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We recently co-sponsored a giveaway with MCP Actions and the results surprised even us. In just 30 days they scored 8,ooo new Facebook fans and doubled their twitter followers. But we’ll get into that below…

Many customers use our giveaway widget to give their site traffic a boost and to give their customers a little love. (If you’re not familiar with the PunchTab giveaway widget, it’s an easy little tool for running a giveaway on your site. We walk you through the 2-minute set up and installation process. Check it out for yourself here.)

What we think makes it pretty special, is the fact that you can run a giveaway on any webpage or Facebook page and that your users help make the giveaway viral because we give them entries when they SHARE your giveaway on the most popular social networks and when they refer friends who might not see your site otherwise.

So just by throwing a quick little giveaway on your site, you get traffic, likes, follows and at the end of the day, AWARENESS…and hopefully some NEW CUSTOMERS.

Back to our friends at MCP Actions…

MCP Actions is a site dedicated to helping professional and hobbyist photographers improve their photography. They leverage the PunchTab loyalty platform across their blog and eCommerce site to increase awareness through social sharing and reward customer loyalty. Here’s how their 30-day PunchTab powered giveaway played out:

Prize: We aligned the prize with something very relevant to the MCP Actions audience: a camera. It doesn’t get any more relevant than a camera for a bunch of photographers!

Promotion: MCP Actions put up a blog post, posted updates on Facebook and Twitter and highlighted the giveaway in their email newsletter. Now, this too is important. Don’t expect the giveaway to run itself. You need a snowball to start an avalanche.

How They Announced The Winner: This deserved a special shout out as Jodi, the founder of MCP Actions, had her twin girls make the announcement. Check it out.

BONUS entries for “Pinning” on Pinterest: Pinterest is now one of the top 10 social networks. If you market to women, then you know this already. Pinterest doesn’t provide an API so PunchTab hasn’t been able to add this to our giveaway widget so we got creative. We offered a separate prize of $100 for people who “pinned” on Pinterest. They just had to leave a comment indicating they’d done it and we selected a winner from the comments. The lesson? Be creative.

The Payoff: As a marketer, I like to break down the results into the 3 buckets: participation, reach and acquisition.

Participation:

• ~260,000 entries
• ~35,000 unique users (entrants)
• 22% of entrants were referred by a friend
• For every 5 people invited, 1 person entered. That’s big. Giving users entries for inviting friends is a win-win. They invite people they know would be interested and get some extra entries while they’re at it.

Reach:

• This giveaway was shared 18,000 times on social channels (7,000 likes, 6500 tweets and 4600 +1′s)
• Those 18,000 shares drove 150,000 inbound clicks to the giveaway page
• THAT MEANS for EVERY SHARE, 8 people clicked on it. Yowza! Now that’s the power of social!

Acquisition:

• Fans on Facebook – MCP acquired 8,000 new fans from the giveaway alone, growing their fan base 8% (they had 100K fans to begin with).
• Twitter – MCP acquired over 7000 followers which almost DOUBLED their Twitter following
• Note: MCP Actions has indicated some people have abandoned. More on that later.
• Email - MCP increased their email list by 33% 
• Users could only enter via email providing MCP Actions with 35,000 email addresses
• Their original list size was 75,000 emails
• When merged with their existing email list, 25,000 of those email addresses were new (so 10K came from their existing list, that’s good!)

Now I know what you’re thinking. “How many of those emails were any good?” Well, a few days after the giveaway ended, MCP Actions sent an email to this list, thanking them for participating, telling them about all the resources available to them on their blog to help them become better photographers and asking anyone who was not interested to opt-out. Check out the email here.

Here’s how people responded:

• 5% of emails were bad emails or opted-out
• 35% opened the email (over 8K) and over 14% clicked (over 1200 clicks)
• The bounce rate and opt-out rate was higher than previous emails which SHOULD be expected. You need to align your expectations when running a giveaway. Some people just want free stuff and go away after the giveaway. And that’s okay. Let them. It’s the people who stick around that matter. The open rate was right up there with previous emails which means the audience was genuinely interested.

So what’s the net net?
It’s simple. Running a viral giveaway can be VERY effective. Just keep 3 things in mind:

1. Make sure your prize attracts a relevant audience
2. Expect fallout. 5-10% is a reasonable percentage of people who just came for the free stuff.
3. Communicate while the giveaway is still fresh. I believe in 100% transparency. There is no point in trying to hang on to an email address, a fan or a follower who isn’t interested. Tell participants what value you have to offer to them after the giveaway. What MCP Actions did was great and the audience reciprocated.