Giveaways are smart marketing strategies you can use to increase your business’s brand recognition, following, and even sales. After all, who doesn’t love free stuff? Learn how to entice more customers to check out your online or retail store through the power of giveaways. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know to run a merchandise giveaway for your business.
Choose Your Giveaway Prize
The first and most important step of planning a giveaway is choosing a prize or prizes you’ll offer your customers. Some of the most popular giveaways involve company branded apparel items, such as t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and other accessories. Some companies may also include some of their products in giveaways to promote new or popular items. Evaluate your target audience and choose a giveaway prize that will resonate with them most.
You can combine the brand awareness achieved through a giveaway with brand loyalty by offering a giveaway such as Prince William Pottery branded mugs.
Outline Your Rules of Entry
When hosting a giveaway, you’ll need to outline a clear set of steps covering how customers can participate. For example, for giveaway campaigns that take place on social media, many companies want participants to first follow their account and leave a like or a comment on the announcement post. If you’re offering a giveaway in-store, you could encourage customers to sign up for your newsletter or email list. These steps for entry can help you build your following, and if you host giveaways often, these customers will be more likely to stick around.
Market Your Giveaway
After you’ve designed your giveaway and its rules, you need to spread the word to encourage new followers to sign up. There are several ways to market your giveaway. Whether you’re running an online or in-store contest, you can use social media to spread the word about it. Create a social media post highlighting your giveaway prizes so that people know what they might win. You can also use other marketing tools, such as texts, emails, and newsletters, to increase participants in your giveaway.
Select a Winner
Once you’ve published and marketed your giveaway, all that’s left to do is wait for your closing date. After the final day, review your applicants to ensure that all of them followed the sign-up requirements. Don’t be afraid to exclude those who didn’t. If you’ve received enough entries, use a random number generator to select a random winner from your list of qualified entrants. Then all you need to do is contact the winner. You can either send them their prizes or encourage them to stop by the store and pick them up.
Now that you know how to host a giveaway for your business, you can use this strategy to increase your following and promote your merchandise. Try hosting a giveaway for yourself and see how many new customers and followers your business can generate.