9: How NOT To Run a Giveaway

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickup. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode, we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we're here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. All right, so today is super fun topic going on. Today is all about the common pitfalls of giveaways and how to avoid them to make sure that a giveaway actually works for your business. Giveaways are a phenomenal way to grow your list, to get brand awareness out there, and to make sales. But there's a lot of things that can go wrong with the giveaway too. So we are here to help you. Avoid a poorly executed giveaway that wastes time, money, and effort. And this way you can get the growth and engagement you are looking for. If you ever thought a giveaway would be the perfect way to grow your audience, but you weren't sure how to make it work, stick around. We're covering all the big mistakes to avoid. This is how not to run a giveaway.

They always have this dual reputation. It's like, okay, they can grow your list a lot, but they're like, when people talk about the hierarchy of quality people on your list, Giveaways often come at the bottom, and it's not that that's untrue, but the more you implement these tips, really set up a giveaway that is set up— I'm saying the same thing twice— set up a giveaway that is designed to bring you the right people, people who want the right thing. Following these tips gets you the best possible people out of running a giveaway that you possibly can get. So the first tip that we have is choosing the wrong prize. Offering a prize that doesn't align with your brand or attract your ideal audience. And I've, I've spoken about this before. It's the thing that always comes to my head is iPads. I see people giving away iPads all the time and it's like, okay, you're not Apple.

iPads and Amazon gift cards.

Yeah. You aren't Amazon, you aren't Apple, you did not make this thing. It's so wide, the kind of people who would want an iPad or an Amazon gift card. That you just get anyone, people are gonna be like, okay, I don't care about Melissa's jewelry, but I just want an iPad, so I'm gonna enter. And then as soon as she tries to email me about this darn iPad, I'm gonna mark it spam.

And instead of unsubscribing every email I'm gonna get from her, I'm gonna mark spam.

Yeah. So choosing a prize that ideally, because we're the Product Growth Lab, we talk about people are making products for the most part.

We have it easier than other businesses. We actually sell shit that people wanna buy. We're not selling courses, we're not selling like insurance or things that are very intangible. Like these are, we sell such physical things, real things. People can say, yes, I want that, or no, I don't want that. And it fits with my life.

So for the most part, you're only gonna give away one or multiple of your products, or maybe a gift card so people can choose their own. But in some cases you might. For some reason want to give away something that isn't by you. And that's when you really need to sit down and consider, okay, what can I give away that will appeal to the people who I want to be on my list but will repel everyone else? If you sell insurance, that's just an example, and you're like, okay, I'm going to give away a one-on-one session with an insurance broker. That is going to repel 99% of people. People who are genuinely interested in insurance and want to talk about it are going to enter that.

Industry I could think of, and insurance was the first one. Loved.

Insurance is actually one of those cases, it's kind of an— where giving away an iPad would probably work because insurance is so broad, you want everyone on your list.

I have a ridiculous example in my head that actually does work for giveaway, not product-based, more services-oriented, but one that is absolutely ridiculous that would work would be Septic Clean with a free septic treatment or something like that. You get people who need septic help. If they want to win one, there's a chance they would buy one in the future, especially if you gave them a discount afterwards.

I was thinking about what would propel me. If you are a coffee brand and you give away an iPad, I may enter that. If you give away a bag of coffee and a coffee maker, I will not enter because I don't like coffee. Whereas Melissa might enter that. You don't want me. So you're, you're working well to attract people you want and repel the people you don't. And you should know your business well enough to go, okay, who are, who are my people? And what can I give away that does attract the people I want and is going to repel anyone else?

Definitely got to think in magnet.

You should be trying to attract people who are most likely to become loyal customers. Not just people who would be interested, like looking at the people who actually go ahead and make a purchase.

If you have a best-selling item, that is a great thing to put in a giveaway because tons of people have already said it's something they're willing to buy and it's attracted them and it's actually converted them on your website. So the best option right there is to do like put together a collection of your bestsellers or one of your bestsellers. Usually the bigger the prize, the more entries you're gonna get. If it doesn't make you hurt or feel slightly nauseous offering it, it's too small.

And the bigger prize giveaway, the more important it is to listen to these tips because you don't want to give away $1,000 worth of prizes for these 3 new people on your email list. So our next tip on what not to do is overcomplicating the entry process. There are platforms that make this easy. Use them. The things where it's like, okay, you need to go to this website, do this thing.

When you are setting up your giveaway, Be very specific and clear to yourself what you want the result of the giveaway to be. Do you want people on your email list? Do you want sales? Do you want website hits? Do you want to grow a social following? Are you running a giveaway to grow brand awareness? Like, there's lots of reasons to run a giveaway and not all of them come down to email list signups and sales. Those might be secondary, but be very aware of what the primary reason you're running the giveaway is. So Andrew's talking here about asking for too many steps. If you are running a giveaway to get engagement and grow your platform, then tagging 5 friends— you would just lose me because I don't have 5 friends on social platforms that I would tag for this. It wouldn't work right there. But tag 2 friends in the comments to enter. If you're trying to grow your following, that's a fantastic option, but don't have follow and like and tag friends and comment and share and sign up just to get you 1 point into a giveaway. No one's gonna do that. They're gonna abandon partway through.

Yeah, many platforms allow you to give them additional entries for doing each one of those, but I'll see it on Instagram a lot. I've teamed up with this person, do this, follow my account, follow their account, comment on a post on my account, on their account, tag 5 people. And then DM me that you've done all that. It's like, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to follow celebrities' accounts because they don't post stuff that I like. I don't want to bother my friends with like, oh, hey Melissa, I want to win this free holiday to Ibiza, so I'm gonna randomly tag you.

It's actually— I'm true.

Yeah, who are the people that are not going to be annoyed if I tag them in this? It's a bunch of steps and stuff I'm not willing to do. But if I go to your website and give me your email address, you're on your email list, that's Most of what we talk about when we talk about giveaways, if you want additional entries, click here to share to Facebook, click here to share on Instagram, click here to do this other thing. That is fine. The platform that both of us use is KingSumo. It does that. Super common, super cheap. You can get started for free. It was $47 for the upgrade.

I think. $39.99 for lifetime access.

Lead with the one that you want the most. We always start with growing your email list. So it's like they put in their email list and then that's, they've got their entry. And that's why you're like, okay, a nice side benefit is I can also get more followers on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter slash X or whatever it is.

If you want to launch a YouTube channel, side comment right here, this is KingSumo, because there is an option they can get points for following, subscribing to you on YouTube. It doesn't actually subscribe, it just takes them to the page to subscribe, but they're probably going to click it anyway thinking that they need to click it to get the points. But you can also put an additional one on KingSumo that is watch this video. And like, if you want to get monetized fast, run a massive giveaway and do that and have like a 5-minute video that people have to watch. You're gonna get your watch time super fast. Yeah.

Making sure that you keep those entry steps as simple as possible. Focus on the one or two things that you really want from it and make sure that they're tied to your goal. If, like, if you want King Sumo in the Sands, there is I had a lot of different ways you can give people additional entries, but if I implement all of them, it starts to look a little crazy. People will look at that list and be like, okay, well, I know I need to do all of these, but it's good. I'm gonna look really annoying after I've told everyone on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and sent an email to them all, tell them to enter this giveaway. Like, my friends are gonna hate me.

Most people like the, the pros. So the con side of using, utilizing as many of the options KingSumo gives you as possible is that people might get overwhelmed or people might get annoyed. But the plus side of that is you are going to get to see pretty quickly just by the end result which platforms your people mostly are on. If you see that everyone is sharing it to Facebook but no one's sharing it to X or no one's sharing it to, um, TikTok or wherever, then you know that maybe you should focus your marketing efforts on Facebook or on whichever platform the most people who enter your giveaway are sharing it on. So like you can get some really cool data from that because people will only share and take the actions on the platforms they actually use. They're going to open up a different platform that they're not on just to share your giveaway.

I feel like I do the opposite. Like I won't bug people eventually to Twitter because I don't use it.

I would do the Twitter one because I'm never on there, so I don't care.

I have a Twitter that I use just to call out companies who won't respond to any email. It's not the one I set up with actual followers. There's one that just has me like tagging, I think it's the, my bank, be like, you what? Help me, help me now.

So lemme get this right, Andrew, you have a rage X channel? Yeah. That is genius.

If I wanted to get more entries in a giveaway, I'd probably share it to that one cuz I know No one will be like, why is Andrew Shane on this with giveaways? So our next tip I wanted to do is ignore legal and platform rules. There's more and more of this over time, but violating giveaway regulations or platform specific guidelines can, well, you can get in legal trouble or you can get banned temporarily or permanently from different social platforms. Timo is really good in the fact that it gives you a set of terms and conditions that it puts on there. It also, it has, I think it's just a tick, I haven't done a giveaway for a while. They just have a tick box for like GDPR. It's like, yeah, follow it. And I don't think it encourages you to do anything that is against what any platforms say. But Facebook is really weird about giveaways and people tend to give a lot of different advice about it, made up. But I know like just links on Facebook is really weird. Facebook can be hard to do anything on these days. And I know for those kind of like the Instagram still giveaways where you have to like follow someone and tag people. I know Facebook does not like that. That's, you don't see them on there because people tend to get banned when they do that. So making sure that you have a clear set of terms and conditions, buy a template, look stuff up online, or if you have KingSumo, it has a set of terms and conditions that you can just turn on.

Really good thing to be aware of when you're looking at those terms and conditions is what countries your giveaway is valid in. Is it worldwide? Or are you trying to build lists and stuff that are only in specific countries? Like, personally, I sell to US and Canada, and that's about it. So you want to put that in your terms. You also want to put that on your giveaway— where, what countries is it valid in? Otherwise, you could end up being very frustrated.

Yeah, you don't give yourself giant shipping costs. And that's one of those things where you're like, okay, sometimes you can think, okay, I'm not willing to send anything to anyone in the UK, so I don't need to follow the EU and the countries that follow its rules, whatever. So it's complicated. So I don't need to worry about the GDPR thing, but if there's a chance that anyone, even if they wouldn't, you know, if they won, they wouldn't get the prize, there's a chance that they'd fill out the form, you still have to follow the GDPR thing because it's super annoying. So sometimes you do have to follow the rules, but I know there's a bunch of countries with rules. I think Again, it's not legal advice, don't listen to me. But I think for Ireland, you can't make it where someone has to buy something in order to be entered into a giveaway. There must be a way around it to enter for free. So knowing if there's a specific rule in your country, but that, I don't think that applies in the UK or the US. Being sure that you follow any of those rules, including those disclaimers like, this giveaway is not affiliated with Facebook or Instagram, blah, blah, blah. You see that a lot because it's one of those things you're supposed to go on, and I don't want to—

I'm never sure, like, why would think that because it's on Facebook, Facebook is affiliated with the giveaway. Like, it always makes me question, it's like, how dumb are people? But the answer is very exceptional.

It's— yeah, it's a kind of— even if no one should think it, it's—

it—

cover your ass is kind of the legal thing. It's like, even if You don't, you think you might not have to do it, just do it anyway. Yeah. Cover your ass. And I don't think we'll go on about this too long because we'll end up saying something we shouldn't that's wrong. So just make sure you keep informed of whatever legal stuff you need to know and follow it. So the next thing to do is failing to promote the giveaway. This is, fail to promote anything is something we talk about a lot, but assuming that somehow people will find your giveaway on their own without a bunch of promotion. It is wrong. Promote it on your email list, promote it on your social, promote it in different ways. There's someone I know who's on a giveaway just now and they're promoting it on Instagram with an occasional post. And I'm like, you should be sharing this more. I feel like we call out a lot of people we know on this podcast. I don't know if you're into mentions because I haven't seen you talk about this this much. It's this occasional Instagram post that is It just sounds crappy kind of a template that you could easily skip past. You'd probably be getting much more results from this if you were even just on Instagram, add it to your story sometimes, talk about it.

I'll be putting it on my story several times a day, every day that damn giveaway is live.

And using things like countdowns again, Instagram makes this really easy having the countdown, like there's only one day left to enter. If you're doing the kind of viral giveaway style, like KingSumo, making sure that people know they can come back every day for more entries. That platform allows you to do that. It will send emails to do that. Make sure you have that all turned on as well. But not just relying on that. And sometimes you might think, okay, I will launch it out to my email list and because they have to share it on Facebook to enter, that'll just take care of it. That's one of the benefits and how it gets shared to more people. But don't solely rely on that. And don't think, well, what's the point of promoting it on my Facebook or Instagram because those people already follow me, so they're probably on my email list. They're not. But as much as you think there's a big crossover between your social following and your email following, there's always straggler. Sometimes I mean the majority of people aren't actually on your email list because it's a lot easier to hit follow than it is to go and sign up for something. So you keep wanting to get as many as people moved over to email.

The other side effect with that, with your own email list, is if you're doing really well with your email list, you're probably just sending to your active people who have opened emails within the last, say, 90 days or months. But you have that whole segment of people who are kind of unengaged. And this is a phenomenal way, no respart for them, to reengage those people and get them back into like the current stuff of what you're doing. Because they might have— you don't know why they fell off. It might not be because if they hated you, they wouldn't be on your list, but it might be that life got busy, interests changed, shit happened, and now they want to— they kind of forgot you existed, and now they're going to remind you. You're going to remind them again that you exist. So I found it phenomenal using giveaways even just to re-engage And when you look at people who are already on your list, it's a nice way to reward them for being on your list. Giveaways are a great way to say thank you and build that customer loyalty even higher. I'll give you one more thing that's like just a side tip that I've done before that worked so crazy amazing. Well, good. Going back to, I talked before earlier on about like if you want to launch a YouTube channel, that doesn't have to be YouTube, any platform that does video. And like, come on, all of them do video right now. If you shoot a video taking people through your giveaway, Like if you do a screenshot style, you could do screen recorder on straight up on your phone and be like, ah, I'm running this giveaway and like just talk about it and take them through the actual process of entering the giveaway. I don't know if that just gives people reassurance, if it gives them validation, if there's a comfort level to it, but A, it gets you watch time or engagement, and B, it gets you more entries in your— I've done it several times and every time I did it, I noticed way more engagement, way more entries. Than the times that I was lazy and did not do that.

So be sure to promote your giveaway and get as many people entering as possible. Our final tip today is neglecting follow-up after the giveaway. This is massive. Not following up in general is another thing that we have to talk about a lot, but running this giveaway and then you suddenly disappear. I find whenever anyone does anything like some sort of big launch type thing, like once they go away, they're like, okay, I'm putting all this effort into this, now I can go and sleep. No, you got all these people here, you give away who are your ideal people, you need to talk to them and you need to woo them. Now they are leads. Leads die really fast if you're like, okay, you know what, I think I'll wait a couple of weeks so I email them because I've kind of annoyed them a lot. Like, I've emailed them a lot during the giveaway, 2,000 or more, so I'll probably like— no, in that time they've forgotten who you are. They have lost interest and, and it, it was a waste of time. If you immediately start to warm them up a little bit, you don't have to go like really full on into this, but adding some follow-up saying, okay, you didn't win, but here's a discount code, or here are the items available to buy on their own, and you just want to go ahead and buy the thing. Making sure to actually announce the winner, thank people for entering, because sometimes it can feel like Someone talks about this giveaway a whole bunch and then suddenly it ends and they don't talk about it. You're like, did anyone actually get this prize? Is this all a scam? It's like I lose a bit of trust in Melissa if she does that. I'm not saying she does, I just mean I would lose a bit of interest. A bit of— You'll get caught. It's like, yeah, she did this big giveaway and she spoke about it all the time and then I never heard anymore about it. And then, well, we have to deal with that. So making sure to— doing the draw live is a really good way to draw out some interest. A lot of people do that when they do a giveaway. And making sure to send follow-up emails as quickly as possible. And having a platform that is sending your leads over to wherever your emails are straight away makes that easier. If you have that kind of platform, we do some sort of giveaway where they're like all being loaded up into a spreadsheet and then when it's done, You finally upload it, like it, that takes time and takes more effort and you end up losing people in that time. So make sure you have a like good dynamic on a platform that's getting them over there as quickly as possible.

If you can, when someone enters the giveaway, like that is the immediate time to hit them. You want to immediately send them, oh, you're entered, fantastic. Here's your next steps email. You, and you wanna kind of. I don't wanna say hammer them, but you wanna keep that kind of one-sided conversation going with them straight through if you can. The, the, um, the giveaway being won or announced, the winners being announced. I know that I send, when someone said, uh, joins onto the list or enters the giveaway, I send at least 2, maybe 3 emails to them. And that's like immediately, 6 hours later, 24 hours later. Yeah. And if you, You actually remember who you are right when you send it immediately.

But for deliverability, getting people to reply is one of the really great ways to do that. And the common thing people do, they'll be like, okay, tell me your biggest problem or tell me what, and it's, people don't tend to respond to them that much. But if you're like, okay, I will give you like, reply back and let me know you got this email and I will give you an extra entry. Or I'm doing this secret side giveaway for a bonus gift card. And I can reply and I'll make sure I get in that raffle too.

Exactly. That's a sneaky one, Andrew. I like it.

But it gets people replying straight away, which increases your deliverability. If you, it makes it more likely you'll appear in their primary inbox. There's a whole bunch of really good reasons you want people to reply to your email. And you know, they're interested in giveaways and you feel like, okay, Here's a way to increase your chances of winning or be in this whole secret, and then give away. And that's a really good way to do that.

That, or another great thing you can do on there, if you're like, I can't give away that much, totally understandable, to be, throw a vote on there. Be like, hey, while you're here, I'm looking at colors for this next piece or whatnot. Which color do you like? A, B, or C? A or B? Like, fantastic time is to get some client research. Anything that's going to be uber, uber simple for them to reply to.

So those are our 5 common giveaway mistakes: making sure to choose the right prize, not overcomplicating your entry procedure—

simple, simple, simple—

following the legal rules, promoting it, and being sure to follow up. We would love to know if you've run a giveaway in the past, what kind of success you've had, any mistakes that you might have made in the past, and what you learned from them. So be sure to share those over in our Facebook group. And if you want to run a sale this weekend, we have put together a really simple pack of templates and instructions so that you can get your next flash sale done in a snap. If you want to grab that, go ahead and go over to theproductgrowthlab.com/flash. Thanks for tuning in to the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating. This is the Product Growth Lab, signing off.