Why Giveaways Are The Best Way To Increase Your Newsletter Subscribers And How To Do It Effectively?

Running a giveaway can be an insanely quick way to increase your newsletter subscribers. It beats most of the other methods - research from Unbounce suggests so - with 700% more email subscribers subscribed when landing pages had a giveaway compared to one without. Here are three reasons why giveaways work so well:

1. Getting something for free is a strong incentive for customers and can bring out the competitiveness of a person. The sense of urgency and fear of missing out is irresistible to most people.

2. Subscribers from giveaways are people interested in the products and services your business offers, making them more likely to shop with you.

3. With excellent email marketing, you can nurture leads from giveaways into first-time customers to brand ambassadors.

You can easily increase your database with giveaways. Below you can learn how to make the most effective giveaways for your business.

1. Landing page & gathering the emails

First, you need to check how can you gather and store your new emails. You might be able to run a giveaway with your current newsletter provider and create specific landing pages for your giveaways and gather emails. If you need more data from the people subscribing you might consider using software specially developed for giveaways.

For example, you can use tools like HAAVI to manage your giveaways and track the results. At Haavi we help companies scale their lead generation activities & revenue fast with advanced lead capture, validation, and distribution software. Read more here >

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2) Define your target audience

Who is your target audience? It is good to start with basics: age, gender, income, and so on. You might know exactly what niche you want to target, but you also might have a mix of a lot of people with different lives, needs, and wants. We will discuss giveaway prizes for mass customers later in this article. Your target audience will, later on, affect things like what prize you should use in your giveaway and where to share and advertise your giveaways.
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3) Select a correct prize for your giveaway

Selecting a correct prize for your giveaway is crucial as if the price doesn’t resonate with your target audience you won’t be getting enough people signing up. Here are three things to think about:

Is the prize value high enough? If you are selling for example sweets and run a giveaway to win one lollipop - not many people will enter as the prize doesn’t seem anything extraordinary - they could go and buy one themselves anyway, but if the prize is winning a gift basket of easter sweets more people would sign up. Make sure your giveaway prize is something that people actually would want and need.

Does the prize resonate with your target audience?  Think about who is your ideal customer and what they would like to win.If you have a niche audience you most likely know already what resonates with them. With large target audiences, you could potentially divide them into more niche audiences or run a more generic giveaway. With a generic giveaway, you need to think about what would a vast majority of people use or dream about? A lot of people would love to travel, have a gift card for a grocery store, or money for petrol to name a few. 

Ideas for prizes

Random draw prize – If you can afford to have multiple winners, conduct random draw prizes whereby you give a prize to random entrants throughout the contest and promote it heavily. This helps break down the “I’ll never win” barrier that exists with contests and encourages more people to try their luck.

Bonus prizes – Have an additional bonus prize for people who share the contest with their friends and family or who for example follow you on social media. This creates a clear incentive to people to do so and while not everyone will do this, you still get the benefit of secondary action.

Shared prizes - Think about offering a prize that can be shared amongst friends, like multiple museum passes or holidays for several people. This helps increase word of mouth, as entrants tell their friends and family about the possible win. 
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4) How to write a good giveaway copy?

Use seasonal copy

Writing a copy that resonates with the target audience is important. You can differentiate the copy by adding seasonality cues - ’Winter dry skin? Win our skincare gift set´ for example or ’Would you like to win a sunny holiday to Hawaii?’ And advertise them during the winter months. This ties into the needs and wants of many people and creates more incentive to sign up. 

Good CTA is needed

When writing a giveaway landing page copy or ad copy for your giveaway make sure the person understands what they need to do and what is happening next. If you want them to fill a long questionnaire, make sure you mention ’fill a questionnaire to take part in the giveaway’ or at least ’click to enter, ’sign up now'.

Create urgency

You can create urgency with many things such as timer on the landing page, adding the date when the giveaway finishes, and making sure your copy contains CTA words like ’now’ or ’I want to win’. 

Things you need - Terms & Conditions

You need to make sure you have terms and conditions easy available for everyone on the page. This includes the end date of the giveaway, the prize, how the winner is picked and how they are contacted, if the winner doesn’t reply when and how a new winner is picked, can the prize be changed to cash, and more. It is always good to check your own area's laws about giveaways.

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5) Share or advertise your giveaway

To gain new email subscribers with your giveaway you need to share it with your current and also with new audiences. Here are few ways to do this:

Notify your current email subscribers

Even if you have their email addresses already, with a giveaway you can re-interest them in your brand and make them look into it more or even share the giveaway with their friends and family.

Place it on your website

If your website ore-commerce store gets views it is smart to place the giveaway to your website too, with this you get free traffic to your website and people subscribing who are already interested in your brand.

Share it on social media

Promote your newsletter on social media bios, post texts, and other areas to create awareness, intrigue, or offer a sale to get the people that are already interested in your brand to take the next step and sign up for your newsletter.

Place it on directory sites

This could be a great way to get more sign-ups, especially if you are looking for bargain hunters as a target audience.

Add it to your and your colleagues' email signatures

Sharing the giveaway link on your email signature creates exposure for the giveaway even if you or the person receiving the email wouldn’t sign up directly. The people receiving your emails can easily share this information with their friends and families.

Write a press release or share it on your Linkedin page

Getting the right people to share in your business connections can be a huge momentum for your giveaway. The prize needs to be good enough to have momentum, as well as you, need to have good connections with people happy to share information or at least interact with it.

Advertise your giveaway on Facebook, google ads, and more

One of the best ways to get your giveaway noticed and get many new sign-ups is to advertise it on social media and online, for example using Facebook ads and Google ads to promote the giveaway. If you are planning on using multiple different channels to promote your giveaway using software like HAAVI could be useful that displays data in a clear manner.

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If you found this article useful please share it with your team via email. For more information on how to scale your database contact one of our salespeople for an in-depth evaluation of your situation.

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