5 Effective Promotion Tips For Your Ending Giveaway

Don’t feel it’s necessary to promote your giveaway the final day before it closes? Big mistake!

In the last three giveaways we’ve run on our homepage, Facebook page & blog, each received a quarter to a third of the total accumulated entries during the final 24 hours. Surprising? Maybe at first. But think about it… don’t you always put off entering giveaways until the last minute? Yeah – me too.

While promoting during the last 24 hours of your giveaway, you’ll want to promote with a sense of excitement but most importantly with a sense of urgency. We’ve listed five tips below that will help you make the most of the last day of your giveaway to help maximize your giveaway’s total entries.

Tip #1: End Your Giveaway Monday at Midnight

If you have any control over when your giveaway ends, make it end on a Monday night at midnight. Giveaway entrants happen to be most active Monday nights, particularly between 8pm to midnight EST. Take advantage of that!

Tuesdays and Wednesdays might work as well. Thursdays are alright. But Friday, Saturday, & Sunday — those are days you should try to avoid if you can. Sometimes it’s tough to avoid though (ex: if you run a monthly giveaway and the month ends on a weekend).

Note: If you end your giveaway on Monday, the below tips only be amplified. For the rest of the post, we’ll assume that your giveaway ends Monday at midnight.

Tip #2: Utilize Your Email List

Plan out a newsletter that you can send to your subscribers 24 hours before your giveaway ends (linking to your promotion). A full day is plenty of time for folks to open, read, and enter your giveaway before it closes.

In addition, if you make it part of your giveaway’s terms and conditions that entrants may be emailed during the promotion, you might shoot over one final email to get them excited about the potential of winning the giveaway in the upcoming day or to give them one last chance to refer their friends and increase their chances.

*Noob Error* Don’t send out the email several hours before the giveaway ends; give folks ample time to get in front of their computers. You may have an unhappy army of potential entrants emailing you back (possibly from another time zone?) if you send out an email a few hours before your giveaway ends. We’ve made that mistake before — it ain’t pretty!

Tip #3: Excite Your Facebook Fans

On Monday morning, after your email has already been sent, think about getting your Facebook fans excited. That shouldn’t be that hard to do, right? After all, your giveaway has an awesome prize, time is running out, and a winner will be selected soon!

Create a Facebook page status that bottles up all this excitement. A big image w/ a call-to-action helps (‘enter to win’ is a favorite of ours). Again, a sense of urgency goes a long way as well (‘last day to enter!’ or ‘giveaway closes tonight!’). Placing a link to the giveaway is a must (*note* if your giveaway is running through the Rafflecopter Facebook app, use your giveaway’s mobile-friendly share link).

Need a few more ideas to get a little extra visibility? Try to incorporate hashtags into the post (#giveaway, #win, etc.), change your cover photo to promote your giveaway, highlight your page status, or pin the page status to the top of the page.

Tip #4: Enhanced Pinterest Prize Images

Nice – so now your Facebook page is rockin’ and rollin’. If you have an audience on Pinterest, it’s time to get to pinning! This is where you can get visual and make your entrants drool, especially if you’re giving away a prize pack that teaches you how to make Sweet Cherry Love Muffins.

It could be something as simple as pinning a few exclusive images of the prizes you’re offering. Or how about a banner that describes your promotion and links to where it’s taking place? And Pinterest, like Twitter & Facebook, allows you to use hashtags in your pins. Why not take advantage?

Tip #5: Timed Tweets

Of the social media outlets mentioned above, you might say Twitter is the best for an immediate response. Send out a few tweets during the day that effectively counts down the time left to enter. Include appropriate hashtags and call-to-action messaging in your tweets.

Need a place to start? If your giveaway is ending at midnight, here are four tweets you might send out during the day:

• 8:30am — Last day to enter…
• 12:01pm — Only 12 hours left to participate…
• 9:00pm — Hurry! 3 hours left in our #giveaway…
• 11:45pm — #FinalCall – You have 15 minutes until…

Everyone loves a good countdown :)

 

@rafflecopter I like to blast social media with a “t minus 12 hours left to enter to win….” Everyone loves a countdown! #oratleastido

— Lauren Lanker (@ThinkingCloset) July 10, 2013
No need to stay up late to tweet these messages at specific times. Just Google the term ‘tweet scheduler’… you’ll find a myriad of apps that will send out scheduled tweets for you. If we had to recommend a couple, you might want to check out Buffer and Hootsuite.

This Is Just The Beginning!

It was tough keeping this post limited to only five tips; I can think of a handful of other ways to promote your giveaway in the last 24 hours. Have any tips or tricks that worked for you? Comment below!