Increasing Engagement & Growth With Strategic Giveaways

Ever wondered how a well-executed giveaway can skyrocket your business's growth? Buckle up for a thrilling ride through the ins and outs of a giveaway that transformed not just our email list, but our entire community. 

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00:00:00 - Introduction to Giveaways
00:05:30 - Planning and Partnering with Vendors
00:11:02 - Setting Up the Giveaway Timeline
00:15:04 - Client Journey and Entry Process
00:20:07 - Email Marketing Strategy
00:26:49 - Verifying Winners and Follow-Up
00:31:02 - Post-Giveaway Strategies
00:34:46 - Recap and Success of the Giveaway

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer, and business coach. Each week, we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's get ready, because this girl means business. Hey there, and welcome back to the Girl Means Business podcast. This week, we're talking about giveaways and how to use giveaways to grow your audience and grow your business. But, other than just sharing regular tips on how to do a giveaway, I'm actually going to be sharing with you the results of a giveaway that I just recently did in my business. So here on the podcast, I want to make sure that everything we're talking about, you understand, are things I'm actively doing in my own business or businesses, and so this is the perfect example of how I want to take the giveaway I just ran, and I want to break down exactly how it was set up, what I did that worked really well, what I might do differently going forward in the future with other giveaways that I plan to do later in the year and give you some behind the scenes of why I felt like this was a really successful giveaway. I'm going to give you all the numbers. We're going to break down all the nitty gritty, so hopefully this will inspire you to, if you're planning to do a giveaway in your business at some point, some tips of how to maybe make it really successful for your business.

Speaker 1: 1:47

Okay, so I'm going to back up to last fall, because I originally had planned to do this giveaway back in like October of last year and then, if you've been following along with me, you know that that was the year, that or that was the month that just kind of was from hell. I got really, really sick, then my daughter got sick, then I got sick again. It was a whole thing, and so the giveaway kind of just end up on the back burner. It was something that I had started working on and then I put it aside and then I thought, okay, once everything got better health wise, everything was good I was like let's move this to maybe between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then I realized like that's a really crazy time to do a giveaway. There's a million things going on. It just was not the right timing for my audience. It was also not the right timing within my own business.

Speaker 1: 2:36

So this giveaway has kind of been in the works since about August, september, when I first started planning it, and then it just kept getting pushed back, pushed back, and so we finally ran it this last week of January. So the giveaway ran from January 29th through February 2nd and so really recently, and honestly, I feel like that that was probably the best timing wise because of a couple of different reasons. Had I run it back in October, it probably would have done just fine, but I didn't really have all my ducks in a row then that I have in place now. I also think that I would not have had the vendors to work with at the time that I was able to have at this time. And had I done it in January I mean in December, november time I do think it would not have been as successful, because that is a really difficult time to get your content in front of people. Everybody is in holiday mode. They're in like kind of shopping, sometimes burnout mode. They're not really thinking about like hey, let me enter to win this fun photography thing. So at timing wise, I feel like it really went really well. And then planning wise, I feel like that I did have enough time, kind of leading up, to start planning. So let's get into the starting planning process and we'll work our way through from planning to execution, to post giveaway, what worked, what I would do differently, all the numbers, all the things. So when I originally started planning for this giveaway, there were a couple of things I knew that I wanted to make sure it happened. One was I wanted to partner with other accounts, other vendors who were in the photography space, who had a similar audience to who I was trying to attract, and that way the giveaway was not really all on my shoulders.

Speaker 1: 4:29

Part of the appeal of doing a giveaway is you want to be able to leverage other people's audiences. So in this giveaway, there were five vendors myself and four others and so we had we each had four brand new audiences to draw from, four new audiences that would see the giveaway, that would maybe, you know, would follow us or become part of the email list that would become aware of us in some way, shape or form. And so when you're doing a giveaway, a lot of times I see people saying I. It's slow season. I see this a lot on Facebook right now. It's slow season. I think I want to do a giveaway to try to like boost some sales of my mini sessions or this workshop that I'm hosting or whatever it is that you're, this course that I've created. And then the problem is they give, do the giveaway all by themselves, so they are really only reaching their current audience.

Speaker 1: 5:25

So tip number one is, if you plan to do a giveaway of any kind, I highly recommend finding a few other accounts to partner with. So what I did to find those accounts one of them was someone who I have had on the podcast. I've been on her podcast, I am a an affiliate for her capture the chaos planner. She has an advertisement here on the podcast for the planner. So we already had a preexisting relationship and I knew, and we had discussed when we did our interviews on the podcast, about doing something like this together, so that relationship was already there. That was an easy one for me to reach out to. Another thing that I did was I reached out to my local like network of other small business owners that I knew were in the photography space, and there were several that have their own presets or that offer coaching or courses or programs within the photography space. And so I reached out to several of those and I said hey, if anybody's interested in joining in on this giveaway or partnering with us, I would love to have a conversation with you. And so that was another way that I was able to tap into the network that I already had within that nation, that space.

Speaker 1: 6:40

Now, first the other two. They were people that I knew had something that my audience would really be interested in. One of them was a camera bag. It's like a cross body. It's called the sidekick from Ruby and Ray. It's awesome. I have one. I love it. It's a cross body camera bag. I knew that my audience would absolutely love that and I knew that she had an audience that was very similar to mine. And then the other one is sessions. It's a booking platform for top four photographers that a lot of photographers really love and use. So I knew that would be another like big draw brand that if I could get them to come in and work with us on this giveaway, that it could be mutually beneficial as far as getting more people signing up for their platform and becoming aware of it and then also drawing a new audience into our other platforms as well.

Speaker 1: 7:29

Now, one of the things I was really particular about with this giveaway was I was looking for vendors who would A be willing to participate and participate on a level other than just, okay, I'm going to put my name on it, but you're going to do all the work of sharing it. I wanted vendors that were actually going to be excited about sharing about the content that we're going to be willing to talk about the giveaway on their own feeds, on their own stories, with their own audience and email list, and sometimes you don't get that when you are just aiming for these really large audiences. A perfect example is for this giveaway. I had originally reached out to Flo Desk and Honey Book, both to see if they would partner to offer a prize as part of the prize pack, and once things kind of fell apart in the fall and I hadn't really heard from Flo Desk and Honey Book had said they were not interested. They don't do giveaways and things like that anymore.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Then I really started thinking about it. I was like you know what? As much as I know that those would be great prizes to offer, they aren't going to really benefit the purpose of this giveaway, which is to expose our brands to different audiences, because I don't really see those brands sharing about things like that on their own pages, their own feeds, and so I really wanted to focus on smaller brands who would benefit from the growth and who would also be more open to sharing about them because they see the benefit of sharing that content with their own audience. And so, as much as like Flo Desk and Honey Book are amazing and it would be awesome to do giveaways with them at some point or have them sponsor something in the future, I, for this particular giveaway, decided that was not a great fit. So, like I said before, for this giveaway, I really wanted to focus on partnering with vendors who were smaller in size, who were maybe newer brands or were brands that I knew would be willing to share and get their content out there, get the list growing, get their following growing and would benefit from this giveaway. So I ended up partnering with four other small businesses and we each offered one to two prizes to offer as part of the giveaway.

Speaker 1: 9:49

Now, this is something else I did a little different. A lot of times the giveaways will say like you win everything in this prize pack. I wanted to make it really inclusive, so I offered six prizes and there were six different winners, so one winner per prize, which, as someone who is entering a giveaway, that seems really exciting to me, because now I have more than just one chance of winning. I have six chances of winning and even though I won't win every prize offered, I could win one of these six prizes and so that one I would maybe play around with and test. So, like next time I do a giveaway, I might test doing like all the prizes as one big prize pack and see if that affects it any differently. But for this particular giveaway, offering six different prizes seemed to work really well because it gave people more of a sense of oh, I have a better chance of winning something because there's more than just one main particular prize.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Once I had the vendors and the prizes in place, I knew what our giveaway was going to actually be. These were the people participating, these were the prizes we were offering. The next thing was to start getting all of the details in place. I knew I wanted to have everything really planned in advance so that I knew exactly, like when we were launching it, what was going to happen, how we were going to make it run, all the things. So the first thing I really decided was the timeframe, what was going to be the window of opportunity from start to finish, of when people could get signed up.

Speaker 1: 11:21

And there were two things I considered here. One is I wanted to keep it to a really short window because I wanted there to be this urgency of I need to get signed up so I don't miss it or forget, and the instant gratification piece. We've all had those ones where we sign up for a giveaway and it's not going to be announced for two or three weeks and then we forget all about it. And in this case I wanted people to be really excited that if they saw it on Monday, by Friday they were going to know if they'd want or not, and so I kept it to a really short five day window. The other reason I did this was because I know, for my own particular audience, weekdays are way more engaging than weekends. A lot of times on weekends, my audience are photographers, their moms. They're busy, they're running from place to place, they're doing sessions, it's family time, whereas weekdays they have a little bit more time to be on social media to see the content, to engage with it and to get signed up. So we ran our giveaway from Monday until Friday. So Monday we launched it, we talked about it all week long and then on Friday afternoon evening the winners were announced and they were announced via social media and via email. So having that short window of time was really easy. It also meant that the participants, the vendors, didn't have to block off a huge block of time in their content to be sharing about the giveaway. It was kind of a here we're doing this one week, really hard push, and then we're done.

Speaker 1: 12:48

The other thing I did that was really helpful was I pre-planned all of the content that I wanted to share. So I had created social media copy and email copy. I created graphics which included carousels, single posts, stories, story videos, all the links. I had a sheet where it had every vendor's contact information with a link for the sign-up form. I had their email, I had their social links, I had what they were offering. I had their website so that all the vendors had access to all that information really easily. And I shared all this in a Google folder and so I shared it with all of the vendor participants and I said here's everything you need to prepare for this giveaway in advance, and I made sure that there were plenty of options as far as the content or the graphics were similar in style, but they had the ability to have options that were sort of more generic with all of the vendor options, or they had ones that were a little more specific to them so that they could share. This is the prize I'm offering. And then we have others as well, and so I wanted to give them plenty of opportunities to have content that they could feel comfortable using. That wasn't necessarily going to be the same across the board for all of us.

Speaker 1: 14:02

And then, of course, I had all the copy done and ready to go. So they had social media captions, email copy, everything they would need to make sure it was easy as possible for them to share their content, because sometimes writing the captions in the copy itself is the most time consuming, and so I know for me, when I have participated in other events or other giveaways, that having all of that done for me makes things so much easier, because then I can just copy paste and schedule it out. So I made sure ahead of time that all of that was done and ready to go two weeks in advance, so that they had time to prepare. They had time to plan if they wanted to schedule out content for their socials or their email list. They didn't have to, like, wait until the last minute or worry about how to do that on their own. It was all done for them.

Speaker 1: 14:51

The next thing that I had to kind of plan out which really was planned out before I created the copy and the graphics, but was the plan for the client journey. A lot of times we think about giveaways and we think, okay, I'm just gonna have them follow everybody that's involved and that's how they enter. Or maybe they have to comment something on the post and that's how they enter. For me, I knew that I wanted this giveaway to not just be about social media, because I knew that if I asked people to follow that, they would follow for the giveaway. But then the likelihood of them staying a follower a lot of them are gonna unfollow or die off and I wanted something a little bit more permanent and a little bit more conducive to what I'm trying to do in my business, which is grow my email list.

Speaker 1: 15:37

So I knew for this particular giveaway. It was not necessarily about the Instagram follows or even the engagement. It was more about I wanted to build an email list from everyone that was interested in the giveaway. So I created a landing page in my flow desk account for the giveaway where I kind of outlined the details of the giveaway and then, in order to enter, they had to give me their name and email address. Simple as that, and so that was what I was ultimately directing everybody back to. So when I created the copy for the emails, I included that link so that anyone sitting on that email that link was what they would go to was that landing page. It really didn't even take people to social media accounts if you were sending email copy.

Speaker 1: 16:24

Then what I did was I thought, okay, similar to I wanna keep it as simple as possible as I can for the participants to share the giveaway with their audiences. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for people to actually enter the giveaway, and so I went on to Instagram. I did a little bit of research. I typed in like hashtag giveaway. I looked at some different giveaways that have been done recently and what I see a lot of especially influencers doing on their giveaways is they say things like okay, you need to be following all of the accounts that are tagged in the post, and then you need to tag a friend, and then you need to share this to your story.

Speaker 1: 17:06

So there's three steps of things you had to do in order to be entered, and I thought that's a lot of steps and those are things that I'm probably, honestly, that's a lot of work and I'm not necessarily going to do that, unless the giveaway is just that amazing, like you're giving away a free camera or a brand new iPhone or something that I feel like is really worth that time and effort. That's a lot of clicking, it's a lot of going through and, honestly, when you think about it in that scenario, put yourself in those shoes, if it was okay. Here's an image with six different businesses tagged on it. You then have to go, click on each of those tags, which will then open up a new account. You have to follow that account, then go back to the original post, find it again, click the next one. You do that six different times. Then you have to tag a friend, then you have to share it to your stories.

Speaker 1: 17:55

That's a lot of steps just to enter this giveaway, and so I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, because I knew that if I was asking people to do too much, they weren't going to do it. It's the ultimate. A confused mind doesn't buy. If you have to do too many steps, you're not going to do any of the steps. So I decided to set up a keyword automation. If you've listened to the podcast, you've heard me talk about MiniChat, which is one of my favorite platforms. It's a keyword automation platform for social media. So the way that it works is for this particular giveaway. Anytime I would share a post about the giveaway. In order to enter, they had to comment on that post with the word giveaway, and then MiniChat would be triggered and it would send them a direct message, and in that direct message it would say like hey, friend, I'm so excited that you are interested in this giveaway. We have some really amazing prizes. Click the link below to get entered, and it would ultimately take them to the giveaway landing page where they had to enter their name and email address.

Speaker 1: 18:58

Now here's the beauty of this, and I had a follow-up step I'll get to in a second. But the beauty of this was when they comment giveaway, that's all they have to do in that moment, even if they comment giveaway and then their kids start screaming in the next room and they totally lose track of what they were doing. Or maybe they were sitting in a red light and they comment and then the green light turns green and they take off and they put their phone down, or whatever the case may be, when they come back to Instagram again, that DM is still gonna be there in their inbox and so even if they don't enter right that second, it's okay. They can come back to it when they have a moment to actually click the link and sign up. And so the simplicity of that really helped to boost the number of comments and likes and shares and all the things that we got, because I made it really really simple for people to enter and the click rate was like 98% on that entry button. So that means that 98% of the people who got that DM in their inbox clicked on it and ultimately signed up for the giveaway.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Now, what I did also was within many chat you can kind of create these little automations so they would get the DM immediately after they commented and it would say like here's the link to sign up and then about 10 minutes later they would get a second message in their inbox that would say something along the lines of hey, if you want to support the vendors that are offering this giveaway, make sure you go and follow everybody that is participating. And it had buttons for each of the vendors and you could click those buttons and you could go follow their page. And so, again, the ultimate goal was the email list, and then kind of a side effect was, if we can also get people to follow us on social media, that's an added bonus, it's the cherry on top, and so I wanted to make sure people knew that these were the accounts to follow. Obviously, they were tagged in the original post, but in case they didn't click it or see it, then I wanted them to be able to go and have those there in their inbox. Again, the inbox piece is really important because even if they don't take action on it right away, it's still there in their inbox and if they didn't see the original DM with the link to sign up for the giveaway 10 minutes later, they're getting another DM which gives another notification, and now they may go back and be like, oh yeah, I forgot to actually sign up for this thing. I wanna go do that, so it works out really well on multiple levels to help get those people that maybe aren't quick action takers, to make sure they're getting reminders to go do the thing and that I want them to do.

Speaker 1: 21:39

Now let's talk about the email side of this, because obviously my number one goal was to build my email list, and so when they signed up, they were added to the email list, and then I had a workflow, an automatic workflow set up, where they would get a welcome email, and that first email was just to confirm that they had entered the giveaway, and then it gave a little bit of information about each of the vendors participating and there was a link for each one of them to go and follow us on Instagram and so. On that workflow, we had a 78% open rate and a 23% click rate, which is really good, because average open rates are typically in the 20s or 30s and average click rates are usually less than 10% sometimes 15%, but pretty low and so the fact that these were being opened and being clicked shows that it was obviously they were getting the emails and they were interested in the emails, and then what I did was each day of the giveaway, I sent out an email. Now, it was not part of the workflow, it was scheduled to go out just like a normal email to just the segment that had entered the giveaway, and each day I sent out an email with a little bit of a blurb about each of the vendors. And so, for example, the Ruby and Ray company, with their sidekicks, I did an email talking about who they were, their products, what they offer, and then links to their website and to their social media with a reminder to support them by going and following them on Instagram and engaging with some of their recent content. And so each day of the week, they got another email. Keeping top of mind, it also reminded them to share about the giveaway, to talk about it, send it to a friend, that kind of thing. And so, while I was sharing it on social media, I was also those people who had already entered. I was letting them know like, hey, we've only got three more days until the winners are announced. I'm so excited. I hope your name is one of the ones that are called. In the meantime, I wanna introduce you to one of our amazing vendors. Here's Ruby and Ray. Here's what they do, so on, so forth.

Speaker 1: 23:43

And so those emails were typically getting about a 60 to 70% open rate and about a 12 to 18% click rate, and so they were still on the higher end of the open rate and click rates. Obviously, as the week went on they kind of dropped a little bit. Our list was also growing, so we had more people opening or getting the emails, but then about the same number of them were being opened so it all kind of even down in the end. But the benefit of those emails was not only did it remind people to go and follow us on social media, to engage with our content, to become part of our communities, but it was also kind of sharing about each of the brands. It was staying top of mind and it was letting them know that like, hey, you're kind of part of this email list now. And surprisingly I was very excited to see we had absolutely zero unsubscribes and we had no bounces, which means the emails that were being sent were all being sent to valid email addresses.

Speaker 1: 25:52

Two other things that I did during this week to stay top of mind was I was sending out daily emails to the vendors, the participants, letting them know kind of what our numbers were, where we were at, how things were going, kind of doing a check-in, reminding them like, hey, I'm going to be posting this. I'm going to invite you to be a collaborator on this post. That way it's kind of easy for you to not have to like it'll already show up on your feed if you accept the collaboration. Here's another link to the Google folder in case you're looking for graphics or content or copy, just kind of sending out little updates and asking for them to kind of give me feedback on how are things going on your end. Are you seeing more subscribers? Are you seeing I mean, are you seeing more people following you on social media? Are you getting people sharing and tagging you in those kinds of things?

Speaker 1: 26:39

And I found that the feedback I got from that was good because they liked knowing one kind of how things were going. It wasn't like they were in the dark about that. And then, two, it also gave them reminders to like pop in on their stories and talk about the giveaway. And that was the other thing we did. It was I went on every single day to my stories and I alternated kind of between, like I would say I would share the post. If I made a post on my feed that day, I would share it to my stories, but then I would also go in and just kind of pop on and talk to camera about the different giveaway prizes or reminding people they had like a certain amount of time left, letting them know to follow the vendors, letting them know to share to their stories, all of those things. And the benefit I found there was that my story views did increase quite a bit, which was really nice, and the clicks that I would get from sharing the direct link on my stories were actually really high as well. I was getting a lot of people going directly to the landing page from my stories instead of going to and like giving a keyword down below in the comments and things like that, and so, either way, I was happy. Either way, as long as they are getting that direct link to the landing page, I was happy, and so those things all went really really well.

Speaker 1: 27:49

One more thing that I did that made it really helpful when it came time to like verifying our winners was anytime somebody shared a the post to their stories. When you go into your Instagram notifications it will show you like a little bubble, kind of like a little Instagram story bubble, and it will show you like active story shares, and so I would go in there a couple of times a day and I would look and see who had been sharing the stories to their feed or to their stories sharing the feed post to their story, sorry. And I would just comment I would say thank you so much for sharing with like a little heart, and what that does is one. It sends them a direct message. So now we have a record of it in our inboxes that they have shared the post, even though it expires. I'll be able to see that they shared a post and I can see that I responded to it. And so one, it opens up a communication in the DMs. And two, it's a record of that.

Speaker 1: 28:42

I acknowledged that they had that and we were able to kind of check that against the winners to see how many times they shared, who had shared, who was following all those things. So then, when it came time to choose the winners, I went into the email list. I did a random number generator on the internet and I basically printed off kind of an Excel spreadsheet of all of the subscribers, the entries in order of the time that they subscribed, so like the very first subscriber to the very last subscriber, and we had roughly around 250 entrance, which was great, and so I did a random number generator from one to 250, I did that six different times and so the first number generator, I think, gave me the number like 27. So I went down the list and entry number 27 was our first winner. We double-check and verify. They were following all of us and you know if they had shared or tagged anybody. And then they got prize number one and so on, so forth down the list.

Speaker 1: 29:41

And so those winners were notified via email and we made an announcement post on Friday evening, tagging those in on Instagram as well. And so each of the vendors were also given that information. So I sent them like hey, this is who won your prize. Here's their email address, here's their social media handle. Make sure you reach out to them and let them know how they can claim their prize from you. And then the emails that were collected were sent to all the vendors as well, so that they could add those to their email list. When one thing I should mention is, on the Entry form it was stated that by entering their name and email. They were giving permission to all of the vendors that are participating in the giveaway to have access to send them emails. So they were Opting in to all of our email list via that Optin form. So it was definitely compliant, all those things Okay. So those the things that I feel like went really well overall.

Speaker 1: 30:40

Like I said, we had around just shy of 250 people enter the giveaway, and I know me personally. I haven't gotten numbers from everybody else, but I know for me personally, I had about 170 new followers on Instagram, so not every single person that entered followed me, but then again, some of them were probably already following me, and so, out of those 250 ish, 170 new people started following me. As of the recording of this episode, I have not noticed a drop-off in my followers, which is great, and so hopefully that means that the majority of them will stick around on Instagram to continue following me. Now post a giveaway. I sent an email out to everybody that participated or that entered the giveaway Offering them a one-time discount code for my membership. So they had the opportunity to Join my membership. They get a two-week free trial and then they also get a discount on top of that for the life of their membership, and so I created a special discount code just for that and I offered that out to everybody that Participated. Now, out of that email, I had about 48 percent opened rate and I had 15 people sign up for that free trial with the discount code attached, and so overall, I feel like I'm honestly that was successful. I think that I will resend that email one more time before the coupon code expires because, again, 47% is good, but it's not everybody didn't see it, so I want to make sure more people are getting eyes on that as well.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Okay, now let's talk about some of the things that I would have done differently if I were to go and do this again. So one of the things I would do is I would be have very clear expectations and guidelines for all of the vendors and participants as far as things like what they need to be sharing on their feed versus their email list, versus their stories. In this case, I was kind of leaving it up to each of the vendors to decide what would work best for them, how they wanted to share the content, and what I saw was that, out of the five of us that participated, only two of us ever shared to our actual feed. Now I did tag them in every post that I did, but for the most part they were just re-sharing my content to their stories, which was fine and it worked out great. But in the future I might suggest that they are required that they have at least one feed post that gets penned to their feed so that it just sort of stays in front of our audiences a little bit more than just in the stories.

Speaker 1: 33:16

The other thing is that I have not done which I probably should is, once the giveaway was over I needed to go in because I had all these new followers and I kind of just went back to like business as usual, posting content. I should have done like an introduction post, either during the giveaway or right after, to let my new followers kind of have a little bit more information about who I am and what I do. So I'll probably go and do that at some point here in a little while, but I did not do that right away after the giveaway was over, and I think that's a great way to make people who are new to your account With an influx of new followers feel a little more welcomed and kind of have a better idea of who they are following. The third thing I would do is Really look at the dates I've selected and see what else is going on in my niche or in the industry. So one of the things I noticed was that some of the other vendors were sharing other giveaways or other events going on online summits, conferences, things like that and While those don't really conflict necessarily, because it's not like they're having to spend time within the giveaway, they're just signing up and kind of moving on, it was I did feel like it was kind of Overshadowed a little bit by some of the other things going on in the industry. So one of the things I might be a little more aware of because I didn't pay attention to this when I was scheduling the giveaway Is what else is going on at that same time that might Overshadow or take away from the impact that this giveaway can have.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Other than that, I would say that this was an extremely successful giveaway in the fact that we grew our email list by around 250 new subscribers, that's, 250 new people, potential clients, potential audiences to connect with and grow in our community and I grew my following. Again, I can't speak for the other vendors, but mine grew around 170, I believe, was the final number followers, and considering that my account was kind of brand new it's less than a year old it's under a thousand followers currently that's a really significant growth, so I'm really excited about that. I haven't seen a huge drop off rate since the giveaway ended, so hopefully they will stick around and I feel like I've created a great community within the vendors that I worked with and that this is an experience that benefited all of us and so hopefully that means that going forward, we have a really good working relationship that we can do other events or giveaways in the future. So all that to say that if you are looking for a way to boost your email list, boost your following, just kind of create a little bit of a surge and influx into your accounts, this is a great way to do that. Again, I would take into account all the things we talked about in this episode, the things that I feel like really helped to make this successful.

Speaker 1: 36:09

I have done giveaways in the past where I just kind of threw something together last minute. It was just myself, or maybe me and one other person, and it did not have the impact that I was hoping that it would have, and so doing it this way, I feel like, was much more beneficial. It was allowed us to reach a much larger audience, and so I would definitely make sure that you put in the time and effort to plan, to coordinate something that is going to benefit everyone involved, and that you make it as easy and as simple as possible for your participants to enter into the giveaway and then for you to stay in contact with them afterwards. All right, guys, I hope you found this really helpful.

Speaker 1: 36:53

If you have questions about running giveaways for your business or you want to just chat more about ideas that you have, you're always welcome to send me a DM over at girlmeansbusinesscom or Instagram at girlmeansbusiness, and I would love to hear your ideas or your thoughts. Or maybe you're hosting a summit or a giveaway or something in your business and you would like to partner with me to do that. I would love to chat with you about that. I am more than happy to do that, so feel free to reach out to me. I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will see you back here next week. Same time, same place.