List Building Giveaways: How to Double your Email List in Seven Days
With social media platforms of all types tightening the algorithm strings on business accounts across the board, giveaways have become a key to break through stagnant reach to connect with fans. Grow your follower counts and build your email list without aimlessly hitting the boost button.
In the first post of our successful Giveaway’s blog post series, we talked about Engagement Giveaways, and how LIKE/SHARE/WIN giveaways have a big place on Facebook and Instagram to keep your posts circulating and fans engaged. Find that post here if you haven’t read it already.
In part two of our blog series, we’re dishing on the second type of giveaways, list-building giveaways.
(Stay tuned for the third post and giveaway type, growth-giveaways, coming soon!)
What is a list-building giveaway?
It’s a giveaway type typically run on a separate URL from any social network, but able to be promoted across all social channels with the purpose of growing your email list. It offers your fans the opportunity to win a prize of your choosing based on them sharing their email and can also ask them to complete an action.
Growing your email list should be a central part of your sales funnel to capture customer information for targeting and retargeting any time.
Consider this, if Instagram or Facebook closed the doors tomorrow, how would you reach your fans? You wouldn’t unless you had their email. Likewise, as organic reach plummets on Facebook and soon Instagram, how will you reach them without paying an arm and a leg? Email.
Let’s talk about List-Building giveaway widgets, quizzes, surveys, and stand alone posts on social media.
Giveaway Widgets
Here are two giveaway widgets we’ve used recently at The Boutique Hub:
PromoSimple is a tool specifically for list building, the app is very simple to set up on desktop and requires only one click to add an email address for users. You can customize the widget with a header image, and embed it to your site, blog posts and social channels.
To promote this giveaway, simply share the URL of your giveaway widget across social’s either as a stand alone link, or together with a giveaway image you create. After the giveaway, download the csv. file and click a button to draw a random winner.
While there is a free version of PromoSimple, you’ll likely go with the second $75/month option to access the ‘viral share’ feature which gives bonus entries for sharing the giveaway across various social networks.
Gleam is one of our favorite giveaway tools because of the wide options of ‘actions’ you can require giveaway participants to take. Not only will they sign in with their email address to enter, they can also follow any of your social channels, visit specific web pages, comment on your blog, and more.
Like PromoSimple, Gleam allows you to share the giveaway URL, embed on your site, integrate with Shopify, or simply create a giveaway tab on Facebook.
While there are free options, the $39/month option is fitting for most accounts to access the opportunity to download the entrant’s emails.
It’s been almost a year since we last used the free version of Rafflecopter, but we found it to be an easy to set-up, easy to use interface with good results at that time. There have been many upgrades to the program since our last use, so be sure to take a look!
Besides Gleam, Rafflecopter and PromoSimple, there are a variety of other options available that we’ll also be testing in the future in an effort to find a program that works best for the host and the user. These other options include WooBox, heyo, FishBowl and Interact. Don’t forget about LeadPages either. Besides its use as a sales funnel builder, the program also has giveaway templates that are easy to set-up and use.
To help you make a decision and take a closer look at options, we came across this fabulous post reviewing our three favorite giveaway widgets for features and use on Kasa Reviews – check out the details and winners here.
Surveys
Surveys are an age old tool to gain customer insight, get valuable feedback and build a deeper brand connection with customers. Offering a giveaway to those filling out your survey is a multidimensional tool to grow your email list.
Survey’s could be easily set up with a Google Form, or our personal favorite tool – Typeform.
Create a giveaway image and share together with the link to your survey across social media and your email list.
Stand Alone CTA’s
If you’re ready to give a list-building giveaway a try without a fancy widget, survey or quiz, you can simply integrate this call-to-action into any Like/Comment/Win giveaway by asking them to hit message and send their email address to your page. You’ll be able to verify entries based on the profile that commented on your post, liked your post and then sent you a message with an email. Simple right? Use random.org to generate a winner based on the entries you recieve.
Group Giveaways
At The Boutique Hub, we offer the opportunity to join with other boutiques to jointly offer a giveaway and cross promote it to many different boutique audiences for greater reach and results. These giveaways are great for getting a large number of new emails on your list, but always be mindful of the approach to connecting with these new subscribers after the giveaway is over and you welcome them to your list.
It’s helpful to send out welcome emails in small batches, remind them of how they signed up for your list, share with them more about your brand and why they should stay on your list, as well as a little coupon code just for saying thanks for joining the giveaway!
Cheers & #BoutiqueLove,
Ashley + The Boutique Hub
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Are you ready to give it a go and grow your own email list? Let us know what tools you found most helpful in the comments below, and be sure to join our Boutique Owners Facebook group for even more tips and opportunities to join a giveaway with other owners like you!
