Giveaways are one of the easiest ways to build an audience for your blog or business. They can be used as a way to attract new visitors, build up a mailing list, or simply get more social media followers. Either way, giveaways are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic and publicity for your website without spending money on advertising.
In this article, we’ll be walking you through the types of giveaways that work best, how to choose prizes, and apps you can use to set up and manage successful giveaways.
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Best Apps For Giveaways
- SweepWidget
SweepWidget Homepage
SweepWidget is a powerful online contest app that offers 90+ entry method types on 30+ social media platforms. They make it easy to grow your likes, followers, shares, and user engagement across virtually every major platform. You can run the following types of contests:
Viral sharing contests/giveaways
Social media growth contests
Leaderboard competitions
Instant coupons/rewards contests
Milestone campaigns
Build your contests with their easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. For those of you who value aesthetics, SweepWidget has an advanced design editor and custom CSS builder. Once your contest is ready you can use a free hosted landing on Sweepwidget and/or embed it directly into your blog or website.
List of places to embed your SweepWidget contest
SweepWidget has 20+ API integrations with email marketing and marketing automation tools. This includes: Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Aweber, etc. They also have API integrations for Zapier, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Tracking Pixel, Stripe, and even have a native API.
SweepWidget makes it simple to track and manage all of your entries. You can randomly or manually select winners, disqualify/delete entries, and export all user information to a CSV file. Also, you can view/edit individual user actions from the advanced analytics portal.
SweepWidget has a free plan with unlimited entries. The pro plan offers more features and starts at $29/month. Overall, SweepWidget gives you all of the functionality you’ll ever need at a very affordable price.
Try SweepWidget Free
Read our SweepWidget review.
- Wishpond
Wishpond homepage
If you’re looking to up your businesses’ lead generation game and need a tool that can handle social contests as well as email campaigns and more, then Wishpond is a great choice. It’s an affordable all-in-one marketing platform that can help you to generate new leads, nurture the ones you have, and—most importantly—convert your leads to sales.
When it comes to social contests, giveaways, and promotions, Wishpond has a lot to offer. It allows users to create unlimited social promotions and offers a range of different contest types. There are 12 contest types in total and these include popular social media contests formats like photo and Instagram Hashtag contests. You can also use Wishpond to create more unique contests such as Pinterest contests, sweepstakes, and coupon giveaways.
Wishpond also provides a wide selection of optimized templates to make it easy to design and create professional-looking social promotions. Once your contests are live, you can also use Wishpond to track their performance and create in-depth reports.
Aside from social promotions, Wishpond can also help you to manage your lead generation efforts and create and automate email marketing campaigns. Wishpond comes complete with an easy-to-use landing page builder, as well as a useful funnel builder. You can also take advantage of the payment, popup, and form tools to optimize your customer journey and increase conversions.
Wishpond prices start from as little as $49/month for up to 1000 leads. Wishpond also offer a 14-day free trial for annual plans.
Try Wishpond Free
- Shortstack
shortstack
If you’re looking for a powerful all-in-one tool for running your social media contests, consider using Shortstack.
You can run everything from Instagram & Twitter hashtag contests, to Facebook giveaways.
Great Lakes hosted a Facebook giveaway using Shortstack and generated over 200,000 entries, which helped them grow their Facebook fans by 200 percent in only three weeks.
Shortstack can also be used with other platforms such as Pinterest.
There are over 90 templates and 30 themes to help you create your giveaway campaign, drag and drop functionality that even the not so tech-savvy can use, and the ability to use custom URLs to suit your branding.
Shortstack Example
It also comes with detailed analytics, verified voting, and the option to restrict voting, making Shortstack a robust choice for your social contests.
Depending on your goal, you can increase engagement by rewarding your entrants with extra chances to win when they refer a friend. Or, if your goal is to collect leads, you can have your entrants share information such as their email address or what state they live in.
Shortstack also has an action-gate function to help you grow your list by having an entrant do something – like fill out their email address – to receive a discount or entry.
With the ability to promote your campaign across a variety of mediums such as social media, your blog, and email – and across any device – makes Shortstack a flexible and easy way to build your brand and get to know your audience.
Shortstack is an all-in-one tool in the sense that it allows you to create landing pages, and offers a boat-load of features to ensure your campaigns deliver results.
Plans are based on your social media goals. For a free trial, you get access to all the features the business plan has to offer. Paid plans start at $99/month and scale up based on your needs.
Try Shortstack Free
- Vyper
Vyper Homepage
Vyper is a referral marketing platform that allows you to run several different types of social media contests:
Viral Contests/Giveaways
User generated Content
Milestone Contests
Leaderboard Contests
With Vyper’s super easy contest builder. You can create a campaign quickly, change the style and choose how you would like your contest to display (landing page, widget or embed).
Vyper Visual Editor
The entire platform has been designed to get you more traffic, referrals, shares, email leads and customers.
Not only that but it is unique in the way that it engages with contest entrants. You can create a range of rewards (1st place, random winner, milestones etc) and set “bonus actions” to reward people for sharing, liking, following and referring.
And, Vyper doesn’t just handle contests – use it to run pre-launch campaigns, loyalty campaigns, ambassador programs, and more. You can integrate with your online store (e.g. Shopify) to track both leads and revenue generated via the platform.
Vyper starts from $149/month with up to 30,000 leads/month.
Try Vyper Free
- Gleam
gleam
Gleam offers a more robust contest and sweepstakes app than what you get with the likes of Rafflecopter.
With Gleam, you’re assured that each contest you run will result in growth of some kind. Whether it’s to grow your email list or social media following, launching a contest with Gleam will help you achieve your goals.
Adding entry methods is simple and quick to do with their drag and drop functionality. Select the type of entries you want – they offer a range of entry methods – and order them how you like.
drag drop entry
One unique feature of Gleam is that, unlike many other platforms, there is verification of each action a user takes. Gleam tracks users on whether or not they complete the actions for your giveaway.
This helps you get qualified data and saves you time so that you don’t have to dig through entries that haven’t fulfilled all the requirements.
For the entrant, filling out a Gleam form is much quicker than other forms since some entries only require one click. For example, if one requirement is to tweet the giveaway, you just click once, and it’s done.
With other forms, you’re given a link to copy and paste or you have to wait for a pop-up.
If you want, you can also set some of your entry actions to be repeatable every day. You can reward your participants by allowing them to tweet or share on Facebook daily for more points.
Gleam also allows you to embed a YouTube video to be more interactive by showing your visitors what they will win or how they can enter your giveaway.
Here’s an example of what the giveaway form looks like:
Gleam example of a giveaway
If you’re interested in running the giveaway on your WordPress site, Gleam has a WordPress plugin to help you. This makes it easy to add the form to your site.
Gleam is available with four apps – Competitions, Rewards, Galleries and Captures. These can be purchased individually from $10-$29/month each. You can buy the full package for $97/month (discounts available for yearly subscription).
Try Gleam Free
- Woorise
Woorise is another all-in-one tool that allows users to create social contests and many other types of lead generation campaigns.
With Woorise you can create a wide range of social contests, including Instagram contests and giveaways, Facebook giveaways, and Twitter contests. It can also be used to create contests for alternative social platforms including Twitch, and Youtube.
In addition to its contest creation options, Woorise also allows users to create surveys and quizzes for lead generation. This can help you to nurture leads, gain insights into your audience, and improve conversion rates.
Woorise also comes complete with a powerful landing page builder that can help you to host your giveaways. The landing page builder uses a simple drag-and-drop editor which makes it super easy to create professional and high converting landing pages in just a few clicks. Also, it includes a useful bio-link tool that is perfect for Instagram marketing.
Woorise is a particularly good option for agencies as it allows you to create separate workspaces in order to manage different accounts for brands and clients.
As you can see, this is far more than a simple competition app.
Woorise offers a free plan that includes contests and allows up to 5000 entries/month. Paid plans start from as little as $23/site/month.
Best apps for instagram giveaways
1 Canva
On Instagram, images are everything and as the platform has grown in popularity, users have also upped their photo editing game. This means that for your Instagram page and your giveaway campaign to be taken seriously, you have to have some decent image editing skills – or a great app that helps you look like you do.
Enter Canva, this web-based image editor has seen an astronomical growth in popularity because it’s easy to use, has a great price point and as a bonus, allows you to access a library of over 400,000 professional images. Canva offers literally thousands of creative templates, including templates for Instagram Stories, and a good variety of simple-to-use graphic design elements, like its famous text overlay tool.
With a free account you get:
Two folders to organize designs
1GB storage for photos and assets
Access to over 8,000 templates
The ability to upload your own images
Access millions of photos starting at $1 each
2 Animoto
If you want a quick route to making your brand Instagram famous, start using Instagram Stories. A recent stat from Instagram shows that 500 million Instagram accounts use IG stories to make posts every day.
More and more marketers are turning to videos as the social media posts of choice because they get crazy amounts of engagement – so what are you waiting for? Intimidated? No worries, we can’t all be Ken Burns, but Animoto knows that and has us amateurs covered with great tools like their Social Video Editor.
When you open an account, just like with Canva, you get access to a vast library of images, as well as copyright free music. Video design is managed by a no-sweat drag-and-drop editor and pre-existing templates make you look like a video making star.
3 Later.com
Now that you have the apps you need to make sure your Instagram visuals are on lock, you can turn your attention to building your giveaway campaign’s post calendar. A well structured Instagram giveaway will have a pre-planned calendar with all of the posts you will publish ready to go. But will you remember to post them at the scheduled times?
The easiest way to handle the task is with a scheduling app like Later.com. Later is an incredibly popular tool reportedly being used by 600,000 of the world’s top brands, agencies and influencers, so you can’t go wrong by adding your name to the list.
The platform offers a Free Forever plan that allows you to schedule up to 30 photo posts per month which is plenty to manage 1 giveaway campaign.
4 Woobox
Your Instagram giveaway app toolbox won’t be complete without an app that helps you easily launch your campaign and pick a random winner. That’s where we come in!
We’ve designed Woobox as a one-stop social media marketing platform. Not only can you use Woobox to launch and manage a killer Instagram giveaway, the platform also allows you to manage other campaign types too like; video contests, personality quizzes, brackets, sweepstakes, polls, and instant-win campaigns.
When it comes to picking your giveaway winner, it’s important that you do so in an unbiased way to protect the integrity of your campaign and your brand. We make this simple by automating the process via our Winner Picker tool. Once you’ve logged into your Woobox account, just select the post where giveaway participants have left comments, then click “Pick a Winner”.
We offer free and paid plans, and all of our plans are packed with features including the Winner Picker Tool which is available with every plan.
5 Mailchimp
Using a social media platform like Instagram to build an engaged follower base is a no-brainer. What some businesses fail to remember is that those followers don’t belong to you until they make a purchase from your company, or opt-in to your mailing list.
Collecting email addresses should be a primary goal of any giveaway campaign, and Mailchimp is one of the top email marketing services available. Its drag-and-drop email builder is top of the line, and Mailchimp has become renowned for its library of beautiful, professional email templates.
One other aspect that makes Mailchimp a top pick among marketers across the world is that it integrates with everything, including Woobox! When launching a campaign, simply select which Mailchimp list you would like entrants to be added to, and you’re done.
Conclusion
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