How to Run a Social Media Giveaway for Your eCommerce Store

September 20, 2021

Marketing plays a huge role for any eCommerce business, and one of the best marketing strategies to boost your sales is a giveaway. An eCommerce social media giveaway can go a long way in promoting your brand, increasing engagement, and ramping up your sales.

Before you just start handing out products though, you need to make sure that your eCommerce giveaway is carefully planned and created to match the needs of your business.

Follow this step-by-step guide to help you create a social media giveaway to really grow your online store.

Why Run Social Media Giveaways for eCommerce?

You need to attract new customers to your online store, and running a giveaway is one of the best ways to do this. Giveaways successfully grab the attention of your target audience. With an enticing giveaway, you can grow your mailing list with interested potential customers, and inspire people to buy your products after the contest.

Some of the biggest benefits of a social media giveaway include boosting brand awareness, bringing lots more traffic to your eCommerce store, increasing social engagement, promoting specific products, and boosting your sales with after-contest promotions.

And you can do this all without needing a big marketing budget. Sure, you’ll have to give away a prize, but your return on investment should be well worth it when you see how much a social media giveaway can boost your store’s popularity.

This marketing tactic is especially useful for eCommerce store owners because you’ve already got the products that you can give away. This allows you to attract the exact audience who would be interested in becoming a customer.

How to Run an eCommerce Social Giveaway: Step-by-Step

Running a giveaway for your eCommerce store is simple, but you need to make sure that you do it properly if it’s going to help you achieve your targets. Follow these steps to creating an eCommerce social media giveaway that does the most for your business.

Step 1: Set Your Goal

You need to have a clear goal in place before you put together your contest. Start by thinking about the end result that you want to achieve, and then you can build your giveaway up around that.

There are many different types of social media contests and giveaways that you can run, with different entry methods and requirements. These should be chosen based on what you want the contest to achieve.

Some common goals could be to increase user-generated content, increase traffic, boost sales of a specific product, increase brand awareness, get more brand mentions on social media, and so on. This goal should be easily measurable. This will help you evaluate the success of your giveaway, and properly plan your promotion around what you hope to achieve.

Step 2: Choose a Social Media Platform

You’ll need to focus your giveaway on one social media platform. The platform that you choose should align with your initial goal, and match your audience’s behavior.

You’ll need to have a clear understanding of your audience for this and know which channel they are most present on. Having a clear understanding of your audience’s online behavior is essential for setting up a great online contest.

Step 3: Choose Your Contest Type

You’ve got loads of different options available when it comes to choosing the type of giveaway that you’ll run. Your main questions here should be: how do people enter, and how do they win? Of course, the option you choose should relate back to your original goal.

Some examples of different contests and giveaways that you can run include a selfie contest, a hashtag contest, referral contests, leaderboard contests, photo caption contests, and more.

If you want to increase user-generated content on Instagram, then a photo or video contest is a great idea. If you want to increase your brand reach as much as possible, then you could run a contest that offers bonus entries for referrals.

Step 4: Choose a Great Prize

The success of your eCommerce giveaway relies on your prize. Your prize is what attracts your entrants, and determines what kind of people are going to enter your contest.

The worst thing you can do is just give away a new iPhone and expect to attract a bunch of people who are interested in your eCommerce store. People will just enter for the prospect of winning an iPhone, and forget about your business straight away.

As an eCommerce store owner, your products make the perfect prizes. Anyone who enters to win one of your products will be interested in your business. After the contest, there’s a good chance that they could become a customer with the right promotion.

So, choose an enticing prize that will attract enough attention. A product bundle or your best-seller is always a good idea. The prize needs to be big enough to generate a lot of buzz, but not too big so that it becomes an unnecessary expense for your business.

Step 5: Determine Your Rules

You need to have a very clear set of rules in place for your contest to run smoothly. Make sure that these rules are as specific as possible, and made very clear to your audience.

First, understand the rules for the social media platform that you’ll be running the giveaway on. For example, Facebook has very clear do’s and don’ts for running giveaways that you need to stick to.

You will also need to set rules for who can enter your contest, how they can enter when the contest ends, what types of submissions won’t be accepted, and so on. You might have to apply restrictions based on area or age.

Step 6: Use the Right Social Giveaway Tool

You’ll need to use a dedicated social media giveaway tool in order to run successful contests. This is necessary for capturing leads, generating more engagement, and ensuring the contest achieves your end goal.

A major benefit of a good social promotions tool is that you can use it to build landing pages for your contest. Landing pages are used to gather information from your contest entries. When they enter, you’ll want to add their email address to your mailing list. This will allow you to send them marketing updates after the contest.

When people click to enter your contest on social media, they can be directed to your landing page where they can enter. You will need to use the right social promotions tool to set this up.

Of course, the way you use your contest tool depends on the contest you’re running. Let’s say you’re doing an Instagram hashtag contest. People will enter by posting on Instagram with a hashtag. For a contest like this, you’ll need a tool that gathers all hashtag entries into one place.

Your giveaway tool is necessary for capturing information from your entrants, and making it easier for your giveaway to achieve its goal.

Step 7: Post Your Contest

Now that your eCommerce giveaway is all set up, it’s time to launch it. Post the contest on your chosen social media platform with an eye catching image that shows off your grand prize. You only want to do one post about your contest to make it easier for people to enter correctly and stay up to date with your rules. Because of this, you should pin your post, or put some effort into boosting and promoting your post.

Step 8: Promote Your Giveaway Properly

Once your contest is up and running, you’ll need to put some effort into promoting it. Even with an amazing prize, your contest might quickly become invisible if you don’t put in enough promotional effort.

Use all of your current marketing channels to promote your contest. This includes social media, your blog, your newsletter, and anything else. Consider using paid advertising to reach more people. You can also update your social media profile to make your contest visible. Link to your contest in your description, add a temporary profile picture and cover photo advertising the giveaway. You could even get influencers to help you promote your giveaway. The more you promote your giveaway, the better your end results will be.

Step 9: Announce Your Winner

Finally, it’s time to choose a winner based on your giveaway rules. However you choose a winner should have already been established at the start of the contest.

Pick a winner, and reach out to them with your prize. Now you can post on social media to let your audience know that the contest is over and a winner has been chosen.

Step 10: Reach Out to All Entrants

As soon as you reach the end of your giveaway, you should follow up with everyone who entered your contest. Your products will be on their mind when you close your giveaway, so this is when they’re most likely to become customers.

Send out an email to all of the people who entered your giveaway, and try to entice them to make a purchase with a special discount code. You could offer something like a 10% off coupon as a consolation prize, which can be a really effective way to drive up your sales.

Conclusion

When done right, regular giveaways can help to keep your audience engaged, attract new potential customers, grow your social media channels, and drive up your sales. With the right tool and strategy, this can be easy.

Follow the steps above, analyze your giveaway results, and repeat. Running a giveaway is easy, and it could be just the thing your eCommerce store needs to achieve real growth.

Written by Tom Kotze. Tom is a marketing content writer at Wishpond – the all-in-one marketing platform that helps businesses achieve real growth.