Every brand wants more eyeballs on their products. Going viral is the dream, but it’s not an easy feat, especially if you’re in a saturated market. Online giveaways are the perfect balance of showcasing your products and expanding your reach while providing an engaging activity for consumers to participate in.
Wondering how to do a giveaway to increase brand awareness and sales? We’ve got you covered. This post will walk you through a step-by-step process, from defining your end goal to choosing which online giveaway platform to use.
What is an online giveaway?
A giveaway is a promotional event where a business offers free products or services to participants, typically to boost brand awareness and engagement.
Giveaway ideas include:
- Social media contests
- Email sign-up incentives
- Purchase-based entries
All of those giveaway ideas are designed to attract new customers, increase brand loyalty, and drive sales.
How to do a giveaway in 7 steps
- Define your goals
- Offer an exciting prize
- Find partnership opportunities
- Decide on the entry requirements
- Choose a giveaway platform
- Launch and promote your giveaway
- Announce the winner and follow up
1. Define your goals
It’s important to identify what you want to achieve with your giveaway. Otherwise, without a clear objective, it can end up being a time-consuming exercise without any measurable results.
There are three main goals that ecommerce brands shoot for with a giveaway:
- Brand awareness: Introduce your brand to more people. This usually results in more social media followers and email subscribers.
- Engagement: Generate a buzz around your brand and products. In action, this looks like more comments, tags, and shares of your posts.
- Sales: This one’s pretty straightforward—sell more products; get more customers.
Decide which goal is best for your business at the time of running the giveaway. For example, if you want to raise awareness of a new product during its launch, brand awareness might be the best goal.
Once you’ve decided on a goal, you should map it to relevant key performance indicators (KPIs). For brand awareness, your KPI could be follower count or the number of email subscribers.
2. Offer an exciting prize
Giveaways with an enticing prize tend to generate higher participation levels than less compelling incentives. If your goal is to get more customers, offer something your target audience would be interested in winning.
Are you going to give away a new product? An entire collection? Your store gift card? Ideally, the giveaway prize should align with your brand and give your audience a taste of your products. An example of a prize-to-brand disconnect would be a vegan cheese brand giving away a gift pack of BBQ meat rubs.
Here are some examples of possible giveaway prizes:
- A limited-edition product
- An entire product collection
- Products from relevant influencers
- Gift cards
- Travel
- A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
The caliber of your prize will ultimately dictate what kind of participants you attract and the success of your giveaway. More importantly, the prize should be something that helps you meet your end goal. For example, if you want to generate user engagement, a big prize like travel or money might work best. If you want to generate sales and get new customers, giving away a product collection or a new product might work better.
When choosing the right prize, consider:
- Your audience (or the audience you want to reach): What are they interested in? What products get them excited?
- Your brand values: What do you want people to associate your brand with? Do you have any staunch values and beliefs that it’s important for your brand to share?
- Your giveaway objective: The prize you choose should be geared toward the end goal you set for your giveaway.
3. Find partnership opportunities
Partnering with influencers and high-authority brands in your niche can dramatically boost the reach of your giveaway. You don’t necessarily need Kim Kardashian on side, per se, but it can be a great help having relevant individuals with large clout sharing your giveaway with their pre-established audiences.
One effective way to partner with influencers and brands is through affiliate marketing. By offering a commission for every sale made through an influencer’s unique referral link, you can incentivize them to promote your products or services to their audience.
This is where Shopify Collabs comes in handy: It allows you to streamline the process of managing and tracking affiliate campaigns directly from your Shopify admin.
Again, always consider the goal of your giveaway: Do you want to increase brand awareness? Try working with an influencer who has a large audience. Want to generate sales? It might be better to team up with micro-influencers who have small but niche audiences and high conversion rates.
When choosing who to partner with, check out:
- Previous influencer marketing campaigns: What giveaways have they been a part of in the past and what were the results?
- Influencer values: Ideally you want to partner with influencers who share your brand values.
- Engagement levels: The engagement levels of an influencer gives you insight into how trusted they are and how much sway they have over their audience.
- Audience: While a high follower count means you might be able to reach more people, it’s not the be-all and end-all if those aren’t qualified leads. In fact, it can be much more fruitful to partner with an influencer who has a smaller audience made up of the kind of people you want to reach.
You can also partner with like-minded brands and businesses, like relevant lifestyle magazines, other parallel ecommerce businesses, and organizations. Consider what you want to get out of the partnership and whether the chosen brand has the means to get you there before starting outreach.
4. Decide on the entry requirements
How will people get involved in your giveaway? If you take a closer look, most ecommerce brands running a social media giveaway encourage participants to do one or more of the following:
- Follow the brand account
- Share the post with their followers
- Comment on the post
- Tag friends
- Sign up to an email list
- Like the photo or post
- Upload their own photo or video
The easier it is to enter, the more participants you’ll get. In fact, some brands count each “action” from the list above as an entry, so one person can claim up to seven entries if they do all of the actions. Again, consider the end goal of your giveaway before you outline the entry requirements.
Want to grow your email list? Make signing up to your list an entry requirement. Want to generate a buzz around your brand? Get participants to tag a friend and share your post with their followers. Choose just two or three entry requirements to make it as easy as possible to enter while still making it possible to reach your giveaway end goal.
5. Choose a giveaway platform
Where will you host your giveaway? Do you want to run a giveaway on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Facebook? Choose the platform that you either want to see growth on or that you already have an established audience on. If you want to grow your Instagram account, host your giveaway there, or if you already have a huge TikTok following and want to increase the chances of your giveaway going viral, host it there instead.
There are several giveaway platforms on the Shopify App Store that will help you streamline the process from start to finish. They help you set up your giveaway, add your entry requirements, collect participant information, and generate a winner—all in one place. This saves you the time and effort it takes to scroll through entries and handpick a winner. (Ultimately, the winner should be chosen at random anyway.)
Giveaway tools to try
ViralSweeps Giveaway Contests: Runs contests and giveaways across a variety of platforms and easily captures participant information with dynamic forms.
Rafflecopter: Big-name giveaway tool that simplifies the process and makes it easy to scale your giveaway efforts.
Social Boost Giveaway Contest: Incentivizes participants to get involved in your giveaway and runs a variety of different giveaway campaigns.
PineRaffle: Rewards giveaway participants with raffle tickets they can cash in for prizes and products.
Instant Giveaway: Creates giveaways and tracks people who visit the sweepstake page to retarget them later.
Giveaway Ninja: Rewards participants with extra entries when they share your giveaway with friends and family.
SweepWidget: Chooses the entry requirements for giveaway participants and offers prizes or coupons as a reward.
6. Launch and promote your giveaway
Your giveaway is all set to go. Now it’s time to put it out into the world and get some momentum going. There are plenty of ways you can promote your giveaway, but here are some popular giveaway ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
Send it to your email list
Your email subscribers are already invested in your brand. They’ve either bought from you in the past or are interested in what you’re selling, so there’s a very high chance they’re also going to be interested in any giveaway you run.
Create a simple promotional email (or a series) that shares your giveaway and the steps participants need to take to enter. Remember to emphasize the giveaway prize and give subscribers a good reason to enter.
Share it on social media
Social media is a great place to get traction on your giveaway. The more people share it with their followers, the wider your reach will be. The best part is giveaways can create a buzz in the comments section, which boosts overall engagement.
You can add a giveaway post to your Instagram feed, promote the giveaway in your Stories, and even turn it into a hashtag challenge on TikTok. Just remember to customize your messaging depending on the platform.
Add a pop-up on your website
People who visit your site are already interested in what you’re selling. Capture high-intent shoppers with a pop-up on your website that allows them to enter the giveaway without leaving your store.
If your giveaway goal is to collect more email addresses, a website pop-up could be a great giveaway entry tactic. Regardless of your objective, this is also a surefire way to attract your target audience to enter the giveaway while they’re already shopping on your site.
Collaborate with influencers
Partner up with relevant industry influencers and complementary brands to spread the word about your giveaway. Find accounts that have a similar target audience or an audience you’d like to reach, and offer them an incentive to share the contest. You might choose to partner with just one influencer or team up with several smaller collaborators depending on the goal of your campaign.
Itsu teams up with nutritionist Emily English to promote their giveaway on Instagram.
Create a hashtag
Hashtags increase the visibility of your giveaway, attract new followers on your social networks, and help you see where and how your customers and followers are promoting it. Choose a hashtag relevant to the giveaway. Take it one step further by encouraging participants to share the giveaway or a piece of content with the added hashtag.
Shea Moisture uses the hashtag #SheaMoistureFam to promote its giveaway and encourage participants to get involved.
Encourage participants to share
Your customers and followers are your greatest marketing tool. Encourage them to share your giveaway on their own social channels. Better yet, offer additional entries for every time they share the giveaway on their accounts or in their Stories.
Sassy Woof gives participants one entry per comment to enter their giveaway.
Write a blog post
Publishing a blog post about your giveaway can boost organic traffic to your site and promote your campaign to people searching on Google. It can also act as a landing page that participants can share with their networks.
Another option is to bring partner bloggers on board to create a series of posts to boost search engine optimization (SEO) and expand your digital marketing strategy. Make sure they understand your Instagram contest rules and eligibility—it helps to give them some promotion guidelines to work with.
7. Announce the winner and follow up
Once the giveaway has ended and you’ve got a load of entries, it’s time to announce the winner and follow up with them. You can do this privately, but it can boost the credibility of your giveaway and brand if you announce it publicly too. That way, participants who didn’t win know that you’ve followed through on your promise, which boosts your brand credibility.
Use an automated giveaway tool to randomly pick a winner and tag them on your chosen social media platform. Send them a DM, too, so they know what steps to take next and how to claim their prize.
Lavinia Stamps announced the winner of its Instagram giveaway by tagging them in a feed post and asking them to email their address. This post also generated a lot of engagement as other participants raced to congratulate the winner.
When to run a giveaway
Struggling to know when’s the right time to run a giveaway? Here are some common trigger points.
Aligning with marketing campaigns
For best results, your giveaways should align with your broader marketing efforts. A giveaway can amplify your message and generate excitement if you’re running a major marketing campaign to promote a new product line or boost brand awareness.
For example, if you’re launching a summer fashion collection, you could run a “summer style giveaway” featuring items from the new line.
Seasonal opportunities
Take advantage of natural shopping seasons relevant to your products. If you sell outdoor gear, consider a giveaway at the start of the camping season. For a beauty brand, a “New Year, New You” giveaway in January could resonate with customers looking to refresh their routines.
Special events and holidays
Holidays and special occasions provide perfect giveaway opportunities. Think beyond just Christmas and Valentine’s Day—consider niche holidays related to your products. For example, if you sell kitchen gadgets, you could run a giveaway for National Cooking Day.
Product launches and announcements
Build buzz around new product releases with a pre-launch giveaway. This creates anticipation and gives lucky winners a chance to be among the first to try your latest offerings. You could also use giveaways to breathe new life into older product lines that need a boost.
Identifying audience engagement peaks
Pay attention to when your audience is most active and engaged. Use your social media and website analytics to pinpoint times when engagement spikes. For example, if you notice increased traffic on Sunday evenings, that could be an ideal time to announce a new giveaway.
Giveaways vs. contests
Understanding the difference between giveaways and contests can help you choose the right strategy for your ecommerce brand. Both can engage your audience and promote your products, but they work in different ways.
Key differences
The main difference between a giveaway and a contest lies in how winners are chosen.
- Giveaways: In a giveaway, anyone who enters has an equal chance of winning, often just by signing up or sharing your post. This makes it easy for participants and encourages more entries.
- Contests: Contests usually require participants to complete a specific task, like submitting a photo or writing a caption. The winner is often chosen based on creativity or skill, which can make it more competitive.
Basically, giveaways are about luck, while contests focus on talent or effort.
Pros and cons of giveaways and contests
Both giveaways and contests have their advantages and disadvantages. Here’s a breakdown to help you decide which might work best for your brand.
Giveaways
Pros:
- Easy to enter. Participants can join without much effort, leading to higher entry numbers.
- Quick results. You can generate excitement and engagement quickly, which is great for boosting your brand’s visibility.
- Builds your audience. Giveaways often require participants to follow your social media or sign up for your newsletter, helping you grow your audience.
Cons:
- Less engagement. Since entering is simple, participants may not feel as invested in your brand.
- Quality of entries. You might attract people who are only interested in free products, not necessarily your brand.
Contests
Pros:
- Higher engagement. Participants are more likely to connect with your brand when they put effort into their entries.
- Quality entries. You can receive creative and unique submissions that showcase your products in interesting ways.
- Brand loyalty. Engaging your audience through contests can build a stronger community and encourage repeat customers.
Cons:
- More complicated. Participants may be deterred by the effort required to enter, leading to fewer overall entries.
- Judging. Selecting a winner can be subjective and may require more time and resources.
Both giveaways and contests can effectively promote your brand. Choose the one that aligns best with your goals, audience, and the type of engagement you want to foster.
Best practices for promoting your giveaway
If you want as many entries as possible, avoid making mistakes with your giveaway by following these best practices.
Use your social media channels
Promoting your giveaway on social media increases its reach and opens it up to more entries. Here’s how to make the most of your social channels:
- Choose the right platforms. Focus on the social media channels where your target audience spends their time. For example, Instagram giveaways might work better for a millennial audience, while a TikTok giveaway might do better with Gen Z.
- Create eye-catching posts. Use bright images and clear text to grab attention. Make sure you include all the details about how to enter, the prize, and the deadline.
- Use hashtags. Incorporate relevant hashtags to reach a broader audience. This can help people who don’t follow you discover your giveaway.
- Engage with your audience. Respond to comments and questions about the giveaway. This interaction can encourage more people to participate.
Collaborate with influencers
Partnering with influencers can significantly boost your giveaway’s visibility by exposing it to big, relevant audiences. Here’s how to do it:
- Find the right influencers. Look for influencers who align with your brand values and have an audience that matches your target market.
- Provide clear guidelines. Make sure influencers know how to enter, what to promote, and any specific messaging you want them to use.
- Consider co-hosting. You can collaborate with an influencer to create a joint giveaway, combining your audiences for even greater reach.
Craft compelling promotional content
The content you create to promote your giveaway should be engaging and informative. Here are some tips:
- Tell a story. Share why you’re running the giveaway and what it means to your brand. This personal touch can resonate with your audience.
- Highlight the prize. Make sure to showcase the giveaway prizes clearly. Use high-quality images and describe its benefits to entice participants.
- Create urgency. Use urgent phrases like “limited time only” or “don’t miss out” to encourage immediate action. This can motivate people to enter right away.
- Use multiple formats. Experiment with different types of content, like videos, stories, and graphics, to see what resonates best with your audience.
Leverage email marketing
Email marketing lets you land right in the sacred inboxes of potential giveaway entrants. Here’s how to use it effectively:
- Send a dedicated email. Create an email specifically about the giveaway. Include all the details and a clear call to action to enter.
- Segment your audience. If possible, send targeted emails to different segments of your audience. Tailoring your message like this can increase engagement.
- Follow up. Send reminder emails as the deadline approaches. This can help boost participation from those who may have forgotten to enter.
- Share results. After your successful giveaway, send an email announcing the winner. This keeps your audience engaged and encourages them to participate in future giveaways.
Encourage user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) can create a buzz around your giveaway and create a sense of community. Here’s how to encourage it:
- Ask for entries. Encourage participants to share photos or stories related to your products as part of their entry. This creates authentic content that showcases your brand.
- Create a unique hashtag. Come up with a specific hashtag for your giveaway. This makes it easy to track entries and encourages participants to share their experiences.
- Feature participants. Highlight user-generated content on your social media or website. This not only recognizes participants but also inspires others to join in.
- Incentivize sharing. Consider offering additional entries for participants who share your giveaway on their own social media channels. This can help spread the word even further.
Grow your business with giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to reach new audiences and spread the word about your product. You can offer a new product, a collection of products, or a cash prize. But whatever you choose, make sure it’s relevant to your brand and something your target audience will be excited about.
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How to do a giveaway FAQ
How do you run a good giveaway?
- Choose a measurable objective for your giveaway.
- Offer an exciting prize that’s relevant to your brand.
- Partner with influencers.
- Determine the entry guidelines.
- Use a giveaway tool or platform.
- Promote your giveaway.
- Announce the winner.
How do you pick a winner for a giveaway?
Here are some ways you can pick a winner:
- Use a giveaway tool to automatically select a winner.
- Pick the person who has completed the most entries.
- Select a winner based on the quality of their entry.
- Create a database of entrants and choose a winner at random.
- Have a partner or influencer choose the winner.
What are the rules for a giveaway?
The rules for a giveaway tell participants how they can enter and if there are any restrictions in place. Rules can include age limitations, valid participant locations, how the winners will be chosen, and how the winners can claim their prize.
How do you get people to enter a giveaway?
Here are some ways to get people to enter your giveaway:
- Email your current customers.
- Share your giveaway on social media.
- Add a pop-up on your website.
- Team up with influencers and partners.
- Create a hashtag for your giveaway.
- Encourage participants to promote the giveaway.
- Write a blog post.
- Include entry requirements in your order packaging.
