Subscriber Giveaway Winner
In April, I did a series of posts expressing my appreciation for visitors, readers, and subscribers to Amdall Gallery, and opened up a giveaway as small gesture of thanks. The prize was small (essentially $20 or custom artwork), but there were far more entries than I expected! I was thinking maybe a dozen or so people would stumble across it and roll the dice, but there were 238 total entries from 79 distinct people! The contest ended today at 12:01am, and I went into the Gleam portal this afternoon to click the “select winner” button. Gleam picked one entry at random (here’s how they do it) from the list, and that lucky person was….
Richard H., who made his entry yesterday – congratulations to you!
I got in touch with Richard today, so we’ll see what he decides for his prize. I’m sure the vast majority who were drawn to the giveaway were after a quick chance at $20, especially if they already had Gleam accounts used for other contests. After all, $20 isn’t much, but who could knock a free meal or two? But, I’ve hoped the winner might opt to have a custom portrait drawn. Which has me wondering, would anyone actually enter if the only prize was something drawn by me? Now that might be more like the handful of entries I originally anticipated. So, what do you think – would that interest you?
As I mentioned before, this was my first attempt at a giveaway. Overall, I’d say it was a pretty cool experience. The free version of Gleam lacks a few things I’d like to use, but overall it’s very effective and easy to manage. It also was really powerful in terms of gaining subscribers – my total number went up by 93 during the 30 days the contest ran! That’s really a huge number for such a small site like mine. I’d say probably 75% of those were social media followers, but that’s just my gut feeling. Also, it the distribution of entries was interesting; we had a surge at the beginning and the end. Here are some graphics:
Most of the actions people took seemed logical. Everyone who took the steps to register with Gleam (or already had an account) did the automatic entry. And almost everyone was willing to visit the Facebook page. Around 30% were willing to comment on the post, and 24% did everything, which is actually a surprisingly high number to me.
So, perhaps we will have another giveaway, this time just for artwork of the winner’s preference! Well, unless the poll tells me that’s not something people are interested in. Congratulations again to Richard H., and thanks to everyone who participated in the giveaway!
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Aww, that gleam thing happened right when I had my family emergency, so I didn’t get to participate. 🙁 Joy for another around 🙂
What a fascinating breakdown you can do, it’s great with that kind of insight.
Well, I’m glad you were able to be back to see this one!
I also saw your one year celebration giveaway – congratulations, by the way. It’s a great milestone, and quite a generous giveaway. That’s really a massive collection of in-game stuff you’re giving out.
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Hi Jon
Great insightful post, thanks for posting up the details, I hadn’t heard of Gleam before. Good to see the stats and results.
I’ve done a couple of ‘free giveaways’ of art on Instagram in a shameless attempt to bump up audience figures. I’ve only got a small following so looked to boost it a bit to feel that I wasn’t just showing off artworks to a few family and friends (something I was doing before getting on the web).
One thing I found was that the giveaways that had some involvement such as “guess the animal – win the picture” seemed to get more response than the simple “tag a friend and hit follow” type posts. This surprised me as I figured because people are lazy and would rather do nothing for something, the reverse seemed to be the case.
Whilst I’ve done a few of them I decided the last would be my last, unless I came up with a better idea. It was linked up to an advert for a ridiculously low-priced item on my Etsy shop – a loss leader essentially. After a two week campaign it resulted in a grand total of zero sales and I think maybe 10 extra followers. Well, that certainly showed me!! Still count it as something worth trying because we live and learn eh?
Once again, thanks for this post – all the best and I really hope the prize chosen is the right one, $20 is soon spent, artwork is far longer lasting.
Cheers
Steve
Hey Steve! So, how did you handle an Instagram giveaway? I really like Instagram because of its focus on images, but I wish it had more integration with WordPress. Do they have any built-in functionality for giveaways, or do you have to select your own winner? It sounds like you’ve gotten pretty creative with yours, which is cool because you’ve learned quite a lot from it.
As you said, I also figured people will go with the path of least resistance on things, so would be less likely to do detailed things. But you’re right, participants surprised with how many actions they’d take to enter.
If you ever decide to do another giveaway, I really liked Gleam. I used the free version, which only lets you set up basic stuff (Facebook, Twitter, a few others). But it’s a nice looking interface, and I feel like many who participated did so because they were familiar with Gleam already. Just browsing through the subreddit /r/giveaways, many are through Gleam, so it’s probably easy to get traction. Depending on which WordPress plan or platform you are using, you may be able to embed the giveaway right in your post (.org self hosted, or .com business, I think).
I also did a test run with Rafflecopter, which seemed to be extremely popular on WordPress. The free version is pretty similar to free Gleam, but I think Rafflecopter isn’t as slick looking. I do believe either of these services might increase participation, though. Then again, take what I say with a grain of salt, because this has been my only experience! This is all a trial-by-error process for me