Eight Holiday Giveaway Ideas

The holiday season is quickly approaching and now is the time to put your end of year marketing plan into action. The last three months of the year is an important time for many businesses, so here are eight creative ideas you can implement to take advantage of the rush of your customers and prospects looking to connect with businesses like yours.

As with any marketing initiative, you’ll want to align your fourth quarter giveaway marketing plans with your overall business goals. Use the ideas below as is, or get creative and put your own spin on them to match your goals.

Halloween

Idea #1: The Basics

Run a giveaway!

For many businesses the busiest time of the year will happen over the last three months of the year. We consistently hear from our most successful customers that one of the main goals for running a giveaway is to grow their email list. Guess what people, you’re going to want a bigger list to contact during your busiest time of year. So, get started planning a giveaway for Halloween (or any time in October) so you can communicate with those people in November and December.

Prefer not to focus on Halloween? How about National Pumpkin Cheesecake day. Pick the theme of your choice. The time to start planning that October giveaway is now.

We even put together a Field Manual filled with giveaway best practices to use as your guide to building killer giveaways.

Hold on, before you rush off and start planning right away, take five more minutes and read on for ideas on how to structure your giveaway marketing for the rest of the year.

Black Friday / Cyber Monday

 

The Friday after Thanksgiving (in the US) plus the following Monday have become a hugely popular time to buy gifts for the upcoming holidays – or even a little something for yourself :)

Whether focusing on your own product/service or any product/service that would be popular with your audience, the period leading up to Black Friday and through Cyber Monday is a key time to build excitement through a giveaway.

Idea #2: Focus On A Key Product

Got a specific product or service that would make a great gift? Give it away! Not only will you build awareness and excitement for the prize, you can also offer a consolation prize in the form of a discount coupon to your entrants who have already expressed an interest!

A few things to consider:

• Use an image to convey your product offering.
• If you plan to email entrants a coupon or discount code, make sure you follow CAN-SPAM laws (or similar digital communications laws for your country) by letting entrants know they’ll be receiving email communication from you in the giveaway terms and conditions.

Idea #3: Stocking Stuffer

The holidays are on everyone’s mind during this time period. So consider doing a stocking stuffer giveaway! This type of giveaway provides a few opportunities:

• Partner with one or more complementary businesses to help increase the number of products and share the cost of prizes.
• The more businesses involved, the more reach you’ll have in promoting the giveaway (a Rafflecopter giveaway can be embedded on multiple websites and Facebook pages).
• Having several items in one giveaway prize can increase the actual and perceived value of your giveaway leading to more entries.

Idea #4: Black Friday Giveaway Followed By Cyber Monday

With two distinct days where people are focused on buying gifts, do two giveaways. For the first giveaway, pick a smaller prize and ask entrants to vote on several options for the second giveaway prize. Ideally this would be the larger of the two prizes so make sure all of the options to vote on fit this criteria.

To help make this successful:

• Communicate in the first giveaway the details of when the second giveaway will start so they can anticipate coming back to enter.
• Collect an email address in the first giveaway and let entrants know you’ll be emailing them. Once the first giveaway is over you can use the email addresses to communicate details about the poll winner of the first giveaway and when the second giveaway will be starting.
• Similar to other giveaway ideas you’ll read about in this blog post, this idea presents an opportunity to team up with complementary businesses.

Christmas

Idea #5: Gift Cards

The seven days leading up to Christmas is a great opportunity to use a gift card as a prize. They give the recipient more options in selecting the product that’s right for them. And as Christmas Day gets closer, they are a relatively easy gift choice for those who may have waited a little too long to get their shopping done :) Just take a look at the number of search queries for the term “gift cards” as the end of the year approaches.

Idea #6: 12 Days of Christmas With Your Products

Another theme leading up to Christmas Day is the 12 days of Christmas. There are way more than 12 opportunities to use the 12 days of Christmas theme. For those that celebrate this holiday, the idea of the 12 days of Christmas is a build-up to the big day that brings with it the chance to piggyback on that excitement.

Pick 12 of your own products, or products your customers would be interested in, and give away one each day by listing them all in a single giveaway. With Rafflecopter, you can select multiple winners over the course of a giveaway.

Ideas #7: 12 Days of Christmas With Partners

Put a spin on the idea above and partner with a few complementary businesses. This will let you lower the cost of prizes by splitting them up plus increase exposure by combining the sphere of influence for both you and your partners.

With some coordination you could have entrants visit specific partner sites on specific days to enter the giveaway. Consider this option carefully. Generally you’ll want to make entry into the giveaway as easy as possible, so the prize will need to be significant enough for an entrant to justify taking some extra steps.

New Years

Besides watching the ball drop on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, what’s the next biggest thing you associate with the start of a new year? That’s right – resolutions and goal setting.

Idea #8: New Year’s Resolution

Setting a new year’s resolution—maybe even more so the idea of setting them—is so universal that virtually any business could integrate giving away a product or service related to them. Think Fitbit, gym memberships, and gift certificates for fitness related products.

A prize related to this popular topic can help drive high entries to grow your email list as well as provide a fun and timely prize as a show of appreciation to current customers.

OK, now you can start planning for the 4th Quarter. Go!

Got any questions or other ideas on how to use giveaways in the 4th quarter? Post them in the comments below.