Running a Giveaway to Build Your List

Has your audience building efforts stalled out? Grow your following and your list by running a giveaway on social media. Come join me on this episode right now.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today we're going to talk about an audience building tactic that I love and that I recommend every one of my new students do. And then I want you to continue to do it quarter after quarter. I want you to run this several times a year, but I'm talking about running a giveaway on social media. And it's really simple. It doesn't have to be complicated. And I'm going to take you through a couple of the steps of it, why you should do this, what you can expect from it, and how to do this. A little bit. So the first thing, when I think about running a social media giveaway, we have to understand our why. Like, why are we doing this? What is the goal? What is the outcome that we want from running a giveaway on social media? And there's 3 different outcomes that I like, and you can get all 3 of them. You don't have to decide on one of them. But when I think about determining that goal, I think of one Growing our following. So growing our social media following is important. It's something that is top of mind all the time. The more we can grow, the more subscriptions are gonna grow, the more our business is gonna grow. So a reason that I would run a giveaway is 'cause I wanna grow my social media following. I also wanna build an email list. That could be an email list, a text list. It could be in different forms. But I wanna build a list because a list is super powerful. Number 3 would be to really gauge some interest in my potential box. And that's really for people that haven't launched yet that are really trying to get their foot, you know, in the, in the sand with this. So they might be starting from scratch on social media. They might not have an email list and they may not even have a box yet and they really wanna gauge interest. So if that's you, running a giveaway is perfect. If you are someone that already has a subscription box, this is a great audience building tactic that we need to work into our marketing efforts year round. So let's walk through these a little bit more in depth. So when I talk about increase your following, I want you to think about where your ideal customer is. So where's the audience that you're trying to attract? So if you're thinking about maybe young moms that have kids at home, they're probably on Pinterest or Instagram. Okay, that's, that's where they hang out. If you are trying to attract like baby boomers, they're gonna be on Facebook. If you're trying to attract millennials, Gen Z, they're gonna be on TikTok. So I want you to think about who your audience is, understand who your ideal customer is, and then we wanna go run this giveaway. On a platform that we want to grow on, where our ideal audience is, where our ideal customer hangs out. That's where we want to do that. We don't want to go, you know, hang out on Twitter and LinkedIn if that's not where our customer is. If that's where our customer is, then that's where we need to be. So I want to grow my following on the platform that my ideal customer is most likely on. And it could be multiples, like it could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be Pinterest, it could be TikTok. It could be multiple of those. We don't have to pigeonhole into one of them. That's what we need to focus on first. And there's a tool that I like to use to run a giveaway, and it's called KingSumo, K-I-N-G-S-U-M-O. And you can go to kingsumo.com and you'll see exactly what I'm looking at. And it's a tool to help connect your social media accounts to your giveaway so that those entries are connected to your accounts. But we wanna increase our following. Like, that's a goal that we should have year round. We always wanna grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. It's a fact. So the second thing that I wanna grow is my list, specifically my email list. When I think about having an email list, it's one of the most important things that any business owner should have. And if you're sitting here right now and you're like, I don't even have an email list, this is a great way to get it started. And if you have an email list already, maybe it's not growing, maybe it's a little bit stalled out. This is a great way to add a pile of people into your email list so that you can start marketing to them. And when you think about like starting something from scratch, say like an email list, it can feel really daunting, right? It can feel like you're watching grass grow in your front yard. But when you can put together a giveaway, it just kind of gives things momentum. It's the same with increasing your follower count on social media. Like, it'll give you a little bit of momentum to get that going and then keep building on that. Same way with your email list. If you start one with a giveaway, we can build on that. If you already have an email list, running a giveaway will just complement that. We can add to what we already have. And the third thing we talked about as far as our why is we're gauging interest in our potential box, right? So we have to put things out there in front of people to see if it's what they want. Creating a giveaway with your potential subscription box in mind will really help you gauge the interest of people, people on your page, people following you, new people. Like, is it viable? Is this a good idea? And if it is a good idea, then we know we can move forward. If you don't get much traction on this, then that's also a sign that maybe we need to change it. Maybe this is not what I think people want. And so it gives us a little bit of social proof and a lot of potential interest. So when we think about why we would run a giveaway, to grow our following, to build a list, and to gauge interest. In our potential box. So those are the, those are the top 3 reasons. And if you're thinking like, yes, I need to do all those, then a giveaway is perfect for you. So the next step in figuring this out is now determining a prize for that giveaway. And I really, really want you to think about this. I want you to think about what you've ever entered a contest for, and it changes, you know, it changes through your life. I can remember, you know, like giving blood to get a free t-shirt when I was in college. Take a lot more for me to give blood now, but when you're in college, man, a free t-shirt's a free t-shirt. So I want you to think about what you would enter a contest for. What would you share on social media? Like, how meaty does that prize have to be for you to share it, for you to give your email, for you to take time out of your day to just sit and enter a contest? Maybe it's more than a t-shirt. It's more than my 20-year-old college days. You know, it would take a little bit more than that for me. Maybe that's a one-time box. Maybe it's a 3-month subscription. Maybe it's a 6-month subscription. It can even be a 1-year subscription. But the, the meatier the prize is, the more viral your giveaway is going to go. And not, not, and I say viral, not that you're going to get a million entries. But viral that it's gonna get juice in social media. Like, it's gonna build momentum. So the bigger the prize is, the more momentum it's gonna have as you start to promote it. And I want you to think about a couple different things when you're thinking about the prize for your giveaway. If you are thinking about doing a subscription box, your giveaway needs to be a subscription box. Okay? We can't go give away an Amazon gift card that doesn't align. That's not who we're trying to attract. We're not giving away a pair of roller skates or a Dyson vacuum cleaner. That's not what we're doing here. We're trying to attract people that would be potential subscribers. So when you think about your giveaway, I want you to curate a box. Now, if you don't have products, if you don't have a box yet, think about what this box could be. If you've taken my 6 in 60 workshop, you've probably laid out 6 months of your subscription box. If you haven't taken it, it's a free workshop that I host. You can register and watch it at 6in60workshop.com. But once you've laid out those 6 months of subscription boxes, you can really visualize what's gonna go in that box. Even if you haven't bought packaging, even if you haven't bought products yet, you could still curate a box similar to what you're thinking, put it together and give that away. You can go to Target and buy products. You can go to any store in town and curate a box to give away, right? All we're doing is giving it away. We're not saying that this is what you're getting in our subscription. We want it to be similar to what you're going to get in your subscription. But we're not saying that this is what it is in our giveaway. We're just creating a giveaway that would attract people that would also want your subscription box. So I want you to keep that in mind as you're determining the prize, and I want you to think about the value of the box. So if I give you one of my subscription boxes, the value is $60, right? But it doesn't cost me $60. If I give away a 6-month subscription, right, then we're getting into hundreds of dollars of value. But it doesn't cost me that much. My cost is the packaging and the products, right, and the shipping. That's my cost. So when you think about the cost of it, I want you to think about what you would pay to get 500 or 1,000 new emails on your list for— of the right person, of your ideal customer. What would you pay to have 1,000 new followers that were your perfect person? What would you pay to have 1,000 new opt-ins, like emails on your email list of your perfect person? That's our trade-off. That's what we're giving up. The cost of that prize is what we're paying to get these people on our list, to get these people into our world. So I don't want you to think of it as this astronomical cost a 6-month subscription, when you, when you line out the cost of that, it's not that big of a deal to get your perfect person on your email list, to get them to follow you on your social media accounts, to get them to share what you're doing with your giveaway. That's priceless. And so I want you to remember that when you're thinking about what kind of prize that you want to give away. Think about what you would pay to have that person into your world that you could potentially sell to over and over and over again. You've got to make your prize worth it. Don't make it something small. It doesn't have to be huge. You don't have to give away a lifetime subscription or anything. Please don't do that. But it needs to be worth it. Okay, think about what you would give your email for. Think about what would make you share on your social media that contest, and that will help you determine your prize. Okay, now the next step After we've figured out why we wanna do this, what we're gonna use as a prize, we gotta create a timeline for this. And the timeline is not long. We don't wanna be too long, 'cause then your giveaway gets stale. But we don't want it to be too short because we wanna give it traction. We wanna give it as much juice as we can to collect as many people into the giveaway as we can. And really that sweet spot is somewhere between 7 and 14 days. So 7 is the shortest, 14 days max. You could push it a little bit further than that, but I would tell you the sweet spot is around there. Maybe 10 days is that sweet spot. Anything longer than 2 weeks, you're just talking about it way too long, and then people get fatigued by it. So create a timeline that you're gonna run this giveaway, and it's important to pick a great time to run it. You don't wanna run it when people are busy with other things. Like, you're not going to run a giveaway during Black Friday. Like, there's too much noise going on there. Don't do that. Not going to run a giveaway the week of Christmas. People aren't paying attention. Okay, create a block of time in the calendar that makes sense for you to run a giveaway for your ideal customer. What are they doing? What are they thinking? You know, all those things that happen during a month from your ideal customer, we've got to create a timeline. So our timeline needs to be somewhere between 7 and 14 days. And that's how long we're gonna run the contest. And then our next step is to share, share, share, share, share, share. We're gonna share it everywhere. We're gonna share it all over our social media accounts. We're gonna email it to our people. And I know you're thinking like, Sarah, we're trying to get people's email. Why would we email it to people that are already on our list? Because they're gonna share it. They're gonna get entries. They're gonna share it on their social media to get more entries. People on your email list, might not be following your social media accounts. So that's another way that we can get more followers on our accounts. So we want to put it everywhere that we can. We're going to share it a lot. And remember, we have these 7 to 14 days to share. That's all we have. So we have to go all in with those 7 to 14 days. We got to keep talking about it throughout every one of those days. You need to be excited about it. We need to post about it. We need to do stories. We need to do short video. We need to go live. Like, we need to talk up our giveaway so that we can get the most bang for our buck. We're going to give away a 6-month subscription. We're going to give away a 1-year subscription. We can't just lob it out there on day 1 and then remind them on the last day, don't forget to sign up. We have to use this as a promotion and we have to talk about it a lot so that we can get the most value out of what we're giving away. Okay, that means we have to talk about it. You can't just put it out there and hope they'll come. You have to keep talking about it. Now there are some rules for social media giveaways, and I wanna go through those with you just a little bit so that you understand what you can and can't do by having a giveaway on social media. You totally can run a giveaway. It is legal to run a giveaway on social media. Hear me say that it is legal, but there are some things that you have to make sure you have in place when you're running a giveaway on social media. And the first thing is that it has to be free to enter. You cannot associate an entry with any cost. So it's not like if you buy, you know, a t-shirt, you get a free entry. If you buy a Tumblr, you get 2 entries. It cannot be associated with anything that has to do with the purchase. Your entries have to be free, and it has to state that in your rules. So we'll talk about that in a minute, but it has to state that. The winner has to be chosen randomly. So you have to be able to choose them randomly. It can't be rigged. Like, and these are just, these are just like, okay, right? Like, I know those things, but they have to be stated because somewhere around the way someone has done this not correctly. So we need to just talk about it. So it has to be free. The winner has to be chosen randomly. The winner has to be publicly announced. So wherever you're hosting this giveaway, you have to publicly announce the winner there. So if you're hosting it on Instagram, you need to do a post with the winner. If you're sending it through email, you need to email that there— here's the winner. Has to be publicly announced. And the 4th thing, and this is probably the most important, is there can be no affiliation with the platform. So you have to clearly state in your rules that your giveaway is not associated with Instagram or Facebook or TikTok in any way. So it has to be clearly stated that this is not associated with your platform that you're running it on. Okay? And if you follow those 4 simple rules, there's no problems running a giveaway. Alright, you— the other thing that I want you to be cautious with is you can't ask people to tag and share. Especially on Facebook. You kind of get away with it on Instagram, but those are, those are things that will get you in trouble on Facebook. So one little tip that I do is I do like a BFF giveaway. I'll do like 3 months for you and 3 months for your BFF. So there's a 6-month subscription, and I won't say tag your BFF because that's kind of against the rules. So I'll say Let me know who you would share your subscription with. And then they're tagging them without me asking them to tag them. Does that make sense? So you just have to be careful with it. We every week inside the Launch Your Box membership, we have members setting up and running giveaways and they're great. They're getting results from them. Some are getting hundreds of people on their lists and following, some are getting thousands. Like the last one that I ran, I got an extra 1,500 people that were new to me on my email list, an extra 1,500 emails that were brand new, not total, but those were the people that weren't on my list before the giveaway. And so you're just constantly growing your audience. And that's what I want you to really learn from this. It's just one of the best things you can do to start. Growing an audience, to start growing a list, but also to continue to grow an audience and continue to grow that list. You know, I've talked through the why of why doing a giveaway is a great idea. You should run a giveaway. And if you're inside Launch Your Box, if you're a Launch Your Box member, I walk you through step by step of setting up a giveaway and then what to do after the giveaway is over. So you'll find that training inside the Launch Your Box library, but it's important, it's important to build your audience and it's important to do that in some fresh, fun, new ways. So let's start growing our following and let's start growing our list. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com Get on our waitlist and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.