun! Decide what it is your followers will be competing for. It could be a product or assortment of products, a gift card, a service, or something else. General prizes like cash or Amazon gift cards will lure in random followers looking for a chance to win a quick buck.

Offering products and prizes related to what your page revolves around is more effective—it ensures that anyone who enters and follows you for the contest is engaged with what it is you do. Try for free. Promote your Instagram giveaway as widely as possible.

to make sure that no one misses it. A post shared by Lucy Chapman lucindaparkerchapman. Hootsuite is the perfect resource to help run and track contests. Contest posts can be scheduled with the Planner. Learn more about how Hootsuite can help you with Instagram contests and, well, all of your other social media efforts :.

You can choose how many winners you want and adjust criteria like mentions and hashtags. The following 11 giveaways demonstrate different contest strategies, entry methods, prize ideas and creative ways to promote your giveaway.

This is the simplest form of IG giveaway. Your audience enters by interacting with the post through liking, commenting or sharing—and post importantly, following. A post shared by KAZO kazowoman. Asking users to tag their friends in the comments—and counting each of those comments as an entry—is basically an evil genius move.

Tagging a friend is less of an evil genius move when it actually has something to do with your brand, or the giveaway itself. A post shared by Crazy Shirts crazyshirts. A new product launch is a great reason to host a contest—it helps create hype around the product and share news of the launch with your audience.

You can partner with a brand on both the contest promotion and the prize—for example, in the contest below, a reusable takeout container brand collaborated with a vegan food producer, and the prize includes products or services from both brands.

A post shared by Reusables. Or, a contest collaboration can just include a prize from one of the brands, while the other collaborator simply promotes the contest—as is the case with this wedding registry company x KitchenAid collab.

Reusable containers and vegan food producers both have the goal of sustainability, while the wedding registry company and KitchenAid have crossovers in their industries. A post shared by Natural Grocers naturalgrocers. Create attention-grabbing—and informative— visual content to help spread the word about your giveaway.

For example, the Instagram contest below uses one long graphic posted as three separate carousel images. It creates a cool effect when scrolling, and also shares a lot of information about the contest and the prize without being too visually overwhelming.

A post shared by Bloomsbury Mill bloomsburymill. When it comes to social media marketing, videos are the name of the game in Try making a Reel to draw viewers in and advertise your contest. For the giveaway below, the creator made a Reel that first engages users with strong visuals and sounds an ASMR-ish cooking video and includes a contest in the description.

He keeps the format simple, just like his non-contest Reels. As a creator, paid partnerships are one of the best ways to make money on Instagram —and as a business, paid partnerships are a great method for expanding your target audience and getting some major street cred.

Partner with a trusted creator who has an impressive portfolio for the best results—for example, the adorable visuals in the paid partnership contest below. If your page advertises products you can ask entrants to post a photo with your wares.

You can also encourage your audience to post a photo that simply follows a theme. Contests like these are also a great way to collect testimonials. Hashtags make for a great way to host giveaways.

Like a user-generated content contest, hashtag giveaways require entrants to post to their page or stories under a specific hashtag you determine what that is yourself.