Prize Selection

A lot of your giveaway’s success will depend on the prize you decide to use. Figuring what should be given away as a prize is a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly either. A fair amount of thought should go into choosing what prize you give away; the prize of your giveaway will define the performance of your promotion.

Next time you think about what you should give away, ask yourself these following five questions:

1. What’s the dollar amount of the prize?

As a general observation, your promotion will receive more entrants the more valuable your prize is. An item that you can purchase from a store for $10 won’t attract and convert as much traffic as an item that costs $100, which won’t attract and convert as much traffic as an item that cost $500.

Based on the many promotions run through Rafflecopter, you’ll find the most success with a prize that has an average retail value worth at least $200.

There are special circumstances where a prize valued at $50 will still see success, but $200 is a fair place to start at. If the effort it takes to enter a promotion isn’t worth the chance at winning a potential reward, the promotion won’t convert your audience into participants.

2. Does your audience have interest in what you’re giving away?

If your company has a fanbase that’s a certain demographic, the item you’re giving away should appeal to that demographic. It’s an easy mistake to make. We’ve made that mistake before.

For Father’s Day in 2013, we ran a promotion to give away a handful of subscriptions to the online subscription box service, Dollar Shave Club, which is a service targeted to men tired of spending too much money for razors in a store. Sounds like it would make for a great prize for a Father’s Day giveaway.

At the time of the promotion, well over two-thirds of the people that used Rafflecopter were female. Despite the good intentions, it wasn’t a good match and the promotion underperformed.

3. How relevant is the prize to your company?

You want to give away a prize that resonates with your users and reflects your companies and giveaways' goals. If you were Apple and you wanted to give away an electronic product, but it was a Microsoft product, that would be confusing.

On the flipside, if you were a company that sold iPhone cases, giving out an iPhone as a prize in addition to the cases you sell would be relevant.

4. Is this a prize that all entrants and potential winners can enjoy?

Always keep in mind your fans that follow you on social media. In our case, although some of our followers run giveaways themselves, a lot of them follow us to simply enter giveaways. In our case, although giving away an annual subscription of Rafflecopter would interest a fair amount of our followers, there are prizes we can giveaway to engage a greater majority of followers.

On that note, not all of our followers would get benefit from a Rafflecopter subscription. If your Grandmother who isn’t as computer literate entered the giveaway and won, she doesn’t have any use for it. While giving away subscriptions to our paid features is a relevant prize, it’s a prize that not everyone can enjoy. That’s usually why we’ll include other prizes in addition to a paid Rafflecopter subscription. Examples include t-shirts, stickers, or gift cards.

Your prize should be something any end consumer can find value in. According to this rule, the best prize besides money would be a universal gift card. Amazon gift cards are a good example of a prize that can be enjoyed by a majority of winners that receive it.

5. How unique / scarce is the prize?

Obtaining a unique prize or an item that’s difficult to get a hold of can help boost your giveaway’s performance as well.

For example, there were 64 soccer matches at the 2014 FIFA World Cup this year. As such, FIFA is giving away 63 kick-off balls, one ball for each match (the first match being the exception). Each soccer match at the World Cup uses many balls that can be purchased from their online store, but you’re getting an item that’s one of a kind, used as the first ball in the match, which has a great story behind it.

One-of-a-kind prizes tend to perform better as well. Several years ago, the team at Dude I Want That ran a giveaway for a one-of-a-kind Nintendo controller. Except the controller was also a fully functional coffee table. You could literally plug the table into your Nintendo and play your favorite game using the gigantic buttons on the table. Not only was the table awesome, the fact that you could enter to win it was even cooler.

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