7 Simple Ways To Grow Your Email Subscribers With Facebook Giveaway

Looking forward to leveraging Facebook’s user base of 2.7 billion monthly active users to build your email subscriber list?

Sounds a good idea but the organic reach on Facebook is consistently declining, and you would definitely consider converting those likes into email list subscriptions.

Regardless of your current engagement, convincing your audience to join your email list is a smart move since you don’t need to compete with the rest of the content. Running a Facebook giveaway will motivate and incentivize your audience to join your email subscriber list and giveaways are time-tested list building techniques.

In this article, you will learn seven ways to grow your email subscriber list using Facebook giveaways. Before we jump to the strategies, let’s brush up on our basics and why you should go for it in the first place.

Why Should I Convert My Facebook Followers Into Email Subscribers

• Emails are required for almost every service and platform on the internet. By making people join your subscriber list, you are ensuring long-lasting relationships that are unlikely to break anytime sooner due to changes in preferences or user trends or social media algorithms.

• Emails give you better returns. Email marketing has an ROI of[ $51] for every dollar pumped in, which is much higher than any other platform.

• Unlike the Facebook feed, once your subscriber opens your message, you own the entire screen. You don’t need to worry about your competitors publishing ads targeted towards your fan base or some other content draining your reader’s attention.

• You don’t need to pay a single dollar for reaching out to the same contacts once you have onboarded them in your subscriber list. Your email developers and creative team will help reach out to them without paying for visibility.

The Formula For A Successful Facebook Giveaway

Running Facebook giveaway campaigns to grow your subscriber list quickly is very much possible. Marketers have attracted thousands of subscribers in a matter of a few days using this tactic.

Here’s my formula that might help you in running a successful Facebook giveaway:

1. Offer gifts that are relevant to your ideal buyer persona. That’s the simplest way of attracting leads relevant to your business without doing much homework.
2. Run exciting contests on different themes like photos and hashtags over a period of at least one week.
3. Incentivize your campaigns in such a way that the interaction with the contest itself becomes rewarding.
4. Use a marketing automation tool that helps you in managing the campaigns from the dashboard like Wishpond. Remember, you need to deal with a lot of transactions and attend engaged users, which isn’t possible without a proper tool.

Enough of learning basics. Let’s head towards 7 ways of growing subscriber list with examples:

1. Directly Drop Email Address

No brainer offers are loved by everyone. Asking people to drop their email address directly in exchange for a giveaway works like a charm in most cases. The monochrome design theme and a simple explanation of entry criteria is one of the major highlights that makes it user-friendly.

People will find it more convenient to simply enter their email addresses without spending much time as in the case of completing tasks. Plus, this wheel spinning game is fun too.

Ideal For:

• Industries having a buyer persona that runs short on time.
• Businesses wanting massive entrant volumes for their email list and have mechanisms to maintain a hygienic list despite the inflow of all types of people.
• Businesses having a huge array of products that they can market to large populations and carry out upselling and cross-selling easily.

Major Highlights:

• Monochromatic design
• Listing down the benefits visually
• One line condition for entry

2. Year-Round Supply Giveaways

Getting year-round supply for any product with daily use is enough motivation to participate in a giveaway contest. The idea of getting long-term benefit in exchange for submitting an email address sounds too good to be ignored. But that’s not the only thing you would like in this contest.

They are giving options for choosing the supplies based on whether they want it for themselves, family, or for their store and gifting others. That’s a very smart way of increasing the reader’s interest so that they would like to participate even if they don’t need the supplies in the first place.

Even in the second example, they have emphasized on ‘145 locations’, ‘5 lucky winners’, and ‘$4000 each’ in order to make people feel that gave a higher chance of winning.

Ideal For:

• Sellers dealing in consumables and perishable goods.
• Fashion and lifestyle brands.
• Subscription-based OTT platforms.

Major Highlights:

• The total evaluation of the giveaway is clearly mentioned.
• Various product options displayed in the advertisement along with the option to get the prize for different purposes other than personal consumption.
• The details are mentioned in such a way that the reader finds the chances of winning broader, and they will be genuinely able to access the benefits.

3. Use Social Proof With Your Giveaway

Social proof is my top pick when it comes to running mass campaigns. Like money attracts more money, people attract more people.

Here too, they have not asked the readers to pour in much effort and simply submit their email addresses. But people have some suspicion against freebies offered online especially when they don’t need to do much work.

To make readers feel safe from spamming and display genuineness, social proof in the form of the number of people that have entered the contest will reassure the participants of the genuineness. The example below echoes users’ actions with social proof, gaining instant trust as the campaign reaches more people.

Ideal For:

• Too good to believe offers.
• Industries where customers were scammed previously.
• Campaigns facing a trust deficit.

Major Highlights:

• A fine description of what to expect as well as terms and conditions.
• Use of timer in the second email example.

4. Pair Email Address Input With Social Media Engagement

Under this strategy, I am going to discuss exactly the opposite of the last one. Why not drive engagement on multiple channels so that you have more opportunities to stay in touch?

This strategy is widely used as you shouldn’t view Facebook giveaways as a one-off event when you can shape an entire multi-platform strategy around it. Asking people to engage on multiple platforms through entry points is a great way to increase your chances of staying in touch as well as it adds weight to your social media handles.

Ideal For:

• Brands looking forward to creating an audience on multiple platforms.
• Brands that are planning to execute social selling in future.

Major Highlights:

• Benefits converted into a dollar amount.
• Emphasis on 25 winners for improving participation.
• Use of timer and clear mention of the participation process and entry points.

5. Use Caption Contests

At times, it is necessary to gauge the interest of your readers in order to ensure that you don’t end up with irrelevant contacts. Asking your readers to participate by submitting a caption is a powerful strategy as you could also use this data to understand the buyer persona. Here’s a guide on “How to Run a Facebook Caption Contest (Step-by-Step Guide) to get you started.

In the below example, you can see how Tauck used the caption contest to drive brand awareness and engage people by encouraging them to share their humorous side.

Ideal For:

• Creating brand awareness.
• Improving your list hygiene.

Major Highlights:

• A predefined gift (camera) relevant to the for participating in the contest.
• Allowing people to like the captions to turn it into a voting contest.

6. Ask For Video Content Entries

Again this strategy is based on shifting the focus on creating a user experience and gathering data about how people view your products in general. Video content takes effort, and this also ensures that the participants will try to know about your brand as well as invest their emotions into it. Approximately 89% of industries are using video contests to promote their products and services.

Fashion is a very personal experience that always seeks external approval. The below example displays how our tendency of seeking approval is used to further incentivize participation.

Ideal For:

• Companies offering experience-based products.
• Conducting market research and devising a strategy to create future marketing materials.

Major Highlights:

• Sleek design with a focus on creating an emotional impact through copy.
• Use of the number of participants that have entered the contest to motivate readers.

7. Use Messenger Bots To Promote Giveaway Campaigns For List Building

In the end, I would like to discuss the most powerful strategies that you can use: Facebook Messenger ads. All of the strategies mentioned above require you to use Facebook ads and landing pages while with messenger ads, you can build an in-app interactive experience.

Messenger ads are much more efficient as well as they have strategic benefits like fetching the email address associated with the account by default to make the process frictionless. Your customers also find it convenient as they don’t need to leave Facebook, something that the platform itself values.

Ideal For:

• Running low budget campaigns
• Generating brand awareness and offering products to your customers as a part of the interaction.

Major Highlights

• Properly mentioning the availability of the offer for a period of 30 days.
• Excellent product visibility and it requires minimal efforts from the participants.

Over To You

In this article, I have discussed various Facebook giveaway strategies that you can use. Still, I would like to draw your attention towards one point: When you don’t promise a reward on a sure-shot basis, don’t make your audience invest more time and effort. Have a look at the below example:

As you can see, they have asked a lot of questions. I strongly recommend not doing so because it will surely slash off a significant portion of your mailing list due to people choosing not to enter too much data.

Wishpond has helped thousands of brands to create lead generating contests and giveaways. Our Client SHOC Made Over $45,000 in Sales with Wishpond.

If you play your cards well, Facebook giveaways are undoubtedly one of the fastest list building techniques which don’t cost you an arm and a leg. I hope that you find this article on 7 ways to grow your email subscribers with Facebook giveaway insightful for your next list building exercise.

About the Author
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers – Email Marketing Agency, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to Email conversion and custom Mailchimp Templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

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