Help: Do I give prize for Retweet or Subscribers?
Question:
For GivingTuesday on Twitter, I am going to give away $100 'tis best charity gift card. The idea is to allow someone to give $100 to a nonprofit of their choice and also to help grow my newsletter Scrappy MarTech for growth marketers.
Should I give prize for retweets or for subscribers?
Retweets = encourages people to share and gets more eyeballs on my newsletter
Subscribers = what I really want as the final goal, but may not get enough traction to move the needle unless people see the offer. (I have ~750 followers on twitter)
Anyone do something like this before? Any suggestions on which one to try?
I've done a bunch of Twitter giveaways with my book in the last 3-4 months and experimented with a bunch of different things. Besides newsletters themselves, these twitter giveaways have been some of my best (most sales) promos.
By far, Twitter's greatest strength is reach. It's biggest weakness is getting people to take action. Optimize for this!
Every time I kept my giveaways simple - eg like and retweet for entry - I got the furthest reach. I also saw the most sales (desired action) in the halo of awareness/interest generated by that activity.
By contrast, more complex entries or asking people to take direct action stunted both.
I've also seen giveaways that require an email to enter. This can generate bigger signup numbers but of lower quality, with more unsubscribes and less interested readers. I'd always rather have smaller list that's more valuable than a bigger list nobody reads.
Obvs YMMV with a newsletter but my hunch is that as long as you have a clear incentive for new subscribers, you'll end up with more long term subscribers who find you from the giveaway!
Great advice from Alex here as per usual.
At SparkLoop I've seen hundreds of newsletter creators run giveaways to grow their audience.
Some require retweets to enter, some require subscribing to enter, some require referring a new subscriber to enter, and others require a mix of all three!
It's difficult to generalise what the best approach is.
In my experience, you only want to reward people for subscribing if the prize they can win is something only your "ideal" subscribers would want to win.
Otherwise, you'll likely end up with a lot of new subscribers who don't care about your content, and do more harm than good.
I've had a lot of luck doing giveaways for retweets/likes. I'm hesitant to require follows because I don't want followers that aren't actually interested in my tweets. It seems that can hurt engagement more than help due to how the Twitter algorithm works.
Well, this is now live on Twitter for Giving Tuesday. I'll report back on the results.
Also, feel free to Retweet to have your chance at the $100 TisBest charity gift card today.