MBA1102 Do Giveaways Work? + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs, one of our full courses. This month we're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build and launch your own online course within 30 days. It retails at $500 over at EasyCourse co. But somebody's gonna win it for free today and you can win as well. All you gotta do is leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw automatically. And you automatically enter the draw for every week when you leave a review until of course you win. It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 NBA show where business is a pleasure with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn Do Giveaways work. Many people, especially on social media, try to run contests and giveaways whether they're gift cards or iPhones or iPads, and they do this to generate attention and leads for their business. But do these giveaways really work? Well, I've tried giveaways in different forms in our business, and I'm going to share with you my experience when giveaways do work and when they don't, so that you can save yourself some time and money and effort and headaches. I'll explain to you how you can run a giveaway easily and who best should be involved in the giveaway so you can maximize your return on investment. I know when we're having like a slow month or sales are kind of dipping, but we're trying to think of new ideas to generate some excitement, and giveaways are at the top of the list. But when they do them wrong, if you don't do them right, they can cause more harm than good. So let's make sure we do it right when it comes to giveaways. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Many of us think about running giveaways to create some buzz, some excitement, and some traffic to our website, but not all traffic is created equal. You want to make sure that you're attracting the right people. You don't want to spend money, time, and effort growing your mailing list with people that are just not good for you, not a good fit for your business, or just in for the giveaway. So I want to share with you my experience when giveaways work and when they don't. I lost a lot of time and effort and, yes, some money running giveaways that just simply do not work or cause me more trouble and pain than it's worth. Let me start with when giveaways do work, and it has to do with the audience who you're actually running the giveaway for. And I believe in my experience, that giveaways really work when your audience are proven buyers, people that actually have bought from you or at the very least have subscribed to your mailing list, to your newsletter from their own interest, people that already sold on you. Many people, they try to use giveaways to bring in new customers or bring in new audience members. I find that you get a lot of dud clients that way, a lot of dud email list people that are just in it for the giveaway and they just flood your mailing lists for no reason. See, when you do a giveaway with people that already sold on you, that already bought from you, when they take action, it has meaning. Let me give you an example of a Giveaway. I've run to my current customers or to my current audience. I often do this on a webinar. So I'm running a webinar and I'm doing a demo of our software, Webinar Ninja. And then I say, hey, anybody who buys webinar Ninja today on the webinar and takes our special offer webinar, we're gonna do a random draw with everybody that signs up and I'll have a tab open with all the new customers that sign up during the webinar and somebody's going to get it for free. So they buy or they sign up and then they get their annual membership for free. So it encourages people to, hey, maybe I can win. If I don't, I'll check it out anyway. And with webinar Ninja, there's a 14 day trial, so they don't really pay anything when they sign up. But it's an incentive to encourage people that are interested anyway. It pushes them beyond that line. It gives them more incentive and that really works. Another great experiment that we used is giveaways to our audience for sharing our products and services with their friends and family. And you could do this through an affiliate program. People that hit certain goals, you can work with a gift like the first prize. The person with the most sales this month will get a new MacBook Pro and second place is an iPad and third place is an iPhone. You get the point. Incentivizing people to share your product with other people to make sales on your behalf. You can also run giveaways to keep your customers to reduce churn. So say, for example, you just email your customers that have become customers this past month and say, hey, we're running a random draw, a random prize for all our customers next month. And it's just our way to say thank you for being awesome. So people will hang on and become customers and continue to use your product because hey, they want to win a prize, but at the same time they are loving your product and they are already customers. You're just incentivizing them to stay on and become a customer for longer or for the long term. Or you can have giveaways again for people that upgrade from monthly to annual. I find that this is giving you more return on investment when it comes to what you give away, whatever the prize is when you actually run the giveaway for current customers or at the very least again, current members of your email list or community. And of course, this could be your Facebook group or your forum or things like that. Now on the flip side, when I ran a giveaway to the public to try to grow my email list or get new customers, I just got a whole lot of people that are just not interested in my product. They're really just interested in the giveaway. And unfortunately, those people cost you time and money. Why? Because every email that you have on your email marketing software, you're paying for it, right? You hit certain limits. You're gonna have to pay more. So you want to make sure you prune your email list and not add people that are just there for other reasons than becoming customers. You want buyers. So as you can see, it's all about the audience, the audience you're actually presenting your giveaway to. Now here's some tips about running the actual giveaway. There's a lot of different software to run giveaways, but the one that we use is called Kingsumo.

Love it.

Absolutely easy to use, super simple to do. But you can do your own research if you prefer to find a software that's right for you. But the prize that you're giving away or the prizes you're giving away in your giveaway really, really matter. You want to make sure that the incentive is something that your audience actually wants. I gave some really bad examples, actually, like a MacBook or an iPhone, because most people have a laptop and have an iPhone or a smartphone, and getting one is not that great. Because what am I going to do with it? Try to sell it. A little bit of a headache, I guess so. So get creative with your prizes, whether they are adventures or trips or vouchers. Some ideas that I thought were great were like, date night for a year. So they will cover the costs for a dinner and a movie once a month for a year. So 12 of those. So that's like a thousand dollars or so. Or Netflix for a year. That's not that expensive, but it's kind of a nice little thing that you can have. You have Netflix, but they'll pay the bill for Netflix for a year. Or a bundle of really good books, like your top 10 favorite books. Or what about some R and R, like a massage package? Who doesn't love a massage? Or something totally fun, like a classic super Nintendo or something. Or two tickets to a sporting event or a concert. Get innovative, get fun with your prizes and make sure it's a good fit for your audience that you are running the giveaway for. And of course, you gotta make sure you follow up after the giveaway. I'm not talking about just rewarding the giveaway, but the people that entered the giveaway and lost. You want to have some sort of relationship with them, follow up with them. Is there any way you can give them some sort of consolation prize like a month free to your product or a free giveaway like a course or a ebook that you wrote? That's a great way to kind of build goodwill.

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So as you can see, giveaways could be hugely beneficial to your business if done right, but also a big waste of time and money if done wrong. At least that's what I experienced. My advice, if you've never done a giveaway, is to start small with your current audience. The price doesn't have to be extravagant. It could be something that's worth a hundred dollars, like an Amazon gift card or an itunes card, or again, like a voucher to a massage or something like that. An experiment and up the ante every time you run a giveaway. Remember, the purpose here is to build goodwill, be top of mind, and to make your customers more convinced they made the right choice by choosing you, by being on your email list, by being customers. Thank you so much for listening. Listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's lesson is over, but the episode's not because it's Free Ride Friday. I gotta announce today's winner. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Rckyu from norway. Rckyu says great. 5 stars. These are business tips that are easy to understand and digest well. Thank you Rckyu. You are our Free Eyed Friday winner all the way from Norway. Your mission is to email me at omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride. If you want to win a free ride, a membership to Easy course or a $500 course on how to build your own online course over at easycourse co. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw automatically. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Giveaways is just one form of marketing. So if you're not interested in it if you don't really like them, if it's not your thing, totally fine, you don't have to do them. You're not missing out if you're doing other forms of marketing. If you're making other efforts to marketing your business. Do what's right for you and your business. But I like to experiment and find out if it is right for me and right for my business before I make that choice. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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