Imagine generating over 1,500 opt-in leads in 10 days for $0.27 each. What if while doing that, it was possible to generate enough sales to cover your ad spend 3x over to get them? These are actual numbers from a giveaway campaign IMPACT ran for a client. That’s the power of Facebook giveaways and contests.
So how do you execute a Facebook giveaway and persuade people to share their contact information? While there are a lot of great ways to generate leads, let’s dig into seven specific tips for using giveaways to make this magic happen.
7 Tips to run successful Facebook giveaways
1. Leverage Lookalike Audiences
One of the most powerful aspects of Facebook ads is prospecting. A core targeting feature is creating Lookalike Audiences. The premise is to take a seed audience — website visitors, email list, Facebook page engagement, etc. — and have Facebook find similar people based on their behaviors and interests.
In this example, the seed audience of All Website Visitors the previous 180 days is used to find the top 1% of Facebook users in the U.S. who most closely match them. The result is an audience of over 2 million people to target:
There are nearly endless variations of Lookalikes to make, and these audiences are digital gold mines since Facebook is doing the heavy lifting to source new potential audiences for you. A highly effective way to persuade them to share their email is with an enticing giveaway.
IMPACT recommends focusing your giveaway on a value-based gift card, so it is appealing to a broader swath of people. When you select items, you limit who may be interested.
Bonus tip: Make sure you exclude your existing opt-in email list to ensure a true top-of-funnel campaign. Otherwise, you are paying to target people who may already be on your email list.
2. Segment your ad sets by the audience
There is a specific formula to use when structuring your Facebook ads campaigns that is a simple concept but often overlooked.
Campaigns should always be used as the overarching objective — e.g., a Facebook giveaway that focuses on conversions would be the campaign — and the ad set level should be used for audience targeting. This allows you to isolate and segment your audiences, continue to prospect for new audiences, and most of all, be careful of audience overlap (one of the biggest cardinal sins in Facebook advertising). Audience overlap happens when your audiences are too muddied throughout different campaigns and you end up bidding against yourself and wasting a lot of ad spend.
By structuring the ad set framework to individually focus on audiences similar to this example, it is easily apparent which ones are converting and which ones are not. Then, ad spend for each stage of your full-funnel approach can focus on the segments that are converting to generate the strongest results:
3. Keep your ads simple
Often, Facebook advertisers newer to the medium over-complicate the creative process. There is no doubt that attractive design and compelling copy are necessary, but it’s important to know where to focus the most.
Since you’re running a giveaway, let the hook of the ad be the star! Don’t bury it in a long format post. Lead with the offer and be succinct.
For IMPACT paid media advertising clients, this format tends to convert best:
- Start with a sentence enthusiastically announcing the giveaway
- Use the headline to tell them to enter and what they could win
- Explain what the offer is
- Make it clear they don’t need to purchase to enter
- Include the link in the copy so it doesn’t feel like an ad (even though the image will click too)
- Use the description to say when it ends to create urgency
4. Make the offer great, but don’t go overboard
To have giveaways perform well, you must first understand your AOV (Average Order Value — total revenue for a time period divided by the number of sales) and then make the offer a little better so that users are willing to share their email address.
For example, if your AOV is $150, make your offer a $200 giveaway. This is important so that people entering the giveaway know that the prize is worth it — no one wants to enter a giveaway for $100 if they can’t buy anything on the website for less than $200. There’s nothing worse than a giveaway that still requires the user to pay out of pocket to get the cheapest item on the website.
Not to mention, creating a giveaway offer that is over the standard AOV psychologically helps people entering daydream about all of the items they want to purchase from your business! For example, if the average price of items on a site is $50 and there is a giveaway for $500…that’s a lot of looking around on the website to start daydreaming about what you would get if you win.
5. Make the contest easy to enter
Similar to basic website conversion principles, creating landing pages that are easy to use is imperative to a Facebook giveaway.
Here are three critical tips to remember when creating your contest page:
- Just like the ads, keep the giveaway page simple. All people want to do is enter. They don’t want to have to scroll aimlessly to enter, so keep the entry form above the fold:
- Make sure your landing page is optimized for mobile experiences. The simple toggle in Instapage is perfect for ensuring that the user experience is great regardless of your device.
- Redirect to a thank you page so that people know their entry is successful. This is important for two reasons. First, you don’t want to overwhelm customer service with inquiries wondering if their entries were received. Second, this allows you to add the Complete Registration pixel event to the page to calculate how many conversions were acquired. More on this in tip #6.
By following these three rules that focus on creating an efficient user experience, it’s easier for end-users to enter giveaways, while allowing you to track and measure each contest appropriately.
Bonus tip: The Instapage “hidden field” feature allows you to collect additional information automatically by pulling UTM codes into form submissions. This is extremely helpful to quickly keep track of how your giveaway is performing across all channels.
6. Be sure you have the Meta Pixel installed
Of all the tips in this list, this one is the most important to remember when running successful Facebook ad campaigns. Without the Meta Pixel, you have no real data to help retarget site behavior, measure effectiveness of campaigns, and identify Lookalike Audiences.
The Meta Pixel is a snippet of code added to your website and landing pages that allows you to retarget views and behaviors on your site.
Depending on your site platform, you will either need to have your web manager add it into the code or use plugins. For landing pages, Instapage makes it very easy. Click on “Analytics” within your pages and enter your pixel id:
Then simply add in the Complete Registration standard event by clicking the “HTML” section within pages:
7. Nurture them into customers
Now that new leads have opted in from your Facebook contest, segment and enroll them in a new workflow in your integrated CRM.
To truly measure if your net-new leads are high quality and will become customers, incentivize them immediately to convert — people like instant gratification. Here is a sequence that tends to perform well:
- Send an immediate thank you email after they enter the giveaway. Make sure to include a limited time special offer, whether a discount or value-add, to entice them to convert to customers right away.
- Next, schedule a three-part email series that nurtures them to convert and purchase using the limited time offer (e.g. seven days).
- Email 1: Remind them halfway through the time period you select that the offer is expiring soon.
- Email 2: Email the day before the offer ends.
- Email 3: Send a final last day notification. Make sure to exclude anyone who purchases along the way so that the sequence stays smart too.
Facebook giveaway benchmarks and expectations
So how do you know if your social media contest was successful? Here are some key benchmarks to measure against:
- Cost per Result: $1
- Click-Through Rate: 1%+
- Landing page conversion rate: 20-50%
- Lead to customer conversion rate: 5-10%
Source: CatHowell.com
Bonus: Find industry-specific benchmarks from WordStream here.
Putting it into action
Give giveaways a chance. Too many people overcomplicate contests — follow the Facebook Ads giveaway roadmap above and test it for yourself.
And remember — just because you launch a giveaway, does not mean the work is complete. Monitor your metrics consistently (preferably daily) until the deadline passes. Respond to comments and questions, engage on the ads as if they were organic posts, and use it as an opportunity to build relationships.
If your results are hovering around or performing better than the benchmarks, you’re doing well. And if they are far surpassing the benchmarks, consider making the contest evergreen to continue to prospect for net-new leads.
To learn more ways to generate conversions with relevant, personalized ad campaigns, sign up for an Instapage 14-day free trial today.
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