Give a Little, Get a Lot
Episode #10 of the course How to generate more leads through your website by Lauren Pawell
Morning,
Yesterday we discussed how to leverage Facebook ads to scale up your lead generation in an automated way.
Today, I want to talk about another method to help scale up your lead volume: giveaways.
Who doesn’t like the opportunity to win free stuff?
Well, when you run giveaways where your target audience must enter their email address in exchange for a chance to win a free prize, you can grow your lead volume quickly.
Plus, if you give extra entries to the contest to anyone who shares it on social media, you can attract even more new leads.
One advantage to this lead generation method is that your cost-per-email is likely to be a heck of a lot cheaper than any other strategy.
However, the quality of your leads can diminish when using giveaways. Why? Because you’re getting people who want free stuff.
So, in order to ensure your subscribers stick around once the giveaway is over, I have a few tips:
Tip #1: Give away something that your prospective customer will love.
You need to REALLY understand who your target audience is. In order to pick a compelling prize, you should know the age, gender, hobbies, interests, dreams, hopes, and fears of your prospective customer.
You should also pick a prize that is complementary to your product. For example, if you are selling a cookbook about smoothies, you might pick a Vitamix blender as your giveaway prize. You’ll know that anyone who wants the blender is likely interested in smoothies…and once someone wins the blender, they will need recipes to help create those smoothies.
To illustrate how this might be used with a service—if you are a consultant who helps businesses manage their social media channels, you might give away a one-year subscription to Hootsuite, a social media scheduling tool. Your prospective customers are looking for ways to make their social media management easier, and this tool will help them do so. But it won’t replace your services, as Hootsuite is only as valuable as the operator.
Tip #2: Differentiate between those who just want a free prize and those who might actually be prospect customers.
During the giveaway, you want to filter out people who aren’t likely to be future customers. This way, by the time the giveaway ends, you’ll know which contacts should be added to your newsletter because they are quality leads. These types of entrants will be less likely to unsubscribe from your list.
To figure out which contacts are worth keeping and which should be scrapped, follow the method described below.
After the giveaway has closed, but before you have announced the winner, offer a “gift” to everyone who entered your contest as a thank you for entering. This “gift” should be a free piece of content you have created, like an ebook, a free trial to your product, or even your lead magnet. Anyone who wants your gift is likely to be a much higher quality-prospect—someone who’s not just out there to get free stuff. Therefore, make sure to track clicks, as you’ll want to keep all the emails who click the link to your gift.
Tip #3: Use a tool to help make the technical aspects of the giveaway easier to manage.
My favorite tools for this are KingSumo, Gleam.io, and Rafflecopter. All are really easy to use and require minimal technical skills.
Consider adding giveaways to your lead-generation system at regular frequencies throughout the year—say once per quarter. This will help you gain more momentum with this strategy.
Here’s to your ongoing online success,
Lauren
Recommended book
Recommended course
Organizational Behavior: How to Manage People
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