An underused method of growing your email list, social media following, and website traffic is running online giveaways. Giveaways are widely used by YouTube and Instagram influencers who team up with brands and give away products. The right execution of these giveaways become viral and lead to exponential growth in traffic, PR opportunities, and revenues for these influencers.
The same methods that influencers use to engage and grow their audiences can be applied in e-commerce as well. The difficult part is finding the best online giveaway tools and running timely, relevant contests.
In this article, you’ll learn about the best tools to use for online giveaways so that you can grow your audience organically. You’ll also discover the best types of online contests to run to help you skyrocket your business. Let’s get into it!
Why run an online giveaway?
Some of the benefits of running online giveaways include:
- Growth in Social Media Followers: By offering entries and points to your giveaway in exchange for a follow or likes, you can boost your social media following.
- Increase in Your Website Traffic: You can attract more visitors to your website by promoting your giveaway on different platforms.
- Rapid Growth With Your Email Subscribers: Asking users to sign-up for your email list for giveaway entries is a great way to increase your email subscribers.
- More Quality Leads and More Sales: You can use giveaways to increase brand awareness and generate leads, then convert them into paying customers to increase sales.
Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of online giveaways, let’s take a closer look at some of the different online giveaway contests so that you can make the best choice for your business!
Types of Online Giveaway contests
Online giveaway contests can take many forms. The types of contests you choose to run should line up with the business goal you’ve set up.
If your main goal is to increase your email subscribers, setting up a contest that encourages sharing is a powerful way to do that. For example, Albert’s, a diamond jeweler, ran a photo contest where all participants had to do was enter their contact information and share the contest on social media.
The user with the most entries received one of their pendants. They held this contest right before Valentine’s Day as a way to ramp up awareness and sales for their TwoGether Diamond Pendant. That’s an excellent way to take advantage of a big holiday and grow an email list.
Let’s say that you’re trying to increase engagement on social media organically. You could run a campaign that shows off your business’ funny side and ask users to join in the fun. Take this excellent campaign by Kettle Brand Chips for example:
To celebrate National Chip Day (yes, it’s a thing), Kettle Brand set up a contest where they invited contestants to share their best potato chip puns. The five jokes with the most likes won a case of Kettle Brand chips. This online giveaway contest was a success because it was relevant, encouraged creativity, and generated organic substantial organic engagement for the brand.
Here are some other online giveaway contest ideas to get you thinking:
Personality Based Quiz:
Buzzfeed is the undisputed champion of viral quizzes. You can take a page from their handbook and incorporate a quiz with quirky questions into a social media contest where contestants receive a discount for an item after completing and sharing the quiz.
A Seasonal Countdown Sweepstakes:
This is an excellent way to leverage holidays to boost engagement, attract new leads, and increase sales. The seasonality of the contest adds a sense of urgency while still capturing the fun of the holiday season.
A Hashtag Contest:
Hashtag contests are another way of driving awareness and increasing engagement to celebrate the launch of a new product or a special sale. When GoPro launched their new HERO 7 Black Camera, they encouraged their audience to use the hashtag #GoProHERO7 to be entered into their awesome million dollar sweepstakes. The result? Powerful videos and the grand prize of million dollars split amongst the best video entries.
Now let’s look at the tools that will empower you to run stress-free online giveaway contests.
The 6 Best Online Giveaway Tools
1. RafflePress
RafflePress is a WordPress plugin that is considered the best giveaway platform available. It offers a wide range of features (even in the Free version) that make running online giveaways a breeze.
Here are the highlights:
- Offers stunning free giveaway templates
- SEO optimized giveaway widget
- 100 percent responsive so that your contests look great on any device
- Easily integrates with various social media platforms
- Fraud protection feature to remove fraud entries
- Pro Version pricing starts at $34/month (billed yearly)
2. ShortStack
ShortStack is a favorite for marketers because there’s no coding involved and it allows you to create an internet giveaway in minutes!
Here are some more features to love:
- Drag and drop builder including 20+ widgets like form, poll, newsletter, social media, gallery, and voting
- Easily customize colors, fonts, boxes, size, text, and every other element in your campaign
- Email notifications let you contact your campaign participants as soon as they enter a competition, after a number of days, or at a scheduled date and time
- Leads are stored in a searchable, exportable database
3. KingSumo
KingSumo is another free tool with powerful online giveaway capabilities. Built by the team behind AppSumo, you can expect a detailed, data-driven platform that gives you all you need to succeed with your contest. For more robust features, you can upgrade to the paid plan (starts at $19/month).
KingSumo offers:
- Custom branding
- Integration with Zapier
- Facebook pixel tracking
- Unlimited giveaways
4. Easypromos
Easypromos houses an exhaustive range of contest types separated by the following categories: direct giveaways, entry forms, contests, and games. If you’re someone who wants more intricate online giveaways, Easypromos is the tool for you!
Here are some of the best features:
- Responsive designs and widgets
- Analysis contest data with detailed reports to calculate the ROI of your campaigns
- Control and minimize fraudulent entries
- Supports 30+ languages for multilingual promotions
- Ability to create giveaways with influencers, brands, and sponsors
5. Woobox
Woobox is a 100 percent free and simple WordPress plugin for creating online giveaways. Its drag-and-drop builder helps you create sweepstakes and contests in just a few moments.
Here’s more to love about Woobox:
- Simple integration with 500+ tools like Mailchimp, AWeber, and Zapier
- Easily collect likes, comments, and hashtags on social media
- You can use embed codes to place a contest anywhere on the website
- Dedicated landing page for your giveaway
6. SweepWidget
SweepWidget is a powerful giveaway platform that offers more features than any other tool at an unbeatable price. Whatever type of contest you want run, SweepWidget will be able to handle it. They even offer quite a bit on their free plan.
Here are some of the best features:
- Easy-to-use drag and drop builder
- Fully custom design and CSS
- 90+ entry methods on 30+ social media platforms
- 20+ CRM integrations
- 103 language translations
- Viral giveaways, leaderboard competitions, and instant rewards
- Out of the box sophisticated fraud prevention tools
Conclusion
In this article, you learned the importance of online giveaway contests. You saw examples of successful online contests, and you discovered the best tools for running them.
Remember, you could have the best tools in the world but if your prize(s) suck, it would be a waste of resources. Start with the end in mind when it comes to online giveaway contests. Use surveys and other data collection tools to help you brainstorm enticing prizes. Great prizes lead to great results!
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