When you list your products to sell on Amazon Marketplace, you’re competing with thousands of sellers trying to do the same thing. It’s hard to stand out. Running a giveaway is a great way to do just that. You’ll get to encourage more users to interact with your Storefront, increasing your visibility, collecting customer email addresses, and driving sales.
Learn more about why giveaways are such a powerful tool for Amazon store promotion, how to set up and manage your own campaign, and the real-life results of a previous Amazon Giveaway campaign.
Why Giveaways Matter for Amazon Store Promotion
Over the last two decades, Amazon’s Marketplace has exploded. In 2021, Amazon’s Marketplace Pulse Report concluded that the platform had approximately 1.5 million active sellers worldwide. Nearly 2,000 new sellers join the Marketplace each day, and third-party sellers account for 44% of total sales across the site. Amazon Marketplace can be a highly effective platform for selling both new and used products, but it’s also a competitive market. In order to be successful, you need to make your brand stand out from the crowd and rank at the top of the search results.
Amazon used to integrate the ability to host giveaways right into the Marketplace. However, this feature was discontinued in October 2019. Fortunately, KickoffLabs offers sweepstakes, waitlists, leaderboards, and milestone giveaways to help you market your Amazon Storefront with giveaways.
When the participant visits your contest landing page, they will be prompted to enter their name and email address. Once they have officially entered the contest, they will be given the option to complete additional tasks for additional entries, such as following other social media accounts and referring friends. With each action they take, they can track how many entries they have accrued.
First, giveaways help increase brand awareness. Kickoff Labs uses an action-based entry system where potential winners can earn additional entries to the competition by doing things like following you on social media, sharing your listing, joining your newsletter, and referring your friends. As a result, more people see and learn about your brand, and you are able to connect with a bigger audience.
Giveaways also help you establish trust with potential customers. As they engage with your content to earn more entries, you have more opportunities to position yourself as a credible authority in your industry. You can also improve your reputation with prospects by giving everyone who entered your giveaway a discount code, even if they didn’t win, to show how much you value and appreciate your audience.
Setting Clear Objectives
All successful marketing campaigns have one thing in common: a clear, measurable objective. Why are you running this campaign? What are you hoping to achieve? How will you know if you have succeeded?
One of the main benefits of running a giveaway is increasing brand awareness and engagement. While your giveaway might not generate a landslide of new sales right off the bat, it will help you form connections with prospects who might be interested in purchasing your products someday. Once you’ve made these connections, you can keep nurturing them until they convert to paying customers and then brand loyalists.
The goal is to keep these new prospects thinking and learning about your brand even after the giveaway has ended. You might set a goal to increase your follower count on social media or your newsletter subscribers. The more specific you can be, the better; set a goal for exactly how large of a percentage increase you’d like to see or a milestone you’d like to hit.
You can also target returning customers while also improving your visibility to new customers. For example, you could select a winner from verified purchasers who left reviews. This encourages customers to leave reviews on your product listing, pushing it higher up the results page.
Planning Your Giveaway Campaign
Once you’ve established your goals for your giveaway campaign, you can focus on the details of executing it successfully. First, you have to decide what you are going to give away. The most important thing is never to make promises you can’t deliver on and pick a prize that aligns with your brand. Make it something that compliments your product or would share in attracting the same customers.
Choose an offer that is going to excite your audience and motivate them to participate. You can give away a single big-ticket item or bundle several smaller items together. The more valuable the prize is, the harder it will be for customers to resist a chance at getting it for free.
Next, set a time frame for your giveaway. A quick deadline is a good way to create a sense of urgency. If you make the giveaway too long, people might decide they have time to enter “later” and forget to enter at all. If the contest is too short, however, you might not give people enough time to see it and enter. Two to four weeks seems to be the “sweet spot” for giving customers enough time to enter without enough time to forget. The last step is to determine how people will be able to enter the competition.
Promoting Your Giveaway
Setting up and launching your giveaway is only the beginning. Next, you have to get the word out. Thanks to Amazon Posts, you can now promote your contest directly on your Amazon Storefront in addition to your social media channels and your existing email list. KickoffLabs’ instant signup feature allows you to use your favorite CRM to send your existing marketing list an email iviting them to join the campaign. Users can join your new giveaway without re-entering their information in just a single click. Make sure all your promotional materials contain eye-catching visuals consistent with your brand identity, whether these are designed graphics or well-shot photos of your products.
One way to boost the visibility of your giveaway is to partner with bloggers or influencers to get the word out about your product. You can pay them or offer a free sample of what you will be giving away. You can also partner with other brands to giveaway a combination of both of your products in exchange for cross-promoting your partner’s business to your audience and vice versa. By choosing the right partners, you can easily gain access to audiences who are interested in your products but might not have heard of your brand before.
Managing the Giveaway
It’s important to stay engaged with your giveaway from start to finish. On the surface, it might not seem like there would be much for you to do once the campaign has launched until it comes time to pick winners and distribute prizes. However, you will want to monitor and manage the campaign throughout the entire process to measure your progress toward your goal and keep participants engaged.
KickoffLabs provides a reliable giveaway management platform to make your job easier. Throughout the giveaway campaign, you can see how many people have entered and what actions they have taken, and continue to communicate with participants to encourage them to do more actions and earn more chances to win. KickoffLabs can also automatically choose your winner or winners for you based on criteria that you determine. This takes any human error or bias out of the selection process and ensures fairness and transparency in determining the winner.
Post-Giveaway Actions
Once you have your winner, you’ll want to announce their name across as many channels as possible, tag them if you are able, and then reach out to them personally to arrange details for sending them their prize. You should also encourage them to share their prize on their social media channels and tag your company. Take the time to thank everyone who participated in your giveaway, even if they didn’t win the grand prize. You can show your appreciation and encourage them to keep interacting with your brand by sending them exclusive promotions or discount codes.
Analyzing the Results
An important part of any marketing campaign is to analyze your performance afterward, and giveaway campaigns are no exception. First, you’ll want to evaluate the performance of your campaign against the objectives you set at the beginning. Did you achieve or surpass your goals, and if not, did you get close? You can also measure other related metrics that show the effects of the campaign on your overall business performance, such as increased web traffic and product sales. The purpose of analyzing the results of your campaign is to determine what worked well and what needs to be improved upon. Using the insights of your analysis, you can adjust future campaigns to be more effective.
Navigating Amazon’s Policies
Whenever you are running a giveaway, it is always important to ensure that you follow relevant rules, regulations, and policies governing giveaways on a certain platform or in a certain geographic location. Otherwise, you could be barred from the platform and face legal or financial penalties. However, since Amazon discontinued its official Giveaway tool, there are very few regulations for Marketplace sellers who want to run giveaways for their products. If your prize totals more than $600 in value, you may need to collect the winner’s tax information for reporting purposes. Learn more about general giveaway rules in your area here.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Just how effective are Amazon Giveaway campaigns? Studies from the team at EcomCrew showed that it’s pretty effective. One of their most successful giveaways attracted nearly 44,000 participants. With KickoffLabs’ entry system, that could mean over 40,000 new email list subscribers or social media followers or 40,000 chances for participants to share your brand with their friends and followers. Even after offering a 25% discount to participants who didn’t win a prize, their Storefront brought in $3,942.57 in revenue as a direct result of the campaign.
Run Your Amazon Giveaway with KickoffLabs
If you run a Storefront on Amazon Marketplace, giveaways offer a cost-effective strategy for boosting your brand’s visibility and attracting new leads to your funnel. KickoffLabs’ unique action-based system is easy to use and helps you leverage your giveaway to its full potential. Start for free today at KickoffLabs, and launch your next giveaway!