How to Host Your Next Retail Giveaway Like a Boss: Things to Know

If you browse various online stores and their social media accounts, you will realize that almost every business is hosting giveaways these days. From free products to tempting discounts, there can be all kinds of things that you can host in sweepstakes.

The good news is that these events can improve the overall reach of your business and help in customer acquisition as well. Therefore, in this post, I will let you know the benefits of a retail giveaway and how you can host one like a pro.

Why You Should Host Giveaways on Your Online Store

Before we learn how to host a giveaway, let’s quickly consider some of the vital benefits of these events and how they can help you.

· Product exposure. This is the most vital benefit of hosting sweepstakes, as it can give more exposure to your products online. Mostly, on social media channels, you can attain brand promotion with such events.

· Generate quick leads. Giveaways can also help you generate instant leads in no time. While they can be used to get new customers, you need to make sure you follow several measures to retain these newly acquired leads.

· Engage with your community. Since most of the giveaways are hosted on social media channels, it will give you a chance to have a dialogue with your customers. You can engage with your community online and promote your brand at the same time.

· Reward your customers. Apart from generating new leads, sweepstakes can also be used to reward your most engaged customers and loyal users. Some insider-only events would be an ideal solution to work on customer retention.

· Have fun! Needless to say, hosting a retail giveaway is so much fun as it would let you give something back to the community and engage with others as well.

How to Host a Successful Giveaway or Sweepstake

Great! Now that you know the benefits of hosting giveaways, let’s look at some smart tips that you can also follow to make the most of these events.

Tip 1: Understand the different types of events that you can host

If you browse platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you will see tons of events tagged as giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes. Therefore, the first thing I would recommend doing is understanding their key differences.

• Sweepstakes: This gives an equal opportunity to everyone as there is no merit-based system and the winners are picked randomly.
• Contests: Mostly, these events follow a merit-based system in which the prize is given to the best entry (like giving the best caption to a photo).

• Giveaways: A “giveaway” is ideally an umbrella term that you can use for contests, sweepstakes, and even lotteries. These are all the basics of hosting such events from a technical perspective. Now, if you want to engage with your customers, then you can come up with a wide variety of giveaways, like the following:
• Hashtag events: These are mostly hosted on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, where users need to post something using your brand’s hashtag.
• Photo Caption: In this contest, you can post a photo, ask your followers to come up with a caption for it, and reward the most creative entry.
• Follow and Tag: This is another popular giveaway type in which you can ask people to follow your handles and tag their friends. If you want to increase your followers on social platforms, then this would be an ideal approach to follow.
• Other events: Apart from that, you can host all kinds of events like a photo contest, guessing games, spin the wheel, trivia posts, first come first get, insider coupons, and so on.

Tip 2: Clearly define your goals and select a relevant platform

After learning about the different types of giveaways and sweepstakes that you can host, you need to define your goals. That is, you need to take a step back and think about the motive of running a retail giveaway.

Do you need to gain followers on Instagram or generate more leads? Do you want to create more brand awareness or get your hashtag trending? Considering these parameters, you can select an appropriate giveaway style from the above-listed categories.

Besides that, you should also consider your target audience while selecting a preferred platform to host a giveaway. For instance, if you want to target teenagers and young adults, then Instagram or TikTok would be better, while Pinterest will help you reach out to millennial women faster.

Tip 3: Be transparent with the rules and results

Let’s be honest – you don’t get multiple chances to create an everlasting impression on your audience, particularly on the web. If your audience would notice that you have manipulated a giveaway, then it can backfire.

Therefore, the best way to run a successful giveaway is by clearly mentioning all the rules and regulations. You can post them on a social media post or on the landing page of the giveaway. Besides that, consider using genuine giveaways raffle platforms to maintain authenticity with the results and keep things transparent with your audience.

Tip 4: Consider using a giveaway platform

Learning how to host a giveaway can sometimes be time-consuming and get complicated. That’s why you can consider taking the advantage of the readily available giveaway and sweepstake platforms.

Some of these popular tools that I recommend exploring are Raffle Press, Gleam, Viral Sweep, Woobox, ShortStack, and Woorise. Using them, you can come up with a giveaway page, create rules, and even run genuine raffles to maintain end-to-end transparency in your event.

Tip 5: Share your giveaway on social handles

Let’s say you have hosted a giveaway, but you aren’t getting enough traction on it. In this case, you can consider sharing the giveaway on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on with relevant links and hashtags.

Besides that, you can also consider collaborating with influencers as it can help you boost the overall reach of your giveaway.

Tip 6: Measure the results and learn from your giveaway

Last, but most importantly, consider monitoring the performance of your retail giveaway. Remember, there is no strict rule of thumb to calculate the ROI of your giveaway. Though, social metrics like the impression, reach, and engagement for your content would certainly come in handy.

Apart from that, you can also check how many new leads your sweepstakes have generated. In this way, you can learn from the performance of your giveaways and  come up with better events in the future.

3 Smart Giveaway Examples to Learn From

I’m sure that by now, you would certainly know how to host a giveaway like a boss. You might already know that tons of brands host giveaways and contests almost every day. Therefore, if you are still not sure what your next retail giveaway should be about, then you can draw some inspiration from the following examples:

1. Mother’s Day Giveaway by Massage Addict

Ideally, you should always keep an eye on any prominent events like Christmas, Black Friday, Mother’s Day, and so on. This is because these big events can give you a perfect opportunity to host a giveaway.

Here, you can see how Massage Addict came up with a giveaway on Mother’s Day that would let participants gift their moms a free massage session. Not only is this related to their product, but the giveaway also struck a chord among their customers, making it a success.

2. Superfan Giveaway by Domino’s Pizza

This mega giveaway was hosted on the Instagram page of Domino’s Pizza. The rules were pretty simple – anyone can participate in the sweepstake by uploading their picture with Domino’s Pizza and posting it with the campaign’s hashtag ( #PieceOfThePieContest). Since the event hosted a price of $10K, it resulted in tons of entries and helped Domino’s Pizza with customer engagement and brand promotion on Instagram.

3. 200K Followers Giveaway by Hydro Flask

Have you completed a milestone (like reaching a specific sales number or crossing 10 thousand followers)? Well, why not come up with a retail giveaway to give something back to the community.

Here’s what Hydro Flask also did when they reached 200K followers on their Instagram handle. They simply asked the participants to follow their handle and leave a comment on the post by tagging two more people. The rules were pretty simple, and it resulted in generating a lot of buzz around the product in no time.

Elevate Your Dropshipping Store with DSers

As you can see, giveaways can help you spike the interest of your customers and new users alike. If you want to retain these newly acquired customers, then you must have a wide range of products and impeccable services. For this, you can just take the assistance of DSers, which is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool.

• DSers is a freely available dropshipping tool hosted by AliExpress and can be integrated with popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix.
• You can browse through one of the most extensive ranges of products on DSers, hosted by thousands of suppliers.
• To make it easier for us to pick the most profitable suppliers, DSers has come up with an inbuilt Supplier Optimizer feature.
• Besides that, you can save your time and efforts by using tons of other features of DSers like automatic tracking of order status, bundle products, variant mapping, stock management, and more.

Over to You!

So, are you ready to host your next retail giveaway? I’m sure that after reading this guide, you can easily learn how to host a giveaway and increase its overall reach by integrating it on social media platforms.

You can further partner with influencers or do some paid promotions for your giveaways to make them successful. If you own a dropshipping store, then make sure you check out DSers to find some of the best products for your customers and manage everything in one place.