How to Do a Giveaway to Grow Your Email List

Do you want to run a giveaway to grow your email list?

If you want to grow your business effectively nowadays, you’ve got to build an email list. Maintaining a list of engaged email subscribers provides an easy way to nurture leads into paying customers.

But how do you build an email list quickly and efficiently? The answer is pretty simple. Run a giveaway.

This article will show you how to do a giveaway to grow your email list with relevant leads. All so you can grow your business faster than ever.

Running a Giveaway To Grow Your Email List

You can’t build a giveaway to grow your email list without putting some necessary steps in place first. So follow the steps below to get started and run a successful contest.

Step 1. Define Your Target Audience

Your target audience is a group of people most likely interested in your business. These are the people you ultimately want to buy your products or services, so defining them is essential.

The easiest way to define your target audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents your ideal customer and includes details of the personality, lifestyle, and interests that inform their buying decisions.

Include the following details in your buyer persona:

• Demographics: age, gender, income, and occupation
• Personal life: marital status, number of children, pets, and type of housing
• Career: job title, industry, responsibilities, salary, and career path
• Personality: introvert, extrovert, optimistic, quiet, and motivated
• Purchase behavior: social media use, online payment preference, mobile device, and internet browser
• Pain points: life goals, frustrations, accomplishments, fears, and regrets

You’ll better understand who your ideal audience is with the above information. That will help with targeting your email giveaway to the right people online.

Step 2. Choose an Email List Service Provider

The next thing you’ll need to run an email giveaway is an email marketing service provider. An email service provider is a company that lets you collect email addresses (email list), so you can send your list email campaigns that promote your business and, of course, your giveaway newsletter.

When you run your giveaway, you’ll connect to your email service provider, so anyone who subscribes as a result of entering will end up on your list. And in the end, you’ll start growing your giveaway newsletter list.

For example, you can create a:

• Constant Contact contest
• Mailchimp giveaway contest
• MailerLite giveaway
• ConvertKit contest
• And more.

Here’s a list of the best email marketing services for small businesses to help you decide which platform is right for you.

Step 3. Pick a Powerful Contest Builder

Once you’ve defined your ideal audience and picked an email marketing service, you’ll need a powerful contest builder to help you run your internet marketing giveaway.

RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin for WordPress users to grow their email list, site traffic, and social media followers.

RafflePress makes it easy to create and run a successful giveaway and includes everything you need to run a giveaway that skyrockets your email subscribers. Plus, it integrates with the most popular email marketing providers, so you can create your email giveaway quickly, with no hassle.

Now let’s look at the steps involved in doing a giveaway to grow your email list using RafflePress. Before you start, get your copy of RafflePress here, so you have everything you need to get up and running.

Step 4. Choose a Desirable Prize

With your target audience, email marketing service, and giveaway builder in place, your next step is to choose a prize that resonates with your audience.

If you don’t have a great prize, people won’t put in the effort to enter your giveaway. So make sure you pick a prize that will attract a lot of attention.

Your prize should also be relevant to your brand and audience. Otherwise, people won’t be interested enough in your brand to stick around after.

So it’s a delicate balance between making the prize desirable enough to draw in an audience and relevant enough to create genuine interest in your business.

Here are a few prize ideas to get you started:

• Book reviewers can run a book giveaway in a blog post to attract avid readers
• Gym owners can offer exercise equipment as their grand prize to promote their gym
• Parent bloggers can run a blog giveaway with prizes of children’s toys
• Freelancers can provide a digital product or service to the winner
• Fashion brands can choose a clothing bundle as the grand prize
• Sports clubs can offer giveaways of sporting goods as a sports marketing and promotion idea

For even more inspiration, check out our list of contest prize ideas.

Step 5. Define Your Email Giveaway Rules

The next step in running your email list giveaway is to create a set of rules and logistics to keep your contest fair.

Usually, you’d start with figuring out the type of contest you’ll run, such as running a simple contest where people only have to enter to win.

But since we already know you want to do a giveaway to grow your email list, we know that you’ll require participants to subscribe to your email list in return for a giveaway entry.

You’ll also need to include the following details in your giveaway rules:

• The age requirements for entering
• Start and end dates and times for your contest
• How people can enter (subscribe to your email list)
• How often people can enter
• If people can gain additional entries (follow your social media channels etc.)
• How you’ll choose a winner (random draw)

After planning your contest, choosing a prize, and setting out your rules, it’s time to build your email giveaway.

Step 6. Create a Giveaway to Grow Your Email List

To create your giveaway, click here to get started with RafflePress. Then follow these instructions to install a WordPress plugin on your website.

Once you’ve installed and activated RafflePress, hover your mouse over the RafflePress logo and click Add New to create a new giveaway.

Choose a Giveaway Template

Upon clicking, you’re taken to a page where you can enter your contest name and choose a giveaway template.

First, enter your giveaway name. For example, if your prize is a Nintendo Switch, you can name your giveaway “Nintendo Switch Giveaway.”

Next, choose your giveaway template. RafflePress has several pre-made contest templates designed to reach specific giveaway goals. Since you want to grow your email list, you’ll need that particular template.

So hover your mouse over the Grow Your Email List template and click Use This Template.

After heading to the giveaway builder, the builder automatically comes with an entry method to subscribe to your newsletter.

Connect Your Email Marketing Service

If you click the Join an Email Newsletter entry method, you’ll see several options on the left-hand side of the builder. That includes a place to enter a new label, how many entries people get from that action, and if that option is mandatory.

The most important features are the Select an Integration dropdown box and Optin Confirmation Checkbox.

The integration dropdown lets you choose from several popular email newsletter services to connect to. At the same time, the optin confirmation box is a way to ensure that people subscribing to your newsletter gives you permission to add them to your list and send them emails.

The email marketing services you can integrate with RafflePress include:

• ActiveCampaign
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• ConvertKit
• Drip
• MailChimp

You can also enter an HTML web form and connect to Zapier. This allows integration with tons of other apps and services. You can learn how to collect emails with Zapier in our documentation here.

To connect to an email marketing service like MailChimp, choose from the dropdown list and click the orange connect button. You’ll be asked to log in to your email service provider. Then follow the on-screen prompts to connect your account.

Click Get Lists to find your existing email lists, and select the appropriate list from the dropdown when you’re connected. Then when you’re done, click Save Integration Details.

Design & Launch Your Giveaway

Next, it’s time to add your giveaway prize details, design your giveaway landing page, and publish your contest on your website.

We’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating an online contest here. So refer to the steps there to finish setting up your giveaway.

Step 7. Promote Your Email Giveaway to Grow Your Email List

With your email list giveaway published, you can’t sit around and wait for people to enter. You need to actively promote the giveaway to spread the word and generate excitement.

Contest promotion is an essential part of any good contest marketing strategy as it’ll help your giveaway go viral so you can grow your audience and generate tons of email subscribers.

The easiest promotion method is sharing your giveaway across your social media channels and asking people to tag a friend in the comments to increase exposure further.

You can also promote your giveaway in the following ways:

• Send an email to your existing subscribers, asking them to share the contest with their contacts
• Add a popup to your website encouraging people to enter using a tool like OptinMonster
• Create a banner for your homepage linking to your contest landing page
• Use social proof notifications to evoke the fear of missing out with platforms like TrustPulse
• Use SmashBalloon’s suite of social media feed plugins to display a feed of people discussing your contest on your website.
• Guest post on other websites and link back to your giveaway page

Remember to start promoting your giveaway weeks before you go live to drive tons of traffic from the day you launch.

You can check out our list of contest promotion ideas for even more help to make your giveaway go viral.

Step 8. Choose a Giveaway Winner

When your giveaway has ended, you’ll need to draw a winner. The fairest way to choose a winner for your email list giveaway is to pick a winner randomly.

With RafflePress, it’s easy to pick a winner. At the end of your giveaway, navigate to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.

The next page shows you how many people entered and how many entries they have. To choose a random winner, click Pick Winner, select your options, and then click Choose Winners Now.

The winner is instantly highlighted, making it easy to email them with great news about their win.

You can learn more ways to pick a winner of a giveaway in this article.

Step 9. Follow Up With Participants

Let’s not forget that after the end of your giveaway, you’ll have a list of new leads for your business. If you let them sit on your list without further interaction, those leads will go cold and unsubscribe, undoing all your hard work.

To keep your new audience engaged with your brand, follow up with an email after the giveaway, thanking them for entering and inviting them to join again in the future.

You could also offer participants a commiseration prize in the form of a discount on their next purchase to help build a relationship and convert them into paying customers.

Step 10. Analyze Your Results

Lastly, it’s a smart move to analyze the results of your email giveaway to see if you were successful in meeting your goals. Since your goal is to grow your email list, you can measure your results by calculating how many new subscribers you gained from running your giveaway vs. the size of your list before.

You can also use a WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights to track contest landing page visits, referral traffic, eCommerce traffic, and other website activity.

With smart dashboard reports, you can see the results within your WordPress dashboard, removing the need to access a different website like Google Analytics.

Analyzing your traffic, you can see which contest promotion strategies drove the most traffic to your giveaway page. Then you can use those insights to make improvements on future giveaways.

You can learn more in this detailed MonsterInsights review.

Need another example? Here’s how Smash Balloon grew its email list by 3,584 subscribers with a giveaway contest.

Email List Giveaway FAQ

There you have it!

Now that you know how to do a giveaway to grow your email list, get started with running a contest!

It will help you develop relationships with your ideal audience, but you’ll also skyrocket your email list, generate laser-targeted leads, and attract new customers to grow your business.

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