The Power of Giveaway Emails: Engage Customers and Drive Business Growth

The benefits of sending giveaway emails

Speaking of giveaway email benefits, let’s talk about a few.

The first and most obvious is that email campaigns can help you build your email list. Because it’s an email campaign, you can send out mass emails for very little money, allowing you to reach a vast audience quickly. How many new subscribers you get depends on how well you run the campaign.

Anything that reaches a large target audience has the potential to generate sales as well, so giveaway emails can increase revenue.

Your giveaway also allows you to interact with prospects and customers, enabling you to develop your brand and your relationship with consumers. You can even introduce customers to your product via a dedicated giveaway page.

How to write an effective giveaway email

There's no universal giveaway email template, but a few best practices can help you run a successful campaign.

The following tips are about the email itself, although they'll also inform your promotional strategy. You can also apply many of these ideas to social media posts.

1. Segment your audience

It’s important to think about who will receive the email and what you hope the interaction will look like. Are you targeting new prospects or engaging with current email subscribers?

Say that you sell car parts. You’re going to run a giveaway, which means you can give away something useful to car owners. In that case, you want to target people who have an automobile so that they'll be interested in the prize.

This is where you segment your audience. You can conduct statistical research to target people who are more likely to benefit from and appreciate your giveaway (e.g., avoid sending emails to people who live in areas with low levels of car ownership).

2. Determine your email sequence

When you know who you're targeting, you can determine the best way to send the emails. Keep in mind that a giveaway email campaign typically involves multiple messages.

First, you send an announcement email letting people know there's a giveaway. You can include instructions for how to participate, or if it’s a little complicated, you can follow up with an instructional email. After that, you can send a reminder and a last-chance message to subscribers who haven't signed up.

Once the winners have been selected, you can announce that via another email. Lastly, don't forget to send a thank you and wrap-up email.

While this sequence works for the vast majority of email campaigns, you can already see room for customization. Maybe you want to announce the winners and thank everyone in the same email. You might even announce the giveaway before it starts, send a reminder, and then send another announcement on the start date. Whether or not you can send all of the giveaway rules and instructions in the first email is also up to you.

Do things your way, but make sure that you properly promote the giveaway, explain how to participate, and announce the winner when it’s over.

3. Create an engaging subject line and preview text

The giveaway email subject line and your email preheader are everything. You want to grab the attention of recipients without making your message look like spam.

First, announce who you are right away. That way, your customers won’t delete the email before they read it.

Second, get to the point. If you’re giving away a flight to Hawaii, make sure readers know that you're giving away a Hawaiian vacation in the preview.

4. Craft the body of the email

Now the fun part.

The body of the email is where you provide the giveaway details. If someone is reading this part, then everything else was successful. Clarity of information is what matters most in the body, but you can implement email marketing design elements here too.

Here are a few things to remember to include:

• The date range for the giveaway program
• How to enter
• Key rules for participation
• Who is eligible
• How recipients know if they win

That is not an exhaustive list. Since each giveaway is unique, you need to determine what information is essential and where to include it in the body.

5. Add a CTA

The email should close with a call to action (CTA). This is where you say something like, “Sign up today if you want to win!”

It’s best to include a relevant link in your CTA. If people can sign up at a giveaway landing page, link that in the CTA.

Giveaway email best practices

Your giveaway contest will thrive and generate a lot more buzz and business when you implement a few best practices.

Create a sense of urgency

Urgency drives clicks, which drives engagement. Your giveaway should have a start and end date; if you include those dates, you’re already creating a sense of urgency.

You can build on that by emphasizing how little time remains and why they should act now instead of waiting. You don’t have to sound like an eager salesperson, but some urgency motivates and increases the number of participants.

Personalize your messaging

Personalization is crucial, especially if this giveaway is for engaged email subscribers. Customizing the email with a recipient's name, location, or other relevant details can help drive loyalty and increase the likelihood of a successful giveaway.

Ensure the prize is enticing

The easiest way to do this is to put yourself in your recipients' shoes. How would you feel about a giveaway email that offers you a chance to win a packet of socks? You probably won’t finish reading it, and even if you do, you aren’t going to sign up for anything.

Are you offering the boring socks of your industry or something your target audience will love?

There’s another way to think about enticing prizes. It doesn’t matter how much the prize costs. What matters is the total value of everything you’re giving away. So, you could give away a thousand inexpensive prizes for the cost of one expensive prize. Thinking in terms of scale can help you determine if your giveaway contest is tempting.

Make the email easy to read

How many emails do you get a day? How many of them do you ignore?

Do you have any reason to believe that the people who receive your emails are different?

If you allow any barrier of entry, it will prevent people from participating in your contest. Make it as easy as possible.

Use appealing graphics

One way to make things easy is to use appealing graphics. Condense the most valuable information into an infographic, and everyone will absorb what matters right away.

Test your email

Most importantly, let some people see your email and provide feedback. Make sure it shows up correctly on major email platforms. Test the giveaway link to verify it works. The last thing you need is for your campaign to fail because you didn’t take the time to test your email.

Make your giveaway campaign a success with emails

A giveaway email campaign is a great way to drive traffic to your brand, grow your email list, and entice subscribers to engage with your business. Before you create your campaign, it's important to look at email campaign ideas and take your time planning the strategy behind it. This can make your giveaway more successful and help you obtain your desired results.

With Mailchimp, it's easy to build an effective giveaway email. Design your email with our easy-to-use tools, optimize it with AI technology, and automate your sequence to save time.