It’s time for me to give away some free advice.
Giveaways are essential for brand growth and increasing sales!
But without the proper planning and preparation, giveaways can easily fail, leaving you with minimal social impact and an expensive product heading out the door!
Don’t worry. I’ve used giveaways to launch multiple multimillion-dollar ecommerce brands, so I’ve got you covered. In this article, I will discuss five tried-and-tested giveaway ideas that will ensure your giveaways gain the traction you need to take your brand to the next level.
Short On Time? Here’s What You Need to Know About Giveaway Ideas
- Giveaways are a great way to grow brand awareness on social media by incentivizing users to share posts.
- To run an effective giveaway, pick an enticing prize, promote scarcity, and keep entry steps simple. Consider collaborating with other brands to reach a wider audience.
- Different giveaway types can achieve various goals: tag-to-win for follower growth, loop giveaways for wider reach, email subscription giveaways for lead generation, and first-time purchase giveaways to encourage new customers.
Why Are Giveaways So Effective for Ecommerce Brands?
Giveaways are one of the best ways to grow a business’s brand awareness on social media, especially those that require users to tag friends in comments or share the post with their followers.
Increasing your reach on social channels via paid ads can be pretty expensive, but you can reach a large audience through the power of social sharing.
How many times have you seen a brand appear in your stories that you don’t recognize, only to realize that it’s a friend resharing their content in the hope of winning a giveaway? This is an example of a brand successfully executing a giveaway and getting their brand in front of a new audience.
Don’t Skip: The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy for Startups
How to Run an Effective Giveaway
- Pick a prize that is worth vying for: Make sure your chosen giveaway prize is enticing enough for your audience to take the action needed to enter.
- Promote scarcity: Ensure you place a deadline on entrants otherwise, many of your audience won’t be pushed to act.
- Keep it simple: Don’t ask your audience to do too much. Each step you ask them to take is an opportunity for them to get distracted and stop signing up.
- Team up with other brands: Collaborate with other brands in your niche for a wider reach. More on this later in the article!
4 Types of Giveaways to Try
The Tag-to-Win Giveaway
A tag-to-win giveaway is a giveaway in which your brand or an influencer asks their followers to tag a friend on their post and follow your brand to go in the draw to win a prize.
I conducted this approach with my watch company, The 5th, and our Instagram follower count grew by 20,000 in just 24 hours. We received over 80,000 comments tagging a friend in the post, and according to the Instagram analytics platform Iconosquare, we were the most engaged with brand profiles on Instagram in the world that day.
The best part? We were only giving away two watches on our own brand’s account.
The Loop Giveaway
Giveaways are highly successful when they are shareable. However, if you don’t already have a large following on social media, gaining traction can be tricky.
That’s where the loop giveaway approach can be beneficial. It’s always a good idea to team up with an account with a higher reach than yours in your niche, such as an influencer or vertical account.
Of course, you shouldn’t work with direct competitors. Still, if you can collaborate with other brands in your space, offering both audiences an incentive to interact, the results can quickly multiply.
Check out this Loop Giveaway idea from Letterboxd in partnership with Mubi and LG.
The Email Subscription Giveaway
Another great option is to run a giveaway that requires users to sign up for your email list. Sure, maybe only one person wins the initial prize, but you then have access to hundreds, if not thousands, of warm leads to follow up with later down the line.
You can even run giveaways that are specific to those who are subscribed to your email list, as this approach will incentivize others to not only subscribe to your communications but also stay engaged as they keep an eye out for your next promotion.
Check out the example below from BÉIS travel.
The First-time Purchase Giveaway
Finally, if you are unsure about giving stuff away for nothing and you’re willing to take a short-term loss for a long-term gain, a first-time purchase giveaway is a fantastic option.
If you’re running a clothing brand, for example, you could throw in a free accessory with each purchase that exceeds $30, such as a phone case or a tote bag.
Of course, this approach does eat into your profit margins at first, but it is much easier to get former customers to repurchase than it is to convince new customers to take a leap of faith.
See the example below from l’ange on their homepage. The “spin-the-wheel” gamified giveaway is a common tactic for DTC brands.
Speaking of Which… We’re Practically Giving Away Our Secrets
Now that you know about the power of giveaways, it’s time to learn everything else you need to know about launching a successful ecommerce start-up for just $1
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