10 Proven Giveaway Ideas [+Case Study]

Looking for giveaway ideas for your business?

This post will help you understand how to choose the best giveaway idea that aligns with your business goals and values. 

Let’s get started:

• Why try giveaways

• Keys to a successful giveaway

• List of good giveaway ideas

• Product giveaway case study: Faguo

Why Try Giveaways for Your Business?

Here are some of the benefits of trying a giveaway for a business, according to Wisepops’ research.

Keys to a Successful Giveaway

Every business is different, but you’ll get better results regardless of what your giveaway idea is if you focus on these six things: 

• Know what you want to achieve. Having a goal makes it easier to run an effective giveaway. For example, if you’d like to build your email list, then product giveaways and/or gift cards are what you need to do

• Prize has to be relevant. No MacBook Pros, no iPads, no cash—give away something valuable YOU sell (this way, you’ll qualify entrants)

• Giveaways must be easy to enter. In most cases, you only need a person’s name and email to enter the giveaway

• Prominent position on your website. Replace your newsletter popup or another opt-in campaign you’re running on your website to get more exposure

• Drive traffic to your giveaway. Consider investing in paid traffic from Facebook or Instagram (you can even get leads for as low as $0.12)

• Gamify the participants’ experience. You need a game to encourage participation—whether its liking and sharing your post, following your Facebook page, or something that will have participants checking out your products 

Giveaway Ideas for Online Businesses

Here are good giveaway ideas you can consider to promote your business:

1. Free item

2. Free product with purchase

3. Sweepstakes

4. Product launch

5. Buy one get one free (BOGO)

6. Spin-to-win wheel with various rewards

7. Photo contest

8. Quiz or survey

9. Gift card

1. Free item

This product giveaway idea is pretty straightforward: you give the winner a product or service for free. The rules for entering could vary, but usually, participants need to sign up for a newsletter, follow a social media account, or take a specific photo.

Here’s an example of such a giveaway idea. Vessi, an online seller of shoes, invited their followers to share images with a hashtag. The price: a pair of cool Vessis.

You can also try this type of giveaway idea with your partners.

For instance, Partake Foods teamed up with five other female-founded brands to celebrate Women’s History Month with a giveaway:

If your online business sells services, a free item is also a good giveaway idea.

You can just give away a service instead of the product. For instance, Pedego Harlem invites visitors to sign up for a free test drive. All they have to do is click this onsite notification and give their preferred time for coming:

2. Free item with purchase

For this giveaway idea, you ask your customers to make a specified minimum purchase. In return, you’ll give them an extra product as a bonus. Free items with purchase are a tried and true giveaway type which can help you increase the average order size (AOV) and get a quick boost in sales.

Example: Codage Paris gives away a popular product for every order above €170 ($185). The product is automatically added to the shopping cart when the value of the order reaches that amount:

Codage Paris also chose the onsite notification feed to share the giveaway. Doing so is a good idea because you can keep the giveaway promo message on the homepage without having to change any content in banners, popups, or the header.

Here’s what you can do with this tool:

3. Sweepstakes

A traditional sweepstake is a type of giveaway where participants make some action for a chance to win prizes. Simply, it's like a lucky draw or a random selection process. The chance to win something is given for completing an action, such as referring a customer, subscribing to a newsletter, or following and commenting on a social media post.

For ecommerce stores, this small giveaway idea is a good one to try. Snif, for example, uses a website popup to promise secret sales promotions, access to products from exclusive collaborations, and a chance to win a free item every month:

As you can see, having a sweepstake like this could be as easy as launching a popup or a banner message on your website, so it’s a good monthly giveaway idea, too.

Another example:

Vessi, gives away $40 for a customer referral:

4. Product launch

Another good giveaway idea is to create some buzz for a new product. You can offer the upcoming product or one of the new arrivals as a reward. Just like with other giveaway ideas for businesses, featuring a countdown in such campaigns can create excitement and increase participation.

Example—

WIldcraft had a promotional giveaway for the new product that they gave away along with a bonus skincare set:

5. BOGO (Buy one, get one free)

To participate in this giveaway, customers need to buy one product. As a thank you, you can give them one product for free. Top Shopify stores use this product giveaway idea to move excess inventory and get a quick boost in sales.

Blume hosted a BOGO giveaway as a way to celebrate the fifth birthday of the brand. The campaign was advertised on the website with this cool-looking popup:

6. Spin to win wheels

Spin-to-win pop ups are a creative and fun product giveaway idea that lets you make the customer experience engaging. You can choose to give away multiple prizes, including discounts, free items, surprise coupons, and other incentives—depending on your goal.

Example: OddBalls builds their email list by giving away a discount like that:

Oddballs used Wisepops’ popup editor to create this campaign. Get a spin-to-win popup template for your giveaway and speed up your campaign creation:

7. Photo contest

Photo contests are a fun giveaway idea where you ask your customers to submit creative photos of themselves, often with your products. The best photo gets a reward. Photo contests are great for maximizing customer engagement and building a community around your business.

Here’s an example of this creative product giveaway idea: Madsen Cycles asked their customers to post photos in “Halloween bike costumes:”

Another example from the same business—

This time, the photo contest was made for Mother's Day. The winner received a $1,000 gift card and a brand new family bike worth $2,395:

8. Quiz or survey

A quiz-based giveaway is a promotional strategy where you offer participants a chance to win something by correctly answering quiz questions related to their brand or industry. Or, you can give various bonuses simply for filling out your quiz (say, if the quiz is about collecting customer preferences).

Example: Asphalte, a clothing business, asks customers what products to manufacture with website surveys. This full-screen popup invites visitors to participate:

If you decide to submit your preferences, clicking the popup’s yellow button will take you directly to a Typeform survey.

There, you simply choose how much you’d want a certain item to be manufactured. In a way, you’re setting fashion trends!

At the end of the survey, Asphalte asks for emails to both validate the answers and generate warm leads. As a thank you for participating, you’ll be the first to know when these products become selected for production and made (so you can, preorder them and save about $20 for an item).

On average, Asphalte’s website surveys allow to get about 4,000 new leads every month (a fantastic performance!):

If you’d like to know more about Asphalte's lead generation strategy, click the case study button below.

You’ll find a report packed with helpful tips as well as a tutorial on replicating their campaign. So, you’ll learn how to design surveys and promote them:

Note: this case study is also available in French.

9. Gift card

Gift cards (provided they’re not for Amazon) are an excellent giveaway idea for small businesses like fashion boutiques because they’re simple to do. To maximize the engagement, choose a gift card value that’s attractive enough to entice participants to enter (for most businesses, it should be at least $50).

In an example giveaway below, Black Ember offers a $500 gift card, which is enough to buy a few products (say, a backpack and a wallet)—an excellent deal!

As you can see below, the business also lets the participants know that they’ll get early access to the next product launch:

10. Shop credit 

This giveaway idea is simple and interesting: you offer customers store credit for your store and/or your partners. 

Many businesses do shop credit giveaways together with partners. For example, Homesick, a candle store, has recently hosted a “Welcome Home Giveaway” together with five other stores:

Case Study: Product Giveaway Idea that added 5,000 Leads to the Email list in a Month

Business: Faguo

Products: Fashion & clothing

Challenge: Slow lead generation

Giveaway promotion channels: paid ads and website popups (spin to win)

Giveaway prize: Faguo-made, expensive sneakers

Apps used: Wisepops (popups), Splio (CRM)

Martin Charousset, the head of ecommerce marketing at Faguo, wanted to accelerate email list building and boost overall growth. Faguo sells shoes, clothing, and accessories, so he had a selection of fantastic products to pick to give away.

Let’s break down his most successful product giveaway campaign.

Martin decided to use popups because they allowed him to target specific visitor groups.

A pair of expensive sneakers were chosen as the main prize. That was a good idea because it was something Faguo sells (so it was relevant) and desired (the product was one of the most popular in its category).

He created two separate spin-to-win campaigns to promote the giveaway: for visitors from desktop and mobile devices. The reason is that traditional popups can affect the mobile experience, so a special template should be used:

Martin used Wisepops popup editor to create the campaign.

One really cool thing he did is the customization: the popups featured the brand’s colors and a gorgeous-looking background of a forest, which was also appropriate because Faguo plants a tree for every product sold:

Another critical aspect was the display scenario.

To ensure that the popup is shown only to those who neither participated nor seen the giveaway before, he excluded over 20 website pages from the campaign display options in Wisepops (mainly transactional like order confirmations):

With the previous popup app, Martin had to import giveaway participants’ emails to his CRM (Splio) manually, which took a lot of time and effort. 

So, this time, he integrated Wisepops with Splio directly. All the leads were sent to the CRM automatically, saving him time.

Results of Faguo’s product giveaway 

Martin ran not two, but four campaigns (four versions, to be exact). As you can see, he did A/B testing for both the mobile and desktop versions.

Testing was an excellent idea, as the performance differed between the versions. For example, one mobile version of the giveaway popup generated almost 29,000 leads while the other managed to get only about 1,200:

Key to the success of this giveaway idea:

• Use popups to promote giveaways

• Integrate your popup tool with your tech stack (email marketing app or CRM)

• A/B test your campaigns to generate more leads and engagement

There’s much more about Martin’s product giveaway idea and strategy to share with you. If you’d like to keep reading, check out: 

💡 Faguo lead generation case study

The case study (available in French as well!) also includes step-by-step instructions on how to replicate this successful spin-to-win giveaway campaign.

But if you'd like to see a very quick overview of how similar campaigns are made, this video will help (Sydney, our brand designer, makes a giveaway popup for St. Patrick's Day):

Summary

So, what did you think of these giveaway ideas?

Giveaways can definitely be a game-changer for both large and small businesses seeking to accelerate email list building (just like it was for Faguo). The benefits are undeniable: expanded reach, enhanced customer engagement, and a thriving email list that can drive long-term success. 

Need more good giveaway ideas? You always have the option of checking out what your competition is doing. So, swing by their website and see if they’re having any giveaways.

And these will help if you’d like to keep learning about how to grow your online business:

• Flash sale guide with examples

• How to write product descriptions

• How to get more email subscribers

• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): best practices & tools

• Springly gets 50% more emails with popups [Case study]