How to Run a Successful Giveaway Campaign on Facebook?

Facebook Ads Scars are yet unhealed!

Many of you would agree with me that this is a fair statement. At least that is what I felt after having spent $500 on Facebook and getting a ZERO ROI.

This is for some very specific campaigns that I ran and shouldn’t be confused as an overall performance of my ads.

I guess that’s enough of confusion. So let me explain.

I am not a huge fan of Facebook ads. While some ads with specific objectives worked for me, something that has never worked are –

1. Teespring campaigns
2. Lead generation campaigns giving away FREE IM products
3. Direct linked Promotion of affiliate products in IM Niche

While I agree that a lot of people on Facebook are interested in the Internet Marketing niche, somehow the above never worked for me. At least Teespring campaigns was a disaster and I am not going into it at least in the near future, more so because it is not a part of my business plan.

I am not a huge fan of testing it with hundreds of dollars. If you know what is a fair amount to test with for your specific business, the results of this testing should be enough to base you decision. And I felt that none of the above was a viable strategy, at least for me.

Our Experimental Giveaway Campaigns

One of the things that has worked real well for me on Facebook is running giveaway campaigns. Giveaways are a nice way to build your list and are very effective if you do it the right way.

But what works and how to set it up the right way are things that you should know if you are to run a successful giveaway campaign using Facebook Ads.

The below is a screenshot of a giveaway that I ran for my wife’s Recipe Blog at http://thetastesofindia.com

That was a giveaway campaign that we ran during Christmas and it was for a $30 Amazon Gift Card. Here are some of the things about the campaign:

1. Our Cost per like was only about 3 cents
2. We got about 1044 page likes for about $35.04
3. The CTR was about 14% which was extremely good

What this campaign did for us was more than just sending some likes our way. Some of the backend benefits of this campaign was –

1. Our website traffic increased by almost about 12%, thanks to all the likes and shares
2. Of these 1000 odd likes that we received, we were able to convert about 193 of them into email subscribers. That is only 18 cents per subscriber, which is very good if you compare it with subscriber acquisition using any other method.

After I finished this giveaway campaign, I ran a couple more in IM and the results were simply amazing.

Ingredients of a Successful Giveaway Campaign

So, how do you run a good and successful Giveaway campaign?

This is a question I had and it took me some time to figure it out because of the lack of any information on that. My initial experiments were not too bad and that gave me the confidence to keep experimenting.

So here are some of the ingredients for a successful Giveaway Campaign.

The Giveaway Prize

This is one of the most important aspect. Give away something that people would want. The fact that “anything FREE is Always Welcome” is true, if you want visitors who are engaged and willing to share their email address with you (which is what the end objective is), you need to pick a nice Giveaway Prize. Here are some examples –

• A Stereo Headphone if you are in the Music or, Gaming Niche
• A Swiss Knife if you are in the Survival Niche
• A Golf Cap or, a Golf Club groove Sharpner for the Golfing Niche
• Dog collars or, Dog Whistles if you are in the Dog Care Niche

Another gift that has always worked for me are “Amazon Giftcards”. People love them because they can use them to buy anything on Amazon. But whatever you pick, just ensure that you are thinking through it.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and see, if the gift is something that you are willing to give out your email address for.

Giveaway Landing Page Builder

Once you have your Giveaway gift finalized, it is time to build your giveaway landing page. This is another very important and critical aspect of a successful giveaway.

Your landing page is the difference between somebody giving you their email address and browsing away without doing that. Here are some important things to keep in mind –

1. Your landing page should ideally show a picture of your Giveaway gift
2. You should have an optin box that is preferably connected to an email provider, prominently appearing on your landing page.
3. Any other actions like social sharing, commenting etc. which are pre-requisites to enter the contest should be clearly mentioned on your landing page.
4. Your landing page should be attractive

These are some of the basic things that should be there.

You can easily design a good landing page in HTML and host it on your site and that should work. You can also use a good landing page builder plugin like Thrive Content Builder to design your page, if you are on WordPress.

A Tool to Manage the Giveaway Campaign

The real problem starts now. Managing a giveaway is a tricky thing. You need to communicate with your audience and at the same time ensure that everything is going on well.

Once the giveaway ends, you will need to pick a winner as well. While picking a winner sounds like an easy thing to do, it is the most difficult of all.

So how would you do all this?

It is here that you will need a good Giveaway management tool.

I have almost always used WordPress to build and manage my websites. It is hence that I wanted something that could run on my WordPress websites and manage my giveaways. That’s where I found these 2 nice little options.

Kingsumo Giveaway Plugin – This is my favorite because of the fact that I have complete flexibility on how to use it. Also since it is a plugin and installs easily on my WordPress site, I find it very easy to use. Managing Giveaway using the Kingsumo plugin is extremely simple. One thing that is a drawback about this plugin is its price. It will set you back by about $200 if you are looking for a single site license.

You can check out Kingsumo Giveaway Plugin here

Rafflecopter – Before using Kingsumo, I used to run all my giveaways on Rafflecopter. Rafflecopter is FREE and easy to use. But the only drawback is that you will have to pay if you want to add the option of capturing email addresses.

Rafflecopter is again, extremely simple to use and can be installed both on WordPress as well as Non-Wordpress sites. You can check out Rafflecopter here.

Both of the above can help you manage most of the things at the backend, like communicating with your participants, picking a random winner etc.

Time to Launch Your Giveaway Campaign

So Now that you have all your ingredients ready, I think you can start your first Giveaway.

Promoting your giveaway is another important aspect of a successful giveaway. You might want to plan well on how you want to promote it because a poorly planned promotion will mean less visitors and that in turn means low optins.

We will be discussing about the promotional strategies in a Giveaway in another post.

Don’t forget to tell me your thoughts about this post by commenting below. Feel free to share it with your friends on your favorite Social Media Sites.