How To Host A Facebook Giveaway That Builds Your Email List

(c) Can Stock Photo Inc. / Thomaspajot

How would you like to build your email list by 100+ people a month? Potential buyers who have raised their hands and said, “Yes, I’m interested in your product.”

That’s what a Facebook Giveaway can do for you.

You can easily, safely and legally, build what can be a huge asset to your business.

In fact, according to the marketing agency, Kapost, “Email marketing delivers the highest ROI (about $44 per dollar spent, on average) of any digital marketing tactic.”

Whether you have a list of 0 or thousands, this method works well for Ecommerce businesses.

We’ve built one of my client’s email lists (an Ecommerce company) to 1278 people in one year (from scratch) using the giveaway model outlined below.

It’s pretty simple once you get it down and it’s effective.

1- Choose your objective – In this case, it’s building the email list. (We use Mailchimp.)

2–Define your prize – Giveaways work great for gift cards or physical prizes. In this case, we’ve used a physical prize from the company.

3-Decide how long you want to run it – a week? A month? Most of ours have run for a month.

4- Define the mechanics of your giveaway – How will you collect the email addresses and generate a winner?

We use Giveaway tools.com and I know people who love Rafflecopter, either will guide you through the process.

5-Choose one of the above tools, set up your contest specifics* and publish it.

A word about *specifics, in addition to describing your prize and mode of entry, you’ll need to host some contest specific rules and regulations on your website. I typically use some boilerplate language that includes mention that they’ll be added to the email list upon entry. Though I’m no lawyer, my understanding is that keeps it legal.

6–Promote your Giveaway– You want people to enter it right?

Then share the link on your social media channels, write a blog post with a link to the submission, send it out in an email to your list and pay a few dollars to get it listed on one of the sweepstakes listings sites. After all, you have better things to do than fill out entry forms.

Trade secret: The promotion part is the most important part. If you skip this, you won’t have many entries — unless you already have a huge presence on social. Getting promoted by sweepstakes/giveaway sites is essential.

7–Announce the Winner – When your contest is over, GiveawayTools will generate a random winner. Send an email to the winner congratulating them and asking for whatever information you need – size, color, mailing address….so you can ship it.

8–Upload Your Entrants to Your Email List – GiveawayTools will generate a CSV file, you’ll download it to your machine and import it into your email client. I’m most familiar with Mailchimp and they make it dead simple.

What about Photo Contests?

Now you may be thinking, “But I want to host a photo contest! How do I do that?”

The process will be the same but the tools are different. I use ShortstackApp, there are others but that’s the one I use. It’s fairly easy to use and the help desk is great.

You’ll still need to promote it of course.

How will you launch your Facebook giveaway?

How To Host A Facebook Giveaway That Builds Your Email List