Launching a giveaway is a great way to engage with your audience and build your mailing list.
It’s also a smart way to drum up attention for a new product or service.
And yes, it’s still a viable tactic in 2021. But if you want to pull it off with great success, you’ll need to follow some steps to learn how to run a giveaway.
We’ve created dozens of giveaways throughout the years, so in this article we’ll talk about our process for running them, and share some tips and tricks from our experience.
Step 1 – Start With A Schedule
Preparing a giveaway usually involves a lot of people – yourself, marketing specialists, content creators, business partners, and even freelance collaborators. That’s why a schedule where key dates and timelines are laid out is extremely important.
In most cases, you won’t just give away your own products, you’ll need to involve other companies as well, and convince them to make a deal for you to give away their products. A schedule matters even more in that scenario.
And here’s what it should contain:
Outreach date. This is when you’ll start reaching out to the companies involved in the giveaway. It should be at least 3 weeks before a giveaway is prepared for launch.
Response deadline. Don’t wait around for any potential partner to get back to you. If they don’t reply within a week, cross them off the list.
Commitment deadline. This is the final date for companies to finalize an offer to you. It should be at least 1 week before the giveaway goes live. Don’t make exceptions for this, especially if you’re working with a tight schedule. It’ll just cause headaches.
Launch Date. Work with your team to figure out the best launch date for your giveaway. You should take national holidays, and your availability into account when settling on this date. You can even take a look at your analytics, to figure out when a campaign launch is most likely to draw your audience’s attention.
End Date. This is when you’ll stop accepting submissions for your giveaway. We usually let a giveaway run for about a week.
Draw Date. This is when you’ll have a live event drawing winners publicly. It really helps your credibility if you’re transparent with this. We usually do it over a live podcast, but any other live streaming service works.
This schedule doesn’t have to be fancy. For example, here’s one of our previous schedules:
But it should be adapted to your capabilities. We have a well-oiled machine for creating and running giveaways. If outreach might take you longer because you don’t have a network to reach out to, extend the outreach period. If you’ll need a lot of time to create the giveaway page because you don’t have a page template, set some time aside for that in the schedule as well.
Step 2 – Finding Companies To Reach Out To
Before you start reaching out to companies, it’s important to create a list of all the people you want to contact. While you send out emails, make sure you update the list based on people’s responses.
An important step here is to identify duplicate types of companies. For example, in our giveaways we usually give out online marketing tools. So if Drip, Mailchimp, and Active Campaign (all email marketing tools) are on our list, we’ll just reach out to one of them. Of course, if they don’t respond, we’ll go down the list. But this is a good principle to avoid conflicts of interest.
Another important thing to do is consider your relationship with the companies on your list. When you learn how to run a giveaway, you don’t have to throw away pre-existing business relations you have. In fact, reaching out to companies that you’ve worked with in the past can make it easier to find products for your giveaway.
Step 3 – Reaching Out To Companies
When your list of companies is finalized, it’s time to start outreaching. The best way to kick this off is with a call. Gather your entire team and go through the list to find out if anyone has a relationship with any of the companies involved.
Even if there’s no pre-existing relationship, you can still identify connections people in your team have. It can be as vague as a team member being born in the country of a company’s HQ, which will make outreach easier.
Throughout our years doing business online, and organizing giveaways, we’ve expanded our network quite significantly. This, of course, makes outreach much easier, so we recommend you always start with the companies and people you already know.
Having any business relation with them can make it much easier to start a conversation. For example, if you’re an affiliate for a company, you can leverage previous success promoting their product to get a special offer for your giveaway. Point to metrics like click-throughs, conversions, and unique page views to start the conversation on a good note.
Then, make sure you clarify your deadline for their involvement, and create reminders for you to follow-up with the companies you contacted.
Cold Outreach – A Viable Alternative
If you don’t have a network to leverage in this process, don’t worry. You can still learn how to run a giveaway in 2021 with the help of cold outreach. But don’t think about this process like a regular outreach effort for link building. It’s not necessarily about the bulk of emails you send.
Your communication needs to be targeted and personalized – or your emails will end up marked as spam.
When choosing the email address to reach out to, aim to get a named email address. Try to contact someone from the company’s outreach or marketing team. Highlight past successes of your campaigns (or giveaways) including page views, conversions, and how well your audience responds to your content.
But paint the picture through their lenses.
Emphasize the benefit they’d be getting if they’re involved in your giveaway.
On top of that, research the company, aim to get 3 of their top tier products, and mention them by name in your email.
Step 4 – Shaking Hands And Following Up
Once you have a list of companies that have offered to be a part of your giveaway, finalize the offer, remain in contact with them, and keep them updated about your campaign. Tell them about the giveaway page, and make sure you request graphics or sales copy in advance, so there’s enough time to get them, and insert them on your giveaway page.
Tally up the cost of all the products offered, and then divide the products between winners. We recommend you offer a tiered prize pool, dividing the products offered between a top 3. This will incentivize people to sign-up more than if you only had one one prize for everyone that joins.
This is our model. But you can take any approach you want. If you have a good offer from one of the companies, feel free to switch it up. You can award more than just three prizes if you have the budget for it.
Lastly, a good tip is to add your own products in the mix. For example, we give Authority Hacker Pro to all three of our winners. This can raise the value of your pool prize significantly, and it’s extremely cost efficient, especially if you have infoproducts.
Step 5 – Building The Giveaway Page
We have a permanent giveaway page that just needs to be updated with every campaign, so this part of the process is easy for us. We definitely recommend this set-up, as it streamlines campaign management. Just make sure you password protect it, so you can make it available to companies when creating the campaign.
If you don’t have a giveaway page or template on the ready, don’t worry. We’ll walk you through all the most important elements on the page, and what you need to do to engage people, and convince them to sign-up.
Overall, here’s what you should focus on:
Title. This should clearly display the value of the products or tools you’re offering in your giveaway. Just make it as accurate as possible, but feel free to round it up to the nearest thousand dollars value. Write something that’d capture your audience’s attention.
Conversion features. A giveaway is a limited time event, so you want to make that clear to your audience by instilling urgency. A good way to do that is to create conversion features on your page, like a dynamic countdown timer, and plenty of CTA’s scattered around your page.
Prize Pool. Make sure your prize pool is clear, and well laid out on the page, so it attracts your audience and incentivizes them to sign-up. We use software to manage our conversions and prize pool for giveaways, and we recommend you always outsource this for ease of use.
Your Own Copy. Make sure the giveaway page contains content that helps you take advantage of the giveaway. If you just want to expand your mailing list, the benefits of signing-up should be everywhere. If you’re also using a giveaway to promote one of your new products, advertise it throughout the page. Remember that a giveaway is a good opportunity to entice new people to join your community, so make it appealing for them.
Featured Partners. While the companies whose products you’ll include in the giveaway will get a mention in your prize pool, it’s still good to feature all of your partners individually, and say a few words about them. Make sure you create special links for all of them, to track how much traffic your campaign is sending their way. Work with the companies themselves to create the copy, and source the graphics for each partner.
These are the elements we focus on, but feel free to add your own twist to your giveaway page. Think about what works for your audience, and what has provided conversions in the past, and hone in on those things.
If you’re not sure about what will work in your niche, you can either use our template, or analyze giveaway pages from your competitors, and get inspired that way.
Step 6 – Make Some Noise
Once your giveaway is live, it’s time to send traffic to it. You can follow all strategies for increasing traffic normally, from SEO to social sharing.
For starters, make sure you notify all of your audience members about this giveaway. Send out an enthusiastic email to your list, create social media posts, and generally try to leverage your existing platforms to advertise this new giveaway you’re organizing.
But giveaways are also about attracting new people to your community, so find ways to reach them as well. Paid ads are a good way to reach new people, but they can be quite expensive. The same is true for influencer marketing.
So one of the cheaper, more effective ways to reach new people with your giveaways is to leverage your partner’s audience. It’s not likely that all of them will agree to mention your giveaway, especially if you’re in contact with bigger brands. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Lastly, don’t forget to optimize your page for SEO. Update its metadata, and use the right URL. You won’t land any spots on the SERP for competitive keywords, but if people hear about your giveaway, they might Google it.
In Conclusion
A giveaway can help boost your notoriety, promote new products, or just welcome new people to your community.
It’s a wonderful tool for growth that we’ve been using for years. If you want to give it a shot, make sure you start with a schedule, find and reach out to the right companies, build a strong giveaway page and make some noise about your campaign.
It’s a model that has driven results for us. We hope it can do the same for your business.