In today's digital world, marketers have more opportunities than ever to reach out and connect with their target audience. With an unprecedented amount of marketing channels to work with it can be challenging to figure out which approaches will allow you to successfully connect with your market, cultivate strong audience relationships and ultimately drive sales.

Amongst the vast array of marketing communication options one still stands tall above the rest, and that's email marketing.

Email marketing is the single best tool you have at your disposal for marketing your brand and driving conversions. In fact, it's been found to have an enormous 300% ROI advantage over social media marketing.

To help you kick your email marketing strategy into high gear we're going to take you through 50+ awesome ideas for effective emails you can send today.

General Email Marketing Ideas

If you want to form a solid relationship with your mailing list and maximise your chances of driving first-time and ongoing sales then you need to be putting out engaging email content several times per week.

This will maximise your emails' chances of getting read, allow you to drive consistent engagement, and help you earn and keep a spot at the top of your audience's mind.

And remember, every email you send should include a call to action which encourages users to take the next step. This can be clicking through to your onsite content, viewing a product or offer, or claiming a coupon code.

Sending out emails with this level of frequency is highly effective, but it can be tough to find something valuable to say all the time. To help you keep your emails constantly flowing and consistently engaging here are some of our favourite ideas for emails you can send anytime:

1. Welcome Emails

Anytime someone new signs up to your mailing list it's important that you immediately reach out and welcome them to your mailing list.

You don't have to do anything too fancy here. You can simply welcome users to you mailing list and give them an introduction to what they can expect from your emails. A welcome email is also a great opportunity to give users a proper introduction to your business, and present them with a clear call to action to try to drive some instant activity.

If you really want to sweeten the deal you can even throw in an introductory coupon to encourage instant action, but we'll talk more about that later.

2. News Emails

Sending out relevant news about your niche is a fantastic way to keep in touch with your subscribers, provide them with value, and drive engagement.

If all you do is send out advertisements and sales pitches, people will tune out pretty quickly. You need to mix it up with interesting, valuable content and sharing relevant news is a great way to do just that.

This is a great strategy for developing relationships with your audience and positioning yourself as a trusted and helpful authority within your niche. This goes a long way when it comes to driving long-term customer acquisition and retention.

Bonus points if you can direct users to your own blog posts covering relevant news updates.

3. Update Emails

Direct email is a fantastic way to keep your users and customers posted about any important updates to your products or procedures. Update emails aren't inherently the most exciting emails, but if you're looping users in on changes to your products and services these emails can serve as a great way to show off what you've got and promote your offering that's constantly improving.

Update emails can even serve as a simple way to touch base with your customers and keep yourself fresh in their mind.

Wahanda were able to cleverly use a standard update email to incentivise customers to subscribe to their newsletter which will give their future promotional efforts a meaningful boost.

4. Sharing Valuable Content

When people sign up for your mailing list it will generally be because they like and trust your brand, and want to gain value from your communications. This value will often take the form of product news and special offers, or it can be the insightful and valuable content that you share.

Just about every business has something to gain to by producing valuable content about their niche, but it can be particularly effective for B2B and SaaS businesses. Whatever it is you're writing about, your content needs to strike a balance between promoting your own offering, and providing readers with meaningful value.

If you regularly publish blog posts it's always a good move to share them with your list, but also producing some exclusive email content is an awesome way to incentivise sign-ups and make your subscribers feel valued.

5. Curated Content

A great way to bulk up your email content is by sharing a curated collection of new, high-value, and relevant articles and videos from around the web.

Taking this approach will allow you to send out more emails and engage your audience more often. Just remember to prioritise your own content, and try not to direct your subscribers towards any of your competitors.

Helm Boots does this expertly by sending out a weekly roundup of engaging content from around the web, including content and deals from their own store.

6. Happy Holidays

Sending out emails around holidays is a great way to instantly make your emails more captivating and capitalise on people's festive spirits. Whether you're running a holiday sale, sharing some holiday-themed content or even just wishing people a happy holiday, this tactic is a surefire way to give your messages an easy boost in engagement.

And with the absurd amount of holidays floating around you'll never run out of reasons to celebrate.

7. Ask Questions

The key to success in any industry is understanding your customers, and there's no better way to gain this understanding than simply going out and asking for it.

If you want to get valuable audience insights then you should try sending your subscribers emails with targeted questions relevant to their stage in the customer journey.

Here's how Vueling Airlines used a quick question to gauge customer preferences and tried to drive some instant conversions:

As well as helping you gauge preferences and drive conversions, this type of email also serves as a nice way to engage users and make them feel involved with your brand.

8. Send Invitations

If you're hosting any sort of event then sending out personal, thought-out invitations is a powerful way to make leads feel appreciated and valued.

If you're selling high-value tickets and have a relatively short lead list, get your team to email as many of them as possible from their own e-mail addresses to add a personal touch.

9. Webinar Invitations

If you're running an online webinar then sending out invites and sign-up forms to all of your subscribers is a must.

You should use emails to announce your webinar, highlight everything users will gain from it, and provide a clear, easy to follow prompt to sign up.

10. Important Dates

Key dates for your business are a great excuse for celebrating with your audience. You can celebrate your organisation's birthday, the day you first broke even, or any other important date.

Can you lay out the key dates in your business calendar and see how many email opportunities you have?

11. Contest & Giveaway Accouncement Emails

One of the most powerful types of promotional campaigns you can run is a giveaway, and reaching out to your evangelists through email is a great way to get the ball rolling on your giveaway and start driving entries.

All you need to do is send out an email which announces your giveaway, highlights the prize, and lets users know what they can do to enter. This is particularly powerful if your giveaway incentivises users to share your campaign with their own social circles, as it will allow you to harness the power of your list to build awareness and attract new subscribers.

Learn Everything You Need To Know About Running A Successful Giveaway

12. Winner Announcement Emails

Everytime you run a contest a giveaway you need to publically announce the winner of your campaign. This will give people closure, boost transparency, and provide you with a solid reason to reach out to your audience and try to drive some engagement.

You can use you winner announcement emails to thank users for participating, hint at future contests to keep them interested, encourage them to shop the products they missed out on winning, and even offer them an exclusive discount to help drive sales.

13. Offer Consolation Prizes

The single best thing you can do to drive action from participants in the aftermath of a contest or giveaway is offer up consolation prizes in the form of exclusive discounts to be used at your store.

This is a truly outstanding way to capitalise on the excitement of your giveaway and drive immediate action from all your fresh leads.

Promotional Emails

So far we've gone over some of our favourite ideas for using email to engage your audience and develop a relationship with potential customers. This is an undeniably critical component of email marketing, but alongside offering up authentic value and boosting engagement it's also important that you're using this channel to promote your offering and drive sales.

Here are some of the most engaging and effective ways you can use email marketing to promote your offering:

14. New Release Emails

Whenever you've got a new release hitting your store you should make sure your subscribers are aware. After all, they're more likely than anyone be keen to check out your latest offering.

You can even offer some subsciber-exclusive discounts if you want to boost interest even more.

15. Start of Season Announcements

If your business has a peak season or different seasonal offers you should always try to send out a reminder at the start of the season.

This is a tactic often used by clothing retailers to promote new seasonal lines and businesses in the travel industry showcasing the season's best destinations, but it's a highly effective approach that can be utilised by just about anyone.

16. End of Season Reminders

Just as it's important to announce the start of a season, it's also important to remind people of it's end. At the end of a particular season you're likely to be trying to move excess stock and squeeze every last sale you can from your list.

A great way to maximise sales at the tail end of a season is to offer special deals and discounts which give your subscribers a final opportunity to get their hands on a seasonal offer.

17. Best Sellers

A simple but effective way to use email marketing to drive sales is to put your best products on full display and encourage your subscribers to check them out, and hopefully make a purchase.

Showcasing your top selling products is an easy way to put your most popular products front and center and give your promotion solid mass appeal.

18. Utilise Social Proof

When you set out to drive sales via email, it's important that you're doing everything you can to highlight the value of your offering and encourage users to take action and make a purchase.

There's arguably no better way to do this than by showcasing customer testimonials, success stories, and user-generated content in your emails. This is the perfect way to highlight the benefits of your offering in an authentic, trustworthy, and highly engaging way that will resonate with your audience far more than traditional marketing material.

You can do this by providing customer testimonials:

Or just by including some customer photos in your emails:

Find Out How You Can Use Contests To Collect Valuable User-Generated Content

19. Show Off Your Results

Similarly to showing off user-generated content that highlights the value you provide, if it makes sense for your business it can be a good move to show off some real, tangible results.

This could be case studies, write-ups about your product from trusted sources, or data that highlights the value of your offering and shows prospects that you can solve their problems and fulfill their needs.

20. Limited Edition Products

If you've got some limited edition products or limited time deals, promptly alerting your email list is an outstanding way to make them feel valued and help strengthen your relationship, regardless of whether or not they ultimately make a purchase.

After all, they subscribed because they want to be the first to know.

21. Teaser Emails

If you're about to launch a new product, promotion or marketing campaign then it's a good move to build hype early on and send out some teaser emails to get people excited before you launch.

This is a great way to get people talking about your new offer or promotion so when you do go live, you're launching to an excited audience that's primed and ready to take action.

22. Preview and Pre-Sale

Teasers are a great way to get people excited about an upcoming release, but as the release draws nearer you may want to give people an in-depth look at what's coming, and even give them a chance to pre-order it.

People love to be at the forefront of exciting new products and innovations, so if you give your loyal subscribers the chance to get your new release before anyone else they're more than likely to jump at the opportunity.

This will help you further strengthen your subscriber relationships, drive sales, and get your new product into the hands of early adopters who will kickstart the cycle of peer-to-peer sharing and help your new release gain traction.

23. Product Education

Just because someone's on your mailing list it doesn't mean they will necessarily know how to use your product.

Sending out emails which give people the option of learning how to use your product is a great way to boost product familiarity and encourage trial.

You don't just have to focus on the basics either. Giving people some in-depth insight and inspiration on using your product is a fantastic way to get prospects excited to get their hands on your product, and help existing customers get even more out of your offering.

Special Offers & Deals

The tactics we went over above are all outstanding ways to use email marketing to promote your offering and drive sales. As effective as they can all be, there still isn't anything you can do that will drive immediate sales as effectively as offering up coupons and discounts.

Here are some of the best ways you can use your email list to offer discounts and drive sales:

24. Welcome Offer

A great way to incentivise email subscriptions and drive some quick sales is sending out a special welcome offer to everyone who signs up to your mailing list. This could be a 10% discount on their first purchase, a 2-week free trial, or anything else you think will help get your foot in the door.

If you want to start giving out welcome offers, make sure that you're using your opt-in forms to promote this special offer to encourage as many people as you can to sign up to your list.

Learn More About Growing Your List With Discount Opt-In Forms

25. Host a Sales Promotion

There's a reason why sales promotions are so universally popular in the world of E-commerce. They work.

Sales promotions are a brilliant way to make your offer that little bit more appealing and drive a serious amount of purchases. No one is more likely to get involved with your sales promotions than your subscribers, so sending out an email devoted to your sale every time you run one is a must.

Announce your sales promotion, showcase what you're offering and give users a clear call to action that takes them right to your sales page.

26. Last Chance Sales Reminders

If you have a sales or special promotion that is drawing to a close, you should send your subscribers a final reminder and give them one last chance to capitalise on your discount.

The psychology of scarcity will invoke a sense of urgency that is sure to prompt users to take immediate action and help you drive some sales. A great way to really instill a sense of urgency is by including a countdown timer inside your email.

Check Out How To Build Urgency On Your Website With Countdown Timers

27. Flash Sales & One-Time Offers

Another effective way to drive instant action by creating a sense of urgency is running flash sales and offering limited-time only deals that give users a weekend or even a single day to capitalise on some awesome deals.

The scarcity this creates is incredibly effective for driving sales.

When you take this approach it's a good move to announce the upcoming promotion in advance. You don't want potential customers to miss out because they didn't check their email in time.

28. Offer Exclusive Discounts

Another brilliant way to encourage sales from your list is offering up exclusive subscriber discounts in the form of coupon codes.

This is not only a sure-fire way to drive sales, but also a terrific opportunity to make your subscribers feel valued. This will greatly enhance your ability to retain customers and promote brand loyalty.

Thirdly, you can track coupon usage, get some advanced analytics on customers’ purchasing habits and the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

Find Out More About Driving Conversions With Coupons

29. Free Shipping

Another type of special offering you can share to drive sales is Free Shipping. Free shipping allows you to offer up a discount without actually having to mark down prices.

This can be helpful if you're offering up luxury goods and don't want its perceived value to be tarnished by price reductions.

30. A Special Gift

Offering your subscibers a free gift is an outstanding way to introduce them to your product and give them a taste of exactly what your product can do for them.

If people like the product you give them as a gift there's a good chance they'll start purchasing it on their own.

31. A Complimentary Service

If you're a service provider then offering your subscribers a free service or a free trial can be a great way to re-engage them, help get your foot in the door, and start working towards converting subscribers into regular customers.

The exact service you offer is completely dependent on the nature of your business, but it's always a good move.

Customer Retention Emails

We've spent some time talking about highly effective email strategies for acquiring customers and driving sales, and while these ideas are all outstanding for driving sales from new and existing customers alike there are some extra tactics you can implement to help engage existing customers and boost retention.

32. Loyalty Discounts

A nice way to show loyal subscribers that they're valued is giving them special discount codes when they reach certain milestones. This could be 6 months as an email subscriber, 1 year since their first purchase or anything else.

As well as showing your fans how much you value them this is also a solid tactic for re-activating former customers and encouraging them to take action once more.

33. Surveys

If you collect your customers' email addresses then reaching out to them with a survey can be a great way to collect highly valuable customer feedback which you can use to improve your offering and figure out how to best connect with your audience.

You can also try offering up a coupon to everyone who completes the survey. This will help you collect more survey responses and drive some sales.

34. Product Recommendations

A brilliant way to re-engage customers and prompt them to make additional purchases is by giving them product recommendations based on their previous purchases.

You can recommend similar products or complimentary products that pair perfectly with purchases they've already made.

35. Reminders to Re-Up

If you sell consumable goods then hopefully your customers will be wanting to re-stock at some point.

A highly effective way to remind them that they need to re-up is sending out a friendly reminder email.

Digital Receipts

Chances are every time someone purchases one of your products you're instantly sending them a digital receipt. These receipts are surprisingly powerful, and are more than likely to have a higher open rate than any other email you send.

These receipts usually just provide the details of a customer's order, but there are a few great ways you can use them as powerful marketing tools to build engagement and drive future sales.

36. “You Made The Right Choice”

Making sure customers are satisfied plays a huge role in boosting retention. If you want to get repeat business then you need to make sure your customers are happy with their purchase.

Alongside offering a great product, a simple way you can help achieve this is using your digital receipt to assure customers that they made the right decision.

You can easily do this by highlighting the benefits of your product, incorporating social proof from other satisfied customers and assuring them that you're always there for any product support they need.

37. Post-Checkout Discount Codes

You can use your digital receipts to immediately start driving future purchases from existing customers by including an exclusive discount code with every post-checkout email.

This is an awesome way to start driving more value from users who have already shown a definitive interest in your brand.

38. Complementary Product Promotions

We already spoke about sending customers emails promoting similar or complementary products, but have you considered doing this in your digital receipt or order confirmation emails?

This can be a great way to remind customers of something else they might need and get them to take action whilst they're still in a purchasing mindset. An example of how this can work is recommending Airpods to someone who just bought an iPhone, or some games to someone who just bought a console.

You can even offer special discounts on complementary products to make a follow up purchase even harder to resist.

39. Incentivise Referrals

When people enjoy something, they like to share it with their friends. This can be hugely valuable to your business, as with the right approach you can turn your satisfied customers into a powerful promotional force.

You can use referral links to offer valuable discounts to customers who successfully share the link with friends, and the friends who capitalise on the offer.

This is an incredibly effective way to not only attract new customers, but also boost retention. You can send out this type of promotion to all of your customers, or you can attach a referral link to your digital receipts and drive social sharing on a consistent basis.

40. Ask For Positive Feedback

Online reviews can play a decisive role in customers' purchase decision, so you want to make sure they're going to tip in you favour.

Try asking customers to leave you a review and link them to the review platforms that you think are most effective for your business.

You can do this in your digital receipts, but you might want to give customers a chance to enjoy your product first. You can easily allow for this by sending a follow up email a few days after the customer receives your product.

Personalised Emails

Every customer you attract and every lead you generate is going to be different, so finding ways to send emails that connect with your audience on a more personal level can go a long way when it comes to building meaningful relationships.

Let's take a look at a few ways you can make your emails more personalised:

41. Segmented Emails

Segmenting your email list is a fantastic way to ensure that you're sending messages that resonate with the recipients.

You can segment your list based on any information you have that you feel will help you send more targeted emails that are likely to land.

This can include:

• Age
• Gender
• Previous Purchases
• Industry (if you're a B2B or SaaS)

Take a look at this email TripAdvisor sent out to a segment of users that had interacted with restaurants and eateries on their site:

You can even use past interactions with your emails to determine what types of email content certain users are likely to engage with, and send them emails based on those behaviours.

For example, you could create a segment of users who have previously clicked through to links in certain emails, and target them with similar offers or messages.

42. Cohort Follow-Ups

A cohort is a group of leads or customers that signed up or bought from you in the same period of time. Tailoring a message to a particular cohort can be an easy way to deliver targeted, time-relevant messages that feel personal.

With this approach you could reach out to customers who made a purchase during your last sale and notify them of an upcoming sale, send exclusive holiday coupons to people who shopped with you last Christmas, or even just reach out and try to re-activate a cohort of customers who haven't shopped with you in a while.

43. Personalised Birthday Emails

If you've been able to capture your leads or customer's date of birth then sending them an awesome birthday voucher is a great way to make your subscribers feel really valued and establish the foundations of a solid customer relationship.

44. Geographic Area Targeting

Another way you can effectively send out personalised emails is implementing geographic segmentation and sending out relevant emails to people in different geographic areas.

This is a great approach to take if you're running a regional sale or hosting an event somewhere.

If you also sell products in a physical location, you can use this approach to promote the openings of nearby stores, or any in-store sales that are being run. You don't even have to promote your own store, promoting a distributor who stocks your products is still an effective tactic for driving sales.

Writing Engaging Emails

We've gone over a whole lot of ideas for powerful marketing emails that will engage your subscribers and promote your offering. Whatever types of emails you decide to send it's crucial that you're effectively executing all of them.

Here are some tips for making sure you're making the most of the emails you send:

45. Write A Good Subject Line

Your email's subject line plays an important role in whether or not users open it.

A good subject line will spark curiosity, build urgency, and give users an indication of what they can expect from your email. You need to give people a solid reason to open your email, so try adding some incentive and highlighting why they should open your email. This can be valuable content or even a valuable discount.

Adding in some emojis are another awesome way to stand out and get noticed.

Whatever you ultimately decide on for your subject line you need to make sure that it's aligned with the actual content of your email.

Also, try sending your emails from a personal account instead of noreply@company.com. This will make your emails seem more authentic and make users a lot more inclined to open them.

46. Speak Your Audience's Language

If you want to connect with your audience in a meaningful way it's important that you're speaking to them in their language.

A lot of this comes down to understanding your audience, but as a general rule you should be friendly, personable and informal. Focus less on yourself and more on your prospect. Instead of talking about the features of your product, focus on the benefits and value it will provide them.

47. Keep It Short & Sharp

People have a limited attention span. This is especially true when they're reading marketing emails.

Focus on grabbing people's attention right from the get-go and channeling them towards your call to action.

You want your emails to be scannable. A lot of people will skim through your message and you want them to still get the key takeaways.

48. Use Engaging Imagery

Engaging visuals and imagery is a fantastic way to stimulate your readers and hold their attention.

Conveying information with images and infographics is far more engaging than a block of text.

Even if you're just throwing a few relevant pictures in to liven things up this is still an effective way to boost engagement.

49. Use Video Content

There may be no better way to give your emails a serious engagement boost than adding in some video content. When people open up an email and a captivating video starts playing you can be pretty sure that they're going to stop and watch it.

Depending on what type of emails you're sending out you can use videos to explain and showcase your product, provide some valuable information or announce a sale or other special promotion.

If your email browser doesn't support embedding videos showing a thumbnail and redirecting users to a video can still be an effective tactic.

Even just adding an eye-catching GIF to your email can be a great way to grab users' attention and make your email more interesting and engaging.

50. Provide A Clear Call To Action

Anytime you send a marketing email there's a very high chance that you want your audience to not only read the email, but also take further action. In fact, we would argue that any marketing email with no call to action is simply pointless.

Whatever action you want them to take, whether it's reading an article, visiting your store, or claiming a coupon code you need to provide them with a clear and engaging call to action that prompts them to take the action you're driving.

How To Grow Your Mailing List

With this massive selection of email ideas and tips at your disposal you should be ready to get out there and nail your email marketing strategy.

Just remember, the bigger your mailing list is, the more effective your email marketing will be. There are a lot of fantastic strategies you can use to generate leads. That includes building attractive landing pages, creating targeted opt-in forms, and using valuable discounts to incentivise sign-ups.

If you want to learn all the best ways to effectively generate leads and grow your mailing list then you need to take a look at our expert guide:

Find Out More About Email Marketing

• Driving Sales From Your Email List
• The Ultimate Guide To Generating Leads
• How To Use User-Generated Content In Your Marketing
• How To Collect Emails From Your Online Store
• How To Create An E-Commerce Discount Popup
• Using Coupons To Convert Website Visitors
• How To Create An Exit-Intent Popup
• 50 Ways To Grow Your Business With Gleam

As two founders living in rural Victoria with a distributed remote team, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of something bigger. But the wave of startup activity happening in Australia and around the world often seems quite alien when I consider how we have built and run our company. It seems to be the accepted logic that bootstrapping is for hobby projects. For us, it’s informed our entire operating model.

I'm still not immune to second-guessing our approach when I see huge valuations, raises, and exits. But I’m also proud of the way that Stuart and I do things. Here’s a peek at some of the principles that underpin Gleam.io.

We Treat Each Other Equally

Co-founder stories often begin with a charming anecdote about a childhood friendship that led to business success. That long-developed sense of trust, and comradery, eventually writ large. Stuart and I weren’t like that. We met shortly after he sent me the digital equivalent of a cold call in February 2009.

Here's what I received:

I was the only one at the time interested enough to shoot him a reply.

Stuart already had a few WordPress coupon sites that were working well, he was able to articulate the concept and show that his idea could actually make revenue (and scale far beyond what was possible for him to make on his own).

He presented a plan to build a large scale coupon aggegration site would list coupons from popular merchants around the world, attracts the user via organic Google searches, the user would find a coupon that gives them a discount, click an affiliate link, and we would make a percentage from the sale – you may remember RetailMeNot (also from Melbourne) who had huge success in this space, they went on to get acquired and eventually IPO (proving that this was a fairly hot space at the time).

We tried to do things a little differently with nifty features (user profiles, price comparison, newsletters, reviews) to differentiate our offering from other sites in the space.

Over the next few months, we worked hard to get a prototype up and running. The weekend we met up to pair on the project was a total disaster - Stuart came to my place and I fumbled for four hours trying to figure out Rails routing to make the URLs look something like:

storecrowd.com/coupons/sitename.com

We were able to laugh about the situation and rejoice when we finally got it working.

Fast forward to 10+ years later and with a very successful company under our belt, our roles are still as they were laid out in that first message. Even though it was Stuart's idea we agreed that 50/50 ownership is the best and most transparent way to flourish and hold each other accountable.

The two of us disagree, negotiate, and fight like a married couple all the time, but ultimately the call is made by the person who owns that area which is tech for me and product for Stuart.

After we’ve put all our ideas and data on the table but still don’t agree we’ll make a decision. We accept that one of us owns that part of the business accept it. Overall, there’s been surprisingly few told you so moments.

We Weren't Afraid To Try New Things

Unlike a lot of success stories, we didn’t start with a vision for a world-beating product. We didn’t have an industry waiting to be disrupted. Instead, we had the desire to build something together that makes some dollars. While the single-minded visionary founder makes for a compelling story, our success has stemmed from the need to be very, very flexible in what we’re creating.

StoreCrowd, our coupon site, got to a peak of 5 remote employees and revenue of $45,000 AUD/month. We realised that companies were spending a fortune on coupon sites when they could easily become the top result if they hosted their own.

We built Couponzor as a whitelabel product so they could do that. This one never really took off due to the overhead and trust required for a company to get set up, along with a more direct sales approach – which wasn’t really our forte.

Like all entrepreneurs, we wanted to solve the little problems we uncovered along the way. ServerBear helped people to find better deals on hosting by allowing users to benchmark their existing web host and see how it compared against everyone else.

The problem with affiliate deals in the hosting space is that the majority of the hosts offering big payouts for signups (HostGator, BlueHost etc) aren’t the ones that offer the best performance or service.

So, in a way ServerBear was fantastic for the end users, they could find the absolutely best value and performance for money. But, we ended up pushing users into providers that didn’t have an affiliate program or paid us a small percentage for each signup.

This idea at its peak was worth around $5k/month. We also built a image bookmark site called Thinng (similar to Pinterest) which saw some decent traction but lacked the ability to be monetised decently.

The main thing that killed off these early sites (StoreCrowd and Couponzor, anyway) was the Google Panda update. Practically overnight we went from almost quitting our jobs to zero.

We picked ourselves up and decided to focus on building a subscription product so we weren’t reliant on SEO. We had built our own competition forms in StoreCrowd to do some giveaways and created our first competition widget for ServerBear. This was the foundation for Gleam.io.

We Managed Our Finances Frugally

The startup world looks for growth first and figures out the monetisation later (and profit later still). Stuart put the initial costs for StoreCrowd on his credit card. We spent $2,500AUD on the domain, business registration costs, and a server. We also used off the components (like Bootstrap) and Stuart designed what he could with Photoshop.

We've never had to put more money in. It took a matter of months for StoreCrowd to start paying for itself.

When we started Gleam.io, the competition site, there were many competitors. Our difference was that we weren’t tied to one social platform so users could run competitions on Facebook or Twitter. Users could also log in using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or SoundCloud which made the experience more seamless.

Commercial partnerships have also provided both money when we’ve needed it, and the opportunity to do more market testing and refine our core product.

In the early days of Gleam.io we built a bespoke solution for the Lady Gaga's ArtPop competition which ended up becoming our Gallery app (which has gone through a few iterations since).

The Gallery app was something we already had customers asking for so it made sense. On the other hand, you can also get distracted by trying to build everything that your customers want. I'd recommend keeping a list of what users ask for a building what you think will add value to as many customers as possible. It's okay say no.

We Didn't Risk Our Personal Lives

From the beginning, we were both very clear that our personal lives had to come first. For me that means my wife, two kids, and paying our mortgage. My first child was born shortly after we started. Stu has two kids of his own. When we started StoreCrowd, I would get up at 6am and work two hours before my day job. I quit playing World of Warcraft completely. Stu was working even harder by doing evenings and his train commute. When I made my treechange, I did two work hours a day on the V/Line train.

During the tougher times, between the Panda debacle and Gleam making enough to pay me, I went back to contracting. Managing a side hustle as it’s rapidly growing while giving your attention to a day job is a very tough situation. We always ran the numbers and went for pragmatism over optimism. Before going full-time, the company needed to reliably be making enough to pay me. It was a roundabout way to get where we are, but we’re not ‘sleeping in our car’ founders. Our families have to come first (and this is something we should all talk about more).

One thing that worked very well for us was setting a specific revenue goal that would allow us to both quit our jobs and go full time. This was $20k AUD MRR - which took us about 8 months to achieve in the beginning. Despite being in a very good position, I was (and still am) fully prepared to go back to full-time work if we get annihilated again.

We Operate In Our Own Way

Because we don't have to answer to anyone, we're able to experiment. We started as one hand-rolled server and the two of us working part-time without paying ourselves. Now we've got around 30 servers, 18 team members dotted around the globe, and it's all sustainable.

The way we’ve built our team can raise a few eyebrows. There are a few now-traditional startup tropes that we’ve avoided. I never was a fan of meetings so we only have a handful of them per year. We use open salaries which means that our roles are paid at the same rate no matter where the team members chooses to work. We also pay normally, there’s no undercutting wages and topping things up with stock options. We want our team to continue to work with us because they are happy and challenged, not counting down to the day that their stock vests.

It could be said that we hire slowly but we’d rather call it deliberately. Firing people is a horrible thing to have to do (and 100x times worse for them) so it’s something that we want to avoid. We have fired people before but we made the call that it’s our fault for screwing up hiring. We give 3 months notice which is enough time to find a new job. We maintain a healthy profit margin (~50%), a good reserve of cash, and still only hire when we’re in that range. I could imagine if we had a board full of MBAs they’d probably consider this negligent.

We Had Laser Focus

When you start out trying to build a business (or "startup"), it's easy to get caught up in specific ideologies about how a startup founder should work.

In our case, we didn't worry about what others were doing - instead we blacked out everything except:

• Customer Development
• Execution of ideas and feedback into production

We did this systematically until we hit the MRR goal that let us both go full time. 8 hours or normal work per day, then 6 hours (or more) of work on Gleam. Just grinding forward as best we could.

There's a lot of distractions in the world. Having laser focus meant we needed to reduce them, ignore them or find ways to optimise our workflow to free up our time to work on the important stuff.

In the early days we didn't attend startup meetups, conferences, or really put much effort into our online personas. To us, that was time wasted from execution and also opened up additional distractions.

The same can happen with your business. Stuart was spending 10 hours a week doing demos for customer, many of which would end up signing up for our $39/month plan. Whilst this may be sustainable in the early days, that sort of approach isn't viable in the long run - so we stopped doing demos.

We Still Get Our Hands Dirty

So many founders/bosses try to delegate as soon as possible so they can focus on important work. In the early days, Stuart spent vast amounts of time every week parsing the data from affiliate networks. We could have simply passed this to a team of remote workers on day one. Instead we felt the pain so invested in automation and improved our user experience. In return we got an intimate knowledge of our data which helped us to optimize our business.

It wasn’t until our backlog of data became impossible for Stuart to manage that we hired staff to manage it.

To this day, the majority of support for our thousands of customer and millions of users is still handled by myself and Stuart. Every morning we get our support inbox to zero and keep it there. If we consistently see an issue being raised, we have full visibility and will endeavour to fix it so it stops hurting us and our customers. Contrast this with most companies (particularly large ones) where issues get stuck in the Customer Support black hole forever (customer raises issue, support replies, nothing improves).

I’m the first person to get a call from PagerDuty if the site goes down and on tools every day (near-constant commits from 2012-2019 on GitHub).

Every week I’ll email a customer back saying, “I’ve fixed that. Thanks for raising it.“. It might sound ridiculous that we spend so much of our time on these tasks that are commonly (and relatively easily) delegated but it’s worked out really well for us.

It would not have been possible for us to even conceive our current company when we started back in 2009.

I started like most people with romantic dreams of my cool startup office (complete with beer on tap, cat, and dog), absurd employee perks, and vast riches.

By constantly challenging our own ideas we've pared back our company to the bare essentials. We only change it after careful consideration and experimentation. To this day, we still don't have an office and may never get one.

When it comes to engaging fans, building an audience and promoting an offering, it doesn't get much better than Instagram. There are loads of outstanding strategies you can implement to get ahead on Instagram, with one of the most impactful being running a photo contest.

An Instagram photo contest is a simple but powerful type of campaign where you ask users to create and share valuable photos or videos for the chance to win a prize.

How you use photo contests is entirely up to you. You can get entrants to upload photos of themselves with your products, videos of your products in action, or anything else that's engaging and valuable.

In this post we'll take you through everything you need to know about running your own highly effective Instagram photo contest.

Why You Should Run An Instagram Photo Contest

Running a photo contest has a lot of valuable benefits. It's a great way to get people excited, engage your audience and best of all, get your biggest fans posting branded photos for their own social circles to see.

This is awesome for a few reasons:

Raising Awareness & Boosting Visibility

Using a contest to encourage users to create and share branded content on your behalf will help you boost visibility, raise awareness, and get people talking about your brand. This is an outstanding way to connect with a new audience and find prospective new customers.

Building Positive Associations

As well as boosting awareness, photo contests are also an awesome way to build a positive perception of your brand. Having a bunch of photos of happy customers is a great way to get people to view you in a positive light and help build a strong sense of community around your brand.

Spreading Promotional Material

Having users create and post photos of themselves enjoying your products is essentially getting your fans to share promotional material on your behalf. Plus, material coming from users has the added bonus of being more fresh, trustworthy, relatable and engaging than your own content.

Collecting Valuable Content

As well as getting this authentic and engaging content shared across Instagram, you'll also be able to collect it to include in your own marketing material. This could be posting it on Instagram and other social media platforms or displaying it on your website.

A simple Instagram photo contest has all these amazing benefits and it will cost you little more than the price of a prize.

How To Run A Photo Contest On Instagram

Setting up a photo contest on Instagram is a fairly simple undertaking. All you need to do is make an Instagram post which announces your contest, showcases your prize, and gives users instructions on how they can enter.

This should include what type of photos they need to post, and how they should tag it. This can be with a designated #hashtag or by @mentioning your Instagram profile.

Making sure entrants properly tag their submissions is crucial to being able to easily collect entries and pick winners

When it comes to picking a prize you want to ensure you're giving away something valuable enough to validate the effort required, and relevant enough to your niche that it will appeal to your target audience. As a general rule, giving away your own product, or a bundle of your own products makes for an ideal prize, but there are plenty of other brilliant prizes you can giveaway.

Check Out 150+ Awesome Prize Ideas For Your Photo Contest

To comply with Instagram's Promotion Policy you should also make it clear that your contest isn't sponsored by or associated with Instagram, and provide users with your contest's terms and conditions. You can share these in your contest post, or to keep things tidy you can leave them in a comment or link off to them from your bio.

Your terms and conditions should include any relevant dates, entry restrictions, how the winner will be selected and what the prize is. You should also make it perfectly clear that by entering your contest users are giving you permission to repost and use their content.

Promoting A Photo Contest

The best way you can promote your photo contest is simply by announcing it in an Instagram post that explains the contest, highlights the prize and gets people excited to enter.

To maximise awareness and participation you should keep posting reminders right up until you stop accepting submissions. Sharing some of the best submissions you've already received is a nice way to boost enthusiasm and inspire people to create and share their own entries.

As well as promoting the contest in your Instagram posts, there are a number of other ways you can promote your campaign and build excitement:

Include It In Your Instagram Bio

Announcing your contest in your Instagram bio is a great way to grab the attention of relevant users who visit your profile. If you've set up a webpage which explains your giveaway (and maybe even showcases submissions) you can link to it from your bio.

Promote It In Your Instagram Stories

Promoting your contest in your Instagram stories is an awesome way to increase your visibility and keep encouraging your fans to get involved.

You can use your stories to explain the contest then and there, or link users to a post where everything is outlined.

Share It On Other Social Media Platforms

If you've got an active presence on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or even Snapchat it's a good idea to announce your photo contest across all of these platforms and encourage your followers to head over to your Instagram page for a chance to win.

As well as helping you increase participation, this can also get more eyes on your Instagram profile and cross-pollinate your social following.

Types Of Photos You Can Collect

When you run an Instagram photo contest one of the biggest decisions you'll need to make is what type of content you want users to submit.

Here are some of the best types of content you can get your fans to share that will help you attract attention, engage your audience and promote your offering:

Photos of Your Products In Action

The exact nature of this content will depend on what your offering is, but using contests to generate photos or videos of your product in action is a brilliant way to get users to share content that promotes your offering in an authentic and relatable way.

This could be anything including photos of them wearing your clothes or using your product, to pictures of them enjoying an experience you offer.

Creative Use Of Your Product

A highly engaging type of promotional material you can collect with contests are creative, funny, or advanced use of your products.

Starbucks has done a great job of this with their #RedCupContest which encourages users to decorate their special Starbucks cups and share them online.

Creative or advanced use photos can be anything which goes a step beyond a photo of a happy customer. You could ask for photos of people using your product in creative and unconventional ways to drum up engagement or you could highlight the full extent of your product's value by encouraging users to show off expert use of your product.

Anything Relevant To Your Niche

Photo contests are awesome for encouraging the creation and sharing of user content that will help promote your brand, but this doesn't always have to be as direct as photos and videos of your products.

You can run a highly engaging and valuable campaign by getting your fans to submit photos or videos that are relevant and appealing to your audience and niche in some way.

Busabout, a travel tour company, did a great job of this by encouraging their audience to share their best travel photos for a chance to win. They didn't even have to ask for photos of Busabout tours because they knew that getting people to share awesome travel pics with a Busabout tag attached would be enough to boost awareness and promote their offering.

While this type of photo contest may not directly promote your offering it can still be a fantastic way to attract attention, form connections, create a fun conversation around your brand and bolster positive associations. Plus, you won't restrict submissions to customers which can help you drive more submissions and gain more traction.

Using #Hashtags & @Mentions

Anytime you run a photo contest on Instagram you will need a clear way of monitoring submissions and collecting entries.

The two best ways you can do this are getting users to tag all their submission posts either by using a designated #hashtag, or using a @mention to tag your profile in the post.

This will allow you to easily identify, monitor and collect submissions, as well as draw winners when it's time to wrap things up.

Mentions

Requiring entrants to @mention you in their posts is a good approach to take for a few reasons.

Firstly, when users tag you in their photos all of their followers who see the post will also see you tagged in it. This will help you boost exposure and can be an awesome way to connect with a new audience.

Secondly, using mentions will give you clear ownership over the campaign, while hashtags can sometimes take on a life of their own and branch off into irrelevant usage.

Hashtags

Hashtags are also a great way to get entrants to tag their submissions. Hashtags have a highly engaging and social nature to them which makes them great for sharing around. If your contest gets big enough your hashtag even has the potential to go viral.

Another upside of hashtags are their ability to not only identify your brand, but also communicate details about your contest which will instantly clue people into what your campaign's all about.

Hashtags and mentions both have their own unique upsides when it comes to identifying contest entries, and if you want the best of both worlds you can even ask entrants to use your hashtag and mention you in their post.

How To Create A Good Contest Hashtag

When you use hashtags to collect entries you'll need to create a brand new and unique hashtag to use. This will play a pretty big role in your contest so it's important that you get it right.

Whenever you created a hashtag you need to make sure it's:

• Branded
• Relevant to your contest
• Easy to read (it helps to capitalise the first letter of each word)
• Short, catchy and memorable
• Original and unique to your contest (always be sure to search your hashtag before you launch)

Learn More About Running a Successful Hashtag Campaign

Picking Winners

One of the most important (and certainly the most complex) components of running an Instagram photo contest is collecting entries and drawing winners.

If you're picking winners based on merit or skill you can look through every submissions and pick your favourite. This is incredibly time consuming, but relatively straightforward. Just make sure you have a clearly defined selection criteria in place.

Picking Random Winners

If you want to pick winners at random, which is generally the best way to go then you'll need to take a different approach.

Until not too long ago, Instagram's API allowed you to pull in historic posts from hashtags and there were a number of free online tools you could use to randomly pick a winner from a hashtag of your choice. This had its own limitations, but it was convenient nonetheless.

Unfortunately, Instagram no longer allows this, so you are left with two main options:

1. You can manually search through your hashtag or mentions, collect every valid entry, put them into a list and use a random number generator or random list picker to choose your winner.
2. You can run your contest with a tool that will automatically collect entries from hashtags or mention in real-time and instantly draw a random winner when you're ready.

Since the first option is absurdly time-consuming and unreliable we recommend that you take the second approach.

How To Automatically Collect Entries & Pick Winners

The best way to automatically collect entries and pick random winners for your photo contest is with Gleam's Competitions app.

Using Gleam's import actions you can run powerful Instagram photo contests that automatically import and collect photos or videos which use a specified hashtag or mention your Instagram profile.

This gives you the opportunity to run powerful photo contests that users can enter without ever having to leave Instagram.

You can even use our entry interval feature to determine how many times users are able to enter. You can allow single, hourly, daily, weekly or unlimited entries.

Plus, you can easily validate entries to make sure they fit your submission criteria. You can validate entries as they come in, or you can simply wait until your contest is over and draw a winner. If it's invalid you can instantly invalidate it and pick a new winner.

If you want to run your photo contest across multiple platforms you can even use our import actions to collect hashtagged submissions from Twitter as well.

Driving Extra Actions

In addition to automatically collecting entries from user-generated content you can also use your Gleam contest to drive an array of other powerful actions including email sign-ups, Twitter follows, and visits to your website, Facebook page or YouTube channel.

A great way to drive additional actions is by announcing your photo contest in an Instagram post, and letting users know that they can unlock more chances to win by following a link in your bio and completing additional actions.

This can be a great way to cross-pollinate your online following and drive even more value from your contest. Here are just a few of the extra actions you could drive with Gleam:

If you do want to take one of these approaches you can host your contest widget on a giveaway page on your own website, or on one of our stylish hosted landing pages.

Showcasing Your Content

In the aftermath of your photo contest you should be left with a bunch of incredibly valuable user-generated content. These photos or videos will provide you with an enormous amount of value when they're initially created and shared by fans, but if you really want to make the most of your photo contest then it's a good idea to use high-quality submissions as a part of your own future promotional efforts.

The content you collect will be highly trustworthy and engaging, so it's well worth taking on board and sharing with your own audience.

You can do this by sharing the content across your own social media channels, incorporating it into your email newsletters, or even displaying it on your website.

Displaying a curated gallery of customer photos on your website is a fantastic way to provide prospective customers with reliable social proof and share authentic photos of your offering that will help build trust and drive sales.

With Gleam's Gallery app you can easily create, customise and curate your own customer galleries that allow you to import photos and videos directly from your contest and display them anywhere on your site.

You can use your gallery to not only show off awesome fan photos, but also to get people excited about your contest, encourage entry, and even let visitors vote for their favourite submissions to help you determine a winner and add an extra layer of engagement.

You may also want to take a more subtle approach and use a sleek gallery carousel to showcase an awesome curated collection of fan content anywhere on your site including homepages, product pages, or pages devoted to reviews and testimonials.

Collecting photos for your gallery doesn't even have to end with your contest either, as you can use Gleam's import sources to bring a constant stream of photos from hashtags or mentions into your gallery.

Want To Learn More?

• Drive Sales With Instagram Welcome Offer
• Convert Contest Entrants Into Customers
• 40+ Ideas For Your Contest Or Giveaway
• 150+ Awesome Prize Ideas For Your Contest
• How To Run A Successful Hashtag Campaign
• 80+ Instagram Ideas For Bosting Engagement
• How To Drive Real Engagement On Facebook
• Running a Successful Online Giveaway
• Using User-Generated Content In Your Marketing
• Running Photo Voting Contests
• Creating Simple E-Commerce Discount Popups
• 50 Ways To Grow Your Brand With Gleam

Since the term was first coined in 2004 as a hybrid of iPod and Broadcast, podcasts have enjoyed a meteoric rise and become a fixture of modern media consumption.

Close to half of the US population have listened to podcasts, with over a quarter doing so at least once per month, and 17% listening to podcasts every week. And these numbers are only going up.

There are a lot of people out there listening to podcasts, and subsequently a lot of room for you to find an audience of your own.

But, just as there are a lot of people listening to podcasts, there are a lot of people producing them. Putting together a consistently engaging podcast is vital to standing out from the crowd and carving out a niche for yourself, but it's still a challenge to get people to check you out in the first place and make room for you in their regular rotation.

One of the best tactics you can implement to build awareness and grow your podcast is running a promotional contest. Keep reading to find out all the best ways you can grow your podcast with contests.

How to Promote Your Podcast With Contests

One of the easiest ways you can run a contest to promote your podcast is by posting Tweets or other social media posts that give users the chance to win a prize by following you on the platform and sharing your posts.

You can easily run these quick contests on Twitter, as well as Facebook and Instagram.

These types of contests are quick, easy, and great for building awareness. However, a major downside of them is that they won't necessarily translate into an increase in listens or subscriptions.

Ideally, your giveaway should reward users for listening or subscribing to your podcast, but manually validating entries and jumping through hoops to get users to prove that they're subscribers is an incredibly arduous task.

That's why we recommend running your contest with a 3rd party app like Gleam. Running a 3rd party contest will make things infinitely easier for both you and your fans. You'll be able to direct traffic to your contest from social media and your podcast and drive all sorts of highly valuable actions ranging from social media follows and shares all the way to podcast listens and subscriptions.

Check out this demo to see how you can use contests to promote your podcast with Gleam's Competitions app:

When you run your contest with Gleam we'll automatically validate and monitor entries for you so you don't have to wait countless hours manually checking subscriptions and figuring out who has entered. All you have to do is encourage users to enter via our widget and we'll handle the rest for you.

Now, let's take a look at the best ways you can easily run a contest with Gleam that will promote your podcast, build awareness, and grow your audience.

Using Contests to Drive Podcast Subscriptions

One of the best ways you can use contests to promote your podcast is by putting together a campaign that awards entries to users who subscribe to your podcast. You can set this type of contest up in a matter of minutes with Gleam's Competitions app.

Check out this demo to see what your own contest could look like:

Getting users to subscribe to your podcast is an outstanding way to encourage listens by giving you prime placement on any platform you're targeting and allowing you to constantly remind users of your presence, announce new episodes and encourage listens.

This is a brilliant way to boost loyalty and increase listens from occasional fans, as well as kick-start new audience relationships by driving first-time listens and giving yourself a chance to grab people's attention and convert them into avid fans.

Plus, by driving listens and subscriptions you'll be able to move up the charts wherever you host your podcast and gain exposure from the countless users looking for new podcasts to check out.

When you run a contest to promote your podcast it's important that you're connecting with listeners through all your distribution channels. This might be a single platform like Apple Podcasts, or it could a whole range including Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, or any of the other countless platforms you might host your podcast on.

No matter where you host your podcast, using contests to drive subscriptions is a walk in the park with Gleam's Competitions app.

You can use our Podcast Action to drive traffic to your podcast and prompt users to answer whether or not they have subscribed. The action itself will automatically award entries to users who visit your podcast's page, so it's important to ask entrants if they have subscribed to ensure that users are properly completing their entries, and to help you validate winners.

Reward Podcast Listeners With Secret Codes

Encouraging users to subscribe isn't the only way you can promote your podcast with contests. With our nifty Secret Code action you will be able to provide a code word during your podcast and award entries to anyone who can provide you with that code.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see how you can use secret codes to drive listens:

Using secret codes to validate entries is the best way you can ensure that contest entrants are actually listening to your podcast.

The excitement your contest generates will allow you promote your podcast and build hype, and the secret codes will give users a great incentive to give you a listen, which will provide you with the perfect opportunity to win them over and turn them into fans and subscribers.

As well as helping you find some new listeners, this type of contest is also great for rewarding your current fanbase and making them feel valued. This is great for boosting listener loyalty and giving people more reason to keep tuning in.

You can run a contest where you distribute the same secret code every episode, or you can try giving out a different code every time and awarding extra entries to users who are listening regularly.

Secret code contests work outstandingly as a strategy of their own, but you can also combine them with subscription contests and simultaneously drive both listens and subscriptions.

If you want to drive listens on Spotify then it can be as simple as using our Spotify Listen action. With this powerful action you can encourage users to listen to particular episodes or just let them listen from the top. You can even customise how long users have to listen for before unlocking an entry to help ensure they're earning their entries.

Driving Other Actions

As well as using contests to directly drive listens and subscriptions, Gleam also provides you with a huge selection of other actions that you can use to help promote and grow your podcast.

This includes incentivising users to:

• Follow you on Twitter
• Tweet about you, or Retweet one of your own posts
• Visit your other social media profiles
• Visit your YouTube channel
• Subscribe to your newsletter
• Share your contest with friends

Check out this demo to see the wide range of actions you can drive to help promote your podcast:

Make Sure You're Promoting Your Contest

Running a contest is an outstanding way to promote your podcast by spreading awareness, encouraging listens, and driving subscriptions. All this upside is, however, reliant on your ability to put your contest in front of an audience.

If no one knows you're running a contest, no one will enter and you'll miss out on your chance to find new listeners and solidify your fan base. This is why it's so important to always ensure that you're actively promoting your contest.

Here are a few of the best ways you can spread the word about your campaign:

Announce It In Your Podcast

One of the easiest and most effective ways to promote your podcast is
to announce it during your podcast. You can announce and explain the contest during your podcast, and then link off to it in your description.

Making sure your listeners are aware of the contest is important for a few key reasons. Firstly, it can help you convert incidental or occasional listeners into subscribers. Secondly, it's a great way to reward your loyal fans, get your campaign in the hands of your evangelists and kick-start the social sharing of your contest with Tweets, Retweets, and Viral Shares.

Spread the Word On Social Media

Announcing and promoting your contest on social media is a highly effective way to build awareness and drive entries from existing fans and newcomers alike.

When you post about your contest on social media always be sure use eye-catching imagery, clearly explain how users can enter and of course, link off to your contest.

The bigger your social following is the more effective these promotional efforts will be. If your podcast hasn't built up much of a following yet it's a good move to use your personal account to help spread the word. And remember, you can also use your contest to incentivise follows and bolster your social following.

Incentivise Social Sharing

As effective as these strategies can be, they're a lot better at driving entries from your existing fans than connecting with new ones. If you want to expose your contest (and your podcast) to a relevant new audience then you'll need to get users to carry some of the weight for you.

You can do this by simply asking users to Retweet or share posts promoting your contests, or you can take things up a notch and award extra entries to users who successfully share your campaign with friends using our powerful Viral Share action.

This is the best way to gain exposure from a huge new audience and give your contest viral potential.

Learn More About Promoting Your Contest

Hosting Your Contest

When you start running a contest and promoting it through various channels you will need to have a landing page for your contest that you can drive traffic to and allow users to enter through.

If you have your own website the best place to host your contest is there. You can easily embed your Gleam campaign on any page on your website, or even mirror our hosted landing pages on your own website if you don't want to design your own landing page.

This approach is incredibly advantageous as it gives you the opportunity to give your contest a simple and memorable landing page that listeners will be able to rememeber and access if they are listening to your podcast whilst driving, or doing something else that prohibits them from immediately accessing your contest. Try using a URL like this:

yourwebsite.com/contest

If you don't have your own website, don't stress. You can easily host your contest on one of our hosted landing pages. Even if users can't click through immediately this isn't a huge issue, as if they're interested they can easily find the link in your decription.

Give Away the Perfect Prize

The prize you give away will be the single biggest driver of contest entries that you have. People who want to win your prize will enter your contest, and they'll happily complete the actions required to do so.

This makes choosing the right prize a crucial component of putting together your contest. The key is to give away a prize that is valuable enough to encourage mass entry, and relevant enough to your target audience that the people who want your prize are highly likely to take an interest in your podcast and check it out.

The best prize you can offer completely depends on the topic of your podcast.

No matter what niche your podcast covers, there are always loads of great prize ideas for you to use. Anything from exciting products in your niche to books on a relevant topic can make for excellent prizes.

If your podcast has its own merchandise then adding that to the mix can be a solid way to add some extra value and help get your name out there.

A particularly effective strategy you can use to increase your prize's value is partnering up with a sponsor to run a joint giveaway.

Partner With Podcast Sponsors

A great way to get your hands on an awesome prize that will drive a whole lot of entries without breaking your budget is to partner up with a relevant sponsor and have them provide you with a prize in exchange for some dedicated actions in your campaign, the promotion and exposure you can offer them, and even the distribution of exclusive discount codes with our powerful Coupon action.

Take a look at this demo we put together to get an idea what your own contest could look like when you team up with a sponsor:

If you already have an established relationship with a sponsor they will make an excellent candidate for a contest partner. If not, you should try reaching to potential sponsors that offer products or services that are relevant to your niche and target audience.

With Gleam you'll be able to start putting together your own powerful promotional campaigns in a matter of minutes. So if you're ready to take your promotion to the next level and start driving more listens and subscriptions then there's no reason to wait, check out Gleam today.

Want More Helpful Tips?

• How to Grow Your Business With Gleam
• Running a Succesful Giveaway
• 150+ Awesome Prize Ideas For Your Next Giveaway
• Simple Trick to Boost YouTube Subscriptions
• Increasing Engagement on Instagram
• Getting More Twitter Followers
• Growing Your SoundCloud Fanbase

Everyone with a YouTube channel knows the importance of driving constant engagement. If you want to build and retain a strong presence on the platform then producing high quality content on a consistent basis is a must, but it's also a good move to make some extra efforts to ensure you're maximising engagement.

One of the best strategies you can implement to achieve this is running contests or giveaways from inside your videos. You can announce your giveaway at the end of some of your regular content, or you can devote an entire video to it.

This is a fantastic way to engage your audience, cultivate a strong sense of community, give your audience more reason to keep tuning in, and even attract new viewers.

One of the best ways you can run a giveaway from a YouTube video is getting viewers to leave a comment to enter, and randomly drawing a winner from your comments.

While setting up this kind of giveaway is quick and easy, drawing a winner can be a challenge. While there are random YouTube comment pickers such as Comment Picker, YouTube RCP, and Sandra Cires YouTube Random Comment Picker available online, they have several significant limitations.

This includes difficulties preventing spam entries, inability to validate entries, and not allowing you to maintain a record of your entry collection and winner drawing process.

There are a couple of ways you can overcome these issues:

• You can manually record every valid entry yourself and enter them into a random list picker (this will take far too much time and effort).
• You can use a giveaway app like Gleam Competitions. This will give you the power to limit users to single or periodical entries, validate winners to ensure they're complying with any comment requirements you may have, boost transparency and reliability with records of entries and winners, and even drive additional powerful actions.

Drawing Random Comments With Gleam

With Gleam's powerful import actions you can easily set up a campaign that will automatically collect comments as entries and allow you to instantly pick random winners.

All you have to do is select the YouTube Comments import action, connect your YouTube account, and provide the link to the video you want to import comments from. It's that simple.

Once your campaign is up and running everyone who comments on your video will be awarded an entry and given a chance to win your prize.

Your campaign will have a single entry interval by default, which means each individual user will only get one entry regardless of how many comments they leave. If you want to allow users to get more entries for leaving more comments you can simply change your entry interval to hourly, daily, weekly or unlimited depending on how often you want to let users enter.

This will help you prevent users from spamming the comments and unfairly shifting the odds in their favour.

Once you're ready to wrap things up all you need to do is head to the Winners tab of your Gleam campaign and click Draw Winners. You'll then be able to instantly select a winner at random and reach out to them to let them with their prize.

When you pick winners with Gleam you can even invalidate any entries you draw if they don't comply with your giveaway requirements, and redraw a new winner. This is great if you're tasking users with commenting something specific such as an answer to a question or some feedback on your channel.

Announcing Your YouTube Giveaway

If you want your giveaway to be as effective as possible then you need to make sure that you're announcing and promoting it.

First off, you always need to make sure you're announcing your giveaway in the YouTube video itself, and its description. Let people know what the prize is, that all they have to do to enter is leave a comment, and some specifications such as when entries close, and if their comments have to meet any requirements.

You should also reference your giveaway in the title of your video. This will make it clear that your video contains a giveaway and give your existing subscribers and potential new viewers alike more reason to click your video and check out your content.

Comment contests can also help you drive more external traffic to your video. When you share links to your video across various social media channels users will be a lot more inclined to check it out if they know there's a giveaway involved.

This can be a great way to encourage relevant new users to check out your video, and if they like what they see there's a good chance they'll come back for more.

Running A Campaign Across Multiple Videos

Another great perk of using Gleam to run your comment contests is that you have the ability to collect entry comments from across multiple videos and draw a winner from the entire pool of entrants.

With this approach you can offer more entries and a greater chance of winning to users who comment on more of your videos. This is a fantastic way to encourage your existing audience to keep tuning in, and incentivise new viewers to watch more of your content and give yourself a greater chance of converting them into fans.

All you need to do to set up this type of campaign is create a different YouTube Comments import action for every video involved. You can add more actions as your campaign progresses so you can keep adding new videos to the mix.

Driving Extra Actions

With Gleam you can also use your YouTube giveaway to drive a bunch of other valuable actions including newsletter subscriptions, social media engagement and a whole lot more.

You can run these giveaways by not only tasking users with commenting on your videos, but also using your videos, descriptions, and social media posts to link off to a giveaway page where users can complete more actions for more chances to win.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see some of the additional actions you could drive:

Adding extra actions won't prevent viewers from easily entering by leaving a comment, but it will give you the opportunity to drive some highly valuable actions from engaged users who are willing to take further action to boost their odds of winning.

You'll be able to drive these additional actions by linking off to a giveaway page from your video's description, as well as through your social media channels.

If you don't have a website to run the campaign on you don't need to stress, you can run the campaign on one of our stylish hosted landing pages and send entrants there.

The ever-increasing ubiquity of social media has had a significant impact on just about every aspect of our lives, and caused a fundamental shift in the way brands have to connect and communicate with consumers.

We live in a social media dominated world and it's more important than ever for brands to ensure that they're maintaining an active online presence, but don't think of this as a chore.

Social media presents every brand with a unique and powerful opportunity to connect with their audience in a meaningful way and get them to actively engage with your brand.

One of the most engaging and effective ways you can use social media to boost visibility and get people talking about your brand is running a hashtag campaign.

In this post we'll take you through exactly what a hashtag campaign is, why they're so effective, and how you can successfully run one of your own. Plus, we'll show you some of our favourite hashtag campaigns for a little bit of inspiration.

What Is A Hashtag Campaign?

A hashtag campaign is a type of social media campaign where brands create a unique hashtag and encourage users to engage in discussion and submit content using the hashtag on social media. Hashtag campaigns can be run across a wide array of online platforms, with Instagram and Twitter generally being the most effective.

With hashtag campaigns you can encourage users to:

Answer Questions And Share Entertaining Stories

An easy and engaging type of hashtag campaign you can run is one which asks users to give answers or share stories about a topic relevant to your brand products, or niche and share them with your hashtag.

Take a look at this campaign from Blue Apron. They used the #BlueApronWins hashtag to get people to share their Blue Apron success stories which generated friendly discussion about the brand, boosted exposure and helped form positive associations.

Campaigns like this are a great way to spread awareness, earn favourable perceptions and possibly even gain some viral traction.

Charmin were able to go viral with their #TweetFromTheSeat campaign which asked the Twitterverse to share their bathroom thoughts. The campaign boosted their profile and helped create a funny, friendly and welcoming brand identity.

Talk About Why They Love Your Products

Hashtag campaigns can also present you with a great opportunity to drive social testimonials and referrals. You can use a hashtag campaign to ask your audience what they love about your products, how they use them, and what their success stories are.

This is an outstanding way to generate positive word of mouth and promote your offerings to wider audience via the authentic and reliable posts your generate from loyal users.

A perfect example of this comes from Sephora who asked their fanbase to show off how their contouring skills and generated a heap of customer testimonials in the process.

Come Up With Fun Ideas

A fun and highly engaging type of hashtag campaign you can put together is one which tasks your audience with coming up with a fun new idea and sharing it on social media with your hashtag.

You can encourage users to share ideas for new products, creative ways to use to use your existing products, or anything else you think will engage your audience and help your brands promotional efforts.

Lay's do an excellent job of this with their incredibly engaging yearly Do Us a Flavor campaign which tasks users with sharing their own potato chip flavour ideas. This campaign generated an enormous amount of impressions and put Lay's in the forefront of their audience's minds.

Enter Contests

If you're running an online contest or sweepstakes then getting users to make a post or Tweet with a contest specific hashtag can be a great way to collect entries.

Plus, by having users publicly post their entries you will be able to broadcast your campaign to a wide audience which will help you increase participation and expose your brand to relevant new users.

Check out how Deliveroo collected contest entries AND got people talking about their brand with their series of #FridayNightDeliveroo giveaways:

Create and Share Images and Videos

The most powerful use of a hashtag campaign is to collect user-generated content in the form of image and video submissions from your fans.

You can ask users to share photos or videos of themselves enjoying your products or using them in unique and creative ways. This is a truly outstanding way to create meaningful engagement and tap into your user base to generate and share a treasure trove of high-quality material that will give your promotional efforts a serious boost.

This is a highly effective and incredibly popular tactic amongst e-commerce stores. Just take a look at Boohoo.com who use #BOOHOObabes to generate an ongoing stream of customer photos which get posted across social media and shared through their own channels (complete with helpful product information).

Why You Should Run A Hashtag Campaign

Now that we've gone over a few of the best types of hashtag campaigns you can run, we're going to take a closer look at exactly what makes them so powerful, and why getting your audience to engage with your brand and share content is so valuable to your promotional efforts.

Raise Awareness & Increase Visibility

When you post about your brand on social media, you'll primarily reach your existing audience, but if you can use a hashtag campaign to get users to post about your brand on your behalf you will be able to expose your brand to huge new relevant audiences that you may have otherwise struggled to connect with.

Lonely Planet have been able to this by asking loyal users to tag their Lonely Planet inspired travel photos with #MyLPGuide.

Campaigns like this help increase the visibility of your brand, help raise awareness and create brand recognition amongst users who may take an interest in what you do and take further action.

GoPro excels at using hashtag campaigns to boost product visibility by encouraging their customers to use a relevant hashtag when posting their GoPro photos and footage. This is the perfect strategy for GoPro as a lot of people will share their photos and videos on social media anyway. All GoPro needs to do is get them to use their hashtag with the incentive of prizes and features.

Get People Talking About Your Brand

Hashtag campaigns are a great way to kickstart fun and engaging conversations about your brand, your products, or anything else that's relevant to your niche. Creating conversations will help you cement your place in consumers' minds and help you drive further engagement and action down the line.

Spotify regularly runs hashtag campaigns where they ask their fans to share what they're listening to. This helps create a friendly dialogue about their service, gets people thinking about them, and encourages others to start listening.

Build Positive Associations

If you run a hashtag campaign designed to elicit positive stories about your brand or engaging photos of your products in action you be able to cultivate positive associations about your brand which endear you to new users and get your target market to view you in a good light.

User-generated content is a lot more authentic, and often much more engaging than traditional branded content. People are a lot more likely to give credence to positive messages about your brand which come from friends and other users than those which come directly from you, which makes it perfect for forging positive associations and building favourable perceptions about your brand.

Travel company Topdecker take full advantage of this by getting their customers to tag their travel photos with #topdecker. These posts get shared by travellers and Topdecker alike and help form a strong association between Topdecker and awesome travel adventures.

Share Promotional Material

As well as building favourable associations and getting people talking and thinking about your brand, using a hashtag campaign to encourage the creation of user-generated content is also a brilliant way to simply promote your offerings.

Getting people to produce and share photos of your product in use and why they love your brand is just like putting out your own branded promotional material on social media with the added bonus of extra authenticity and trustworthiness. Plus, it will be able to reach audiences you may have struggled to connect with without the help of social sharing.

Frank Body does this superbly by getting influencers and ordinary customers to sing praise for their products with #TheFrankEffect hashtag.

You can use hashtag campaigns to procure content that promotes your brand and products as a whole, or you can focus your campaign on a particular offering or component of your brand.

Foster Your Community

Hashtag campaigns aren't only an exceptional way to connect with new audiences, they're also fantastic for engaging with your existing audience, solidifying your customer relationships and cultivating a stronger sense of community around your brand.

This will help you keep your audience engaged and encourage brand loyalty which puts you in an enviable position going forward.

If you really want to use your hashtag campaign to strengthen your community you should try to respond to users who are getting involved. You can easily do this by searching through posts with your hashtag and liking them, or leaving a friendly comment. This is particularly important to do on high-value posts that you want seen by as many people as possible.

Expedia regularly uses the #ExpediaChat hashtag to engage their audience and build their community by asking and answering questions about travel tips, ideas, deals and more.

Create An Ongoing Marketing Campaign

If you run a particularly hashtag campaign which gains traction and takes off you can use it as a launching pad for an ongoing marketing campaign that can form a significant part of your brand identity and drive consistent engagement.

Lululemon encouraged their audience to share inspirational fitness photos with #TheSweatLife hashtag and it was such a massive success that it grew into a major component of their ongoing marketing efforts. Health and fitness are a big part of Lululemon's brand identity, and getting people to share branded fitness pics has greatly helped them raise awareness and solidify their position.

If you find that you're achieving great results with a hashtag it's worth making efforts to keep it going for as long as it's working.

Collect User-Generated Content

We've already mentioned the power of having your audience share authentic and exciting branded content on your behalf, but there's also enormous value in collecting this content for use in your own marketing efforts.

In fact, getting your hands on authentic and engaging promotional material to share through you own channels is probably the biggest advantage of running a hashtag campaign.

You'll be able to integrate authentic and engaging user content into your marketing efforts and spread a much more relatable and reliable brand message than you could if you relied exclusively on traditional marketing materials. Plus, you'll still be able to use your existing promotional reach which is likely to be a lot larger than that of the fans submitting content.

Contiki is a great example of a brand who understands the power of user-generated content, as most of the content they share through their social media channels is sourced from their customers. This allows them to put out a consistently engaging and relatable message that helps them connect with an audience and promote their offering.

All Of This For Free

There is clearly a whole lot of upside to running a hashtag campaign, and one of the best parts of them is that you can enjoy all of these benefits at a fraction of the contest of a traditional marketing campaign.

The only cost involved with running a hashtag campaign is the potential cost of a prize if you want to run a giveaway to encourage hashtag use. This is an enormous advantage which should put hashtag campaigns at the top of your list as you decide on what promotional steps you want to take next.

Creating A Hashtag

When you're ready to start putting a hashtag campaign into action, the first thing you'll need to do is create a unique and engaging hashtag for your campaign.

The hashtag you choose for your campaign will have a profound impact on it's overall success. Ideally you want to come up with something that people will easily understand, and grow to recognise and associate with your brand and campaign.

When you're coming up with your hashtag there are a few key considerations you need to consider:

Relevant To Your Campaign

You want to make sure that your hashtag is highly relevant to the specific campaign you're running. You want users who see your hashtag to have an instant understanding of what it means.

Just take Apple's #ShotoniPhone hashtag which instantly clues users into what the campaign is about, and how they can get involved.

Make Sure It's Branded

Your hashtag should also include some level of branding. This will allow you to be identifiable in the content you generate and use your campaign to boost awareness and recognition.

You can even keep things simple and get users to hashtag your brand name.

You can also boost awareness and recognition from your hashtag campaign by asking users to tag you in their posts.

Easy To Read

The easier to read your hashtag is, the more likely it is to catch on and gain traction. If people are struggling to even read your hashtag they're not overly likely to start contributing to it.

Try not to use more than 3-4 in a single hashtag, and make sure you capitalise the first letter of each word. This will significantly increase your readability.

Take a look at Corona's #ThisIsLiving hashtag. It's clear, it isn't too long, and it is appropriately capitalised. Look at how readable #ThisIsLiving is compared to #thisisliving.

Make It Catchy

There aren't any metrics you can use to quantify this, but it's incredibly important that your hashtag is appealing and memorable. Try saying your hashtag out loud a few times to get a feel for how well it flows.

Be Original

Always make sure the hashtag you choose for your campaign is unique and original. You don't want the hashtagged content you generate to be drowned out by a bunch of other posts with no relevance to your brand or audience.

When you come up with a hashtag you may want to use make sure you do a quick search for it on all the major social media channels to check for noise.

Double Check For Disasters

As well as ensuring that your hashtag is original, you also need to check to make sure you aren't going to stumble into any other PR disasters. You need to make sure you aren't accidentally saying something offensive, off-putting, or completely misleading when read in a certain way.

Don't make the same mistake as Susan Boyle's PR team who tried to promote her album launch party with the unfortunately worded #susanalbumparty

Some of the damage could have been mitigated with proper capitalisation, but the disaster could have been averted entirely with a little more thought.

Use Mentions

If you're running a hashtag campaign on Instagram then it's often a good move to encourage users to tag you in their posts as well as using your hashtag.

Instagram now allows businesses to easily access @mentions, so you can now use Gleam's Instagram Mentions import action to track and collect content submissions as contest entries or Gallery submissions.

Encouyraging mentions allows you to open up a more direct line of communication with your fans. Plus, when users tag your brand in their posts you will be able to directly expose your profile and brand to everyone who sees these photos.

This is perfect for boosting exposure and strengthening your online presence.

Driving Audience Participation

Once you've come up with your hashtag it's time to start spreading the word and encouraging users to get involved with the campaign.

The beauty of a hashtag campaign is that once you get the ball rolling it will do a pretty great job of promoting itself, as everyone who uses your hashtag will expose it to their own social circles leading to a cycle of adoption and exposure.

The challenge of a hashtag campaign lies in finding your early adopters and getting people to start using your hashtag in the first place. Here are some of the most effective ways you can start driving participation in your hashtag campaign:

Ask For It

It may sound overly simple, but one of the most effective tactics for getting your audience to adopt your hashtag is simply giving them a prompt and asking them to use it. This is especially true for larger or more established brands who have already cultivated a fairly engaged audience.

If your hashtag campaign involves something fairly easy like sharing a story or answering a question on Twitter you shouldn't need to do anything more than ask. If you want your audience to produce something a little more high-value for your hashtag campaign like tailored Instagram posts, it might help to offer some sort of incentivise for doing so.

Offering the best submissions the chance to get featured in your social feed or on your website will often be enough incentive for a lot of users.

If your hashtag campaign is asking for photo submissions you should post about it about it on a regular basis and always lead by example. Try posting your own photos and any early submissions you receive with the hashtag. This will help get people in the spirit of your campaign and give your audience some inspiration.

If you're running a hashtag campaign on Instagram it's worth mentioning your hashtag in your bio. People who visit your profile have already shown clear interest in your brand, so instantly cluing them into your campaign is a great way to drive participation from highly relevant users.

Run A Giveaway

As easy and effective as it can be to just ask your audience to get involved with you hahstag, if you really want to maximise participation and drive engagement then you may want to consider running a contest where users can post content on social media channel for the chance to win a prize.

Starbucks were able to drive massive hashtag adoption and content creation with their #RedCupContest which tasked users with submitting artistic cup drawings for a change win valuable cash prizes.

Running a user-generated content contest is a particularly good idea if you're trying to drive high-value content submissions.

You can easily run a giveaway on Instagram, Twitter or even Facebook by making a post announcing your campaign, laying out the submission requirements, and highlighting your prize as incentive.

There's no doubt that running a giveaway is a powerful way to jumpstart your hashtag and drive a whole lot of user engagement, but running one manually can pose some challenges.

Firstly, you'll have to manually validate entries and draw winners yourself which can be quite an effort. Secondly, if you want to hang on to user submissions and use them in your own marketing efforts this can be quite a challenge. That's why we recommend using a 3rd party app such as Gleam to run your giveaway.

Run Your Hashtag Campaign With Gleam

When you run a hashtag campaign giveaway with Gleam you won't have to worry about monitoring entries or drawing winners, and we'll collect every submission for you with our powerful Import actions that allow you to gather entries via Instagram hashtags and mentions, Twitter hashtags, Facebook comments or posts to your page and more.

When you import hashtagged Instagram images into your campaign it's important to note that Instagram will only allow you to pull in hashtagged images from the last 24 hours and your top hahstags. You can continue to import submissions as your campaign continues.

The best part about using these import actions is you can still run your campaign entirely on social media, as Gleam will collect and monitor posts that use your hashtag, or @mention your profile without users ever having to interact our widget. All you need to do is encourage your audience to enter and we'll take care of the rest.

An alternative approach you can take is driving traffic to a Gleam campaign widget and using our Select actions for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to ask users to submit their hashtagged photo. You can even combine it all into one powerful action with our Submit Media action.

A major upside of using the widget is the ability to incentivise other actions such as visiting your Intagram profile, following you on Twitter or signing up to your mailing list.

Whether you run your campaign entirely on social media or using our widget you can easily display all your submissions in a personalised and curated gallery on your website. Or you can simply store them to share on social media.

You can even import hashtagged YouTube videos into your Competition or Gallery, so if you want to get your hands on some really high value customer content you can ask your audience to get involved with your hashtag campaign by uploading videos with your hashtag.

When you run a giveaway to encourage hashtag usage you should make sure you're regularly promoting your campaign on whatever social media platforms you're trying to drive engagement on. Instagram and Twitter are your best bets for driving hashtagged image submissions, but Facebook can also be a good option. It all comes down to what platforms you and your audience are most active on.

Another outstanding way you can use Gleam to run a hashtag campaign on Twitter is by using our Hashtag action to award contest entries to anyone who Tweets with your hashtag. This can be particularly effective when you combine it with other actions such as Twitter follows, Viral Shares and more.

Give Out Coupons

Another tactic you can use to incentivise participation in your hashtag campaign is using Gleam's Rewards app to offer online coupons to users who participate in your campaign.

This is a great way to not only increase participation but also drive sales by offering up enticing discounts. Just remember, if you're giving out discounts you'll want to be getting some fairly valuable content back in return.

Try asking your audience to upload photos of themselves enjoying your product. This will help you cultivate highly engaging content and boost retention by offering discounts to your existing customer base.

Showcasing Hashtagged Content

When you use a hashtag campaign to generate a bunch of valuable fan-made content it's important that you're collecting it and putting it to work in your marketing material.

Share Fan Submissions On Social Media

The best way you can put the UGC you collect to work for your brand is by sharing it across social media. Fan submissions make for perfect social media content as it will be engaging, trustworthy, and perfectly suited for promoting your brand and products in an authentic and relatable manner.

When you share user content on social media it's a good idea to tag the content creator in your post. This will help you build loyalty and develop brand advocates whilst also adding an extra layer of credibility and authenticity to your posts.

It's also important that you make it clear to users that you intend to share their submissions. You want to ensure that everyone is a willing participant.

Learn More About Getting Permission To Repost User-Generated Content

Create A Hashtag Gallery

Another outstanding way you can use the content you acquire from your hashtag campaign to aid your promotional efforts is putting it on full display in a gallery on your website.

If you've developed a collection of hashtagged images which show off your products and your community then showing them off on your website is an awesome way to use what are essentially customer testimonials to build trust and guide website visitors towards conversion.

With Gleam's Galleries app you can build stylish galleries which automatically import hashtagged images from social media.

You can even sync a gallery up with a giveaway and automatically display submissions. And don't worry, you can easily curate your gallery so only the best submissions will be put on display.

Create A Carousel

With Gleam's Galleries app you can also build sleek and stylish Carousels which allow you to show off your hashtagged community photos in a way that can seemlessy integrate with any page on your website.

By now you should be feeling motivated and ready to get out there and put your own hashtag campaign into action. Whether you just want to drive some quick engagement or drive an ongoing stream of powerful user content you have the knowledge and tools to make it happen.

Want More Ideas For Your Next Social Media Campaign?

• Using Giveaways to Collect User-Generated Content
• Running Photo Voting Contests
• The Best Hashtag You Can Start Using Today
• Using User-Generated Content In Your Marketing
• 80+ Awesome Instagram Marketing Ideas
• Running a Giveaway on Instagram
• Running a Photo Contest On Instagram
• Drive Sales From Instagram
• Getting More Followers On Twitter
• Ultimate List of Facebook Marketing Tips
• Running a Facebook Contest

As they grow from their early stages into maturity, every business will face it's own unique set of challenges, obstacles and opportunities. The industry you operate in, the offering you sell and the customers you serve will all shape the distinctive journey your business will take, but there is one constant that holds true for every business:

The need to consistently find and connect with potential new customers.

It doesn't matter what you're selling or how good it is. If people don't know about your offering, they won't buy it. This is why it's so important to connect with your target market and convert them into users who are aware of your offering and interested in purchasing it.

This is a process known as lead generation.

What Is A Lead?

In this post we're going to take you through all the best ways you can generate leads and set yourself up to drive sales, but first we're going to take a look at exactly what a lead is.

A lead is essentially any user who has displayed interest in your product or service, and lead generation is simply the process of initiating customer interest in your offering and opening communication with them.

Leads can be captured by getting users to perform an action which signifies their interest in your offering. This typically involves you collecting information from a lead such as their name and email address.

Generating and capturing leads allows you to open communication with potential customers, kick-start customer journeys and put yourself in a perfect position to drive acquisition from users who have already expressed clear interest in your offering.

When it comes to lead generation there are two distinct types of leads you can go after, and two approaches to generating them:

Outbound Leads

Outbound leads are users with an interest in your offering which you find by reaching out to them yourself. Outbound leads most likely won't know you before you reach out to them, and the marketing material you use to connect with them will be the first interaction they have with your brand.

There's a lot of debate surrounding what qualifies as outbound marketing, but following the idea that it's any marketing activity where you are reaching out and initiating contact you can consider outbound lead generation to include tactics such as paid ads, cold emails, and certain social media campaigns designed to initiate content.

Inbound Leads

Inbound leads are the users who come to you. These users will discover you and the content you put out through search engines, social media and other online platforms.

You can drive inbound leads by engaging in inbound marketing activities such as creating engaging and valuable content, optimising your website for lead generation, engaging in SEO activities, and doing whatever else you can to help users find you and form an interest in your offering.

Thanks in large part to the interconnectedness and complexity of our online landscape the line between outbound and inbound marketing is often blurred.

Optimising your content for Google searches is clearly inbound marketing, but how about targeted Google Ads?

Do you consider social media inbound or outbound marketing? A compelling case can be made either way.

Unfortunately there isn't any definitive answer to these questions, but the good news is that it doesn't really matter.

If you want to put together a comprehensive and effective lead generation strategy then you will need to strike a balance between the two approach and employ a range of inbound and outbound marketing strategies.

Keep reading to find out all our best tips and strategies for generating leads which will help you build awareness, drive sales, and grow your business.

Use Your Onsite Content To Generate Leads

The best approach you can take to generating leads is implementing a variety of strategies to drive traffic to your landing page, and then using your onsite content, as well as some special offers to encourage users to sign up with their email address.

If your website is properly optimised to convert visitors into leads then you will be able to devote a lot of your efforts to finding relevant users and sending them to your website with the confidence that you can convert them to leads once they arrive.

Here are our favourite tactics for using your website to generate leads:

Make An Awesome Landing Page

When users land on your website you want them to be instantly engaged, compelled by your offering, and ready to sign up and become a lead.

The best way to do this is with a well-executed and exciting landing page that grabs users' attention, highlights the value of your offering, builds product-interest and ultimately encourages them to sign up.

A great example of a landing page comes from Squarespace who put together a visually engaging landing page designed to drive free sign-ups. Plus, when you scroll down you can see all their features with clear CTAs every step of the way.

In order to build an effective landing page it's important that your page explains or, better yet, demonstrates what your offering is, what problem it solves, what its benefits are, and exactly why visitors should sign up. This can be anything from access to the latest news and special offerings, exclusive content, a discount, a free trial, entry into a contest, or any other valuable incentive you can offer.

When you're putting together your landing page there are a few key elements you should be sure to include. You want to make sure you have:

• An eye-catching and exciting headline, supporting headline and value statement.
• A unique selling proposition. Something that only you can offer.
• Highlight the benefits of your offering.
• Appealing images or videos with a focus on product usage.
• Social proof or testimonials.
• A clear and concise call to action.

Here's Slack's awesome landing page which manages to tick all the boxes:

If you're able to successfully execute your landing page you'll be able to boost product interest and generate leads with ease.

Pre-Launch Landing Pages

Building a landing page designed to generate interest in your product and drive signups is a particularly effective strategy for pre-launch businesses looking to build hype and cultivate an audience before they go live.

This is a brilliant way to ensure that when you do launch, you're launching to an excited audience that can't wait to get their hands on your product.

So if you haven't released your product yet, get out there and build hype on as many platforms as you can, and try funneling traffic back to an awesome landing page which you can use to capture your leads.

Build Contextual Landing Pages

Depending on exactly what it is you're offering, a single landing page might not cut it. If you offer several different products, or multiple product categories then it's in your best interest to create a unique landing page for each of these categories.

If you're an E-commerce retailer this can be a great way to drive sales leads.

Using contextual landing pages allows you to create highly targeted pitches that are far more likely to resonate with an audience seeking out a particular type of product than a coverall landing page that tries to squeeze the value and benefits of all of your products into a single page.

Upwork excels in this regard and have put together a number of landing pages covering every field they operate in.

As well as creating unique landing pages for all of your products, it can also be a good move to build targetted landing pages for different SEO keywords.

For example, if you're an SaaS with a product that can be used for multiple purposes or multiple industries you should try making a dedicated landing page for each of them.

This will allow you to not only reach a wider audience looking for specific solutions, but also give you the opportunity to put together tailored propositions for each of your consumer segments which can skyrocket your conversion rate.

If you offer a location-based service then you should take a similar approach and create landing pages for every location you service. This level of personalisation will help you connect with relevant audience and put forth personalised pitches that are great for generating leads.

Offer Free Trials & Discounts

A great way to kick your lead-generation into high gear is offering free trials or discounts on your products to users who sign up.

This is a truly outstanding way to not only generate leads, but also give yourself an incredible opportunity to convert these leads into customers by getting them to trial your offering or even make an instant purchase.

Autopilot does a great job of using free trials to generate leads, but that isn't all they rely on as their landing page is also filled with customer testimonials, product videos and more.

You can use free trials and discounts to drive lead generation by putting these offers front and centre on your landing page or by housing them in a stylish popup which you can easily make with products like Gleam's Capture app.

When it comes to generating leads it's clearly vital to show off what your product is, what value it provides and what problems it solves.

There are a few other important features you should incorporate into your landing page which will help you endear yourself towards users, build product trust and familiarity, and ultimately drive users towards sign up.

Host Webinars

One of the best things you can do to build interest and connect with your audience is help them overcome a problem they face, teach them learn a new skill, or show them how your product can do that for them.

A great way to provide your target marketing with valuable knowledge, insights and skills is to host a webinar. The best course of action is to put together a webinar in your area of expertise. Focus on a topic that's relevant to your niche, incorporates your product, and is valuable for people to learn. You need people to want to join your webinar afterall.

Just remember to focus on providing real value rather than just plugging your product. This will make the whole thing seem incensere and lacking in value.

If you can successfully execute a webinar you will be able to connect with your market, position yourself as a trusted authority in your niche, explain and promote your product, generate leads, and kickstart customer relationships.

When you run a webinar it's important that you're maximising awareness and participation by getting out and promoting it. You can do this by announcing your webinar to website visitors with on-site notifications, spreading the word on social media, or incentivising signups with Rewards campaigns that offer discounts to users who sign up to your webinar.

You don't even have to put together a live webinar event for this to be an effective strategy. You can put together a pre-recorded automated webinar and provide access to anyone who signs up for it. This approach offers a more flexible apporach that will allow you to reach more people and get a lot more longterm value from your webinar.

The main downside of automated webinars are that they don't allow for two-way interaction which is great for answering questions and providing participants with a more personalised and valuable experience. You can partially overcome this by adding a live chat componant to your webinars but this will diminish the time-saving benefits of automated webinars.

Ultimately both live and automated webinars have their own pros and cons, it just comes down to what works best for you.

Showcase Customer Testimonials

Providing some sort of social proof of your products effectiveness and functionality is a truly outstanding way to promote your offering in a trustworthy and reliable way.

Praise from customers is always going to be more authentic and reliable than praise from yourself.

This makes showcasing referrals, testimonials and customer success stories a hugely valuable asset when it comes to generating leads.

You can include customer testimonials on your landing page, provide case studies that highlight customer success stories, or if you're in an appropriate industry, put together a stylish gallery of satisfied customers.

Learn More About Collecting User-Generated Content

Show Off Live Demos

If you want people to really take an interest in your product and consider purchase or adoption then it helps if you can show them your product in action. How you go about doing this largely depends on what your business is, but there's always a way.

If you're an SaaS then you should create high-quality live demos that show off the full capabilities of your product.

This is something we do on all of our product pages. We even annotate the demos to give users a clear understanding of exactly how our products function.

If you're selling a physical product you should put together a product video that explains what it is and why people need it.

If you're selling a more straightforward E-commerce product then it may be enough to display some high-quality photos of your product.

This can also present you with a perfect opportunity to display product photos from your community.

Learn More About Showcasing Your E-Commerce Community With Carousels

Engage Users With Live Chat & FAQ

Allowing users to live chat with your business from inside your website is a fantastic way to answer any questions and queries prospective leads may have and provide them with all the information they need to develop a serious interest in your offering and become a lead.

Often an unanswered question is all that stands between a undecided user and a sign up, and live chat is a great way to help you overcome this potential barrier.

Having an accessible and comprehensive FAQ can help you tackle the same challenge, but Live Chat has the added advantage of allowing you to directly engage with potential leads and cater to their specific situation and needs.

Use Opt-In Forms To Grow Your List

As powerful as landing pages can be, they aren't the only way you can generate leads inside your website. You can also use opt-in forms that display targeted messages and prompt visitors to sign up at the perfect time.

With Gleam's Capture app you can create a wide array of personalised opt-in forms that you can use to generate leads from anywhere on your website.

Plus, it's a whole lot easier than building a landing page from scratch.

Opt-in forms can be a particularly effective lead generation strategy for e-commerce retailers who are likely to forgo a sign up landing page in favour of driving traffic to their products and store.

You can use opt-in forms to drive sign-ups from an informative home page, specific product pages, blog posts or anywhere else. Let's take a look at some of the most effective ways you can use opt-in forms to generate leads:

Popup Opt-ins On Your Homepage

If you want to start capturing leads as soon as they visit your website then you should try displaying a popup opt-in form on your homepage which will grab users' attention and encourage them to sign up.

If users have already developed an interest in your brand then there's a good chance they'll sign up right away, but if you want to maximise lead generation then you may want to consider offering up some kind of incentive.

Give Out Discount Codes

Asking users to sign up to your mailing list is a particularly effective strategy when you're offering them some sort of incentive for doing so.

Incentivising sign-ups won't only help you generate more leads and open up direct communication with prospective customers, it will also enable you to drive more sales by providing users with rewards such as discounts, free trials, and samples which make purchase and product adoption much more likely.

This is a fantastic way for businesses to kick-start customer relationships and make it a lot easier to drive sales well into the future.

With Gleam's Capture app you can easily build stylish popup coupons which you can use to capture leads and instantly distribute discount codes.

Giving users a discount code from within your store is also an awesome way to drive some immediate sales.

Offer Gifts

Discounts aren't the only way you can incentivise sign-ups. You can also try giving leads free gifts which will give them a taste of your offering. This can be anything from a free trial to a sample product.

Free trials and samples is a great way to get leads to trial your product and see its value for themselves. This will make it a lot easier to convert your leads to customers when you do reach out to them.

The gift you use to incentivise sign-ups can even be something as simple as some insights and advice relevant to your product, or some exclusive content. This will give interested users a reason to sign up and allow you to reach out to them with some additional content that should guide them further along the path towards purchase.

Host A Sales Event

We've already gone over using discounts as an incentive to generate leads, but it's worth mentioning that this already powerful tactic can be made even more effective by offering these discounts as a part of a limited time offer or sales event.

The added urgency of these offers will make users far more likely to instantly sign up and claim their discount than they would if it was an anytime offer.

This can do wonders for your conversion rate.

If you really want to drive home the scarcity of your offer and maximise sign-ups you can use Gleam's Countdown Captures to give users a timer showing them exactly how long they have to signup and claim their reward.

Product Specific Opt-ins

Another awesome way to generate leads from inside your online store is to create opt-in forms specific to certain products.

You can enact this tactic by triggering a popup on your product's landing page which asks users to sign up, possibly in exchange for further information, access to demos, or even a product discount.

Another option which is perfectly suited for E-commerce retailers is offering tailored discount to visitors who check out a particular product or range of products. This is a great way to reach out to users who have displayed a clear interest in your offering, convert them into leads and guide your new leads one step closer to a purchase.

Subtle Opt-ins Across Your Entire Site

As effective as bold, screen-filling popup opt-in forms can be, sometimes you might want to prompt users to sign up in a more subtle and unobtrusive way.

Taking this approach will allow your visitors to freely explore your website, learn about your offering, and then sign up when they're ready.

You can accomplish this with opt-in bars which you display across the top or bottom of your entire site.

You can even use these bars to give out coupons and encourage more sign-ups.

Another more subtle approach to generating leads inside your site is triggering notifications on the side of your page.

This is a good option if you want to make users aware of a special offer without distracting too much from the rest of your site.

Exit-Intent Popups

Sometimes you'll want to give users the chance to freely check out your site and discover everything you have to offer without asking them to sign up to your list straight away. This can allow users to familiarise themselves with your product and naturally build up more interest.

While this can be an effective approach to take, you still want to make sure that users aren't leaving without signing up.

This is where exit-intent popups come into play.

Exit-intent popups are opt-in forms which you trigger when users are about to leave your website, and with Gleam's Capture app you can set one up in a matter of minutes.

You can use exit-intent popups to offer users a valuable discount before they leave.

Or offer them access to some exclusive content as a way to encourage sign-ups and keep in touch with exiting users.

Exit-intent popups are an awesomely powerful lead generation tool that allows you to generate leads from users you would have otherwise lost.

Learn More About Creating & Using Exit-Intent Popups

If you're an E-commerce business a particularly powerful implementation of exit-intent popups is the abandoned cart popup.

These opt-in forms function the same as regular exit-intent popups, except they are triggered when a user is about to abandon a shopping cart with items in it.

You can use these popups to offer valuable discounts to users who sign up. This will help you drive sales from interested users who may just need that little bit of extra incentive whilst simultaneously generating leads and putting yourself in an outstanding position to drive future sales.

Learn More About Creating & Using Abandoned Cart Popups

Drive Signups From Your Blog

If you have a blog which generates traffic (we'll get to this soon) then you should be trying to keep your readers around and convert them into product users and customers.

The best way to do this is by incorporating some opt-in forms into your posts.

You can do this by having a subtle sign up form at the top or bottom of your posts, or by triggering a popup to users who scroll a certain way down your post.

This is a great way to generate leads from inside your post by using your engaging content (possibly even some subscriber exclusives) to incentivise users to sign up.

Produce Valuable Content

We've taken a good look at generating leads from inside your website, and now we're going to take you through all the best ways you can kick-start lead generation by building interest and excitement and driving traffic to your landing page and website.

The first strategy we're going to look at is producing high-quality content that will drive traffic to your site, engage visitors and ultimately generate leads.

Write Valuable Blog Posts

Writing high-quality blog posts is an incredibly effective way to attract relevant users, engage them, get them interested in what you do and ultimately convert them into leads.

The key is to write content that is valuable enough to your target market that they will search for it and click on it, and relevant enough to your business that you can use it to generate leads.

There are two outstanding ways you can use blog posts to generate leads:

1. You can use your content to highlight the value of your product and use your blog to funnel traffic towards your landing page. Just make sure you're still focusing your posts on providing meaningful value and only talking about your offering when it's relevant to the topic at hand. People will tune out pretty quickly if you're blog posts are nothing more than ads.

2. Encourage users to sign up to your list from inside the blog. You can present readers with opt-in forms that ask them to sign up to stay in the loop and get all your latest posts, or you can even offer a content upgrade and use exclusive content to incentivise leads. You just need to make sure your content is valuable enough for sign-ups to be worthwhile.

Here are a few tips you can use to make your blog posts as valuable as possible:

Provide Your Readers With Actionable Advice

Most people who search for and click through to your post will be looking to find an answer or solve a problem. If you can provide them with exactly what they're after they'll be keen to check out more of your content, and be a lot more receptive to product pitches and sign-up prompts.

Write Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that is always relevant to your target market. It focuses on topics that will always be fresh, or can be easily updated to stay fresh.

If you can put together some awesome evergreen pieces that will always be relevant and searched for by your target market then you can potentially net yourself a massive ROI, as each post has the ability to generate leads indefinitely.

Talk About Your Offering

We're not saying you should devote your blog to prattling on about how great your product is, because you shouldn't.

What you should do is write about topics that are relevant to your niche and present you with natural opportunities to demonstrate the value of your product, and showcase your offering in relation to whatever it is you're discussing.

This is a tactic we regularly implement with our Product category of posts which focus on overcoming real challenges with the help of Gleam.

This will help you put together a more authentic and timely pitch that will generate more leads.

Come Up With Catchy Titles

Whenever you publish a new blog post you should try to give it an eye-catching, attention grabbing title. When people are searching for something on Google or scrolling through their social media feeds you want your post to be the one that stops them in their tracks and drives clicks.

Stay away from overly manufactured SEO titles. They will no longer help you appear favourably in the eyes of the Google algorithm, so you're far better off focusing on a title that conveys what your content is, and why they should read it.

Optimise It For Mobile

Most online traffic comes from mobile devices, and mobile usage is only getting more and more prevalent. This is why it's vital that your blog, and all of your onsite content is optimised from viewing on mobile devices.

Write For Your Target Market

Producing high-quality content is clearly vitally important. But just as important as what you write, is what you write about.

If you're not putting out content which your target market is interested in, or better yet, actively searching for, then you're not putting yourself in the best position to drive leads from your content.

Try using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to examine the search traffic and keyword difficulty of various keywords relevant to your business and your audience. This can help you form a clear picture of what types of content your target market is looking for, and what types of content you should be producing.

You can also use Ahrefs to check out what keywords your competitors are tracking for, but you're not. This is a great way to see where you're missing out on potential leads and what content you can produce to remedy the issue.

Optimise Your Content For Search Engines

As well as writing content that you're target market is looking for, there are a few other things you should be doing to help your posts perform as well as they can on search engines and land in front of as many relevant users as they can. Here are a few quick SEO tips:

• Include the keywords you're targeting in the title of your post, as well as in headers and throughout the body. Just make sure you're only doing this at natural opportunities, you don't want to get punished for keyword stuffing.
• Create good URLs that are relevant, include your keywords, and aren't too long.
• Make sure your blog (and the rest of your website) is optimised for mobile devices and loads quickly.
• Use your meta-descriptions wisely. These should include your keywords, but also give a clear and concise summary of what your post is, and why users should read it.

If you're able to rank well on Google you will be able to drive lots of relevant traffic to your site and start using your content to generate leads, so it's important you're doing what you can to optimise your content for search engines.

Use Google Ads

While you're doing what you can to get your content to naturally rank on Google you sometimes might want to give it a bit of a boost.

This is something you can do with Google Ads.

Using Google Ads to drive extra traffic to your landing pages is a highly effective way to put your product in front of users searching for the very thing you're offering.

The key to an effective Google Ads campaign is targetting the right keywords. You need to target the keywords that users will search when they're seeking a service you can offer, or faced with a problem you can solve.

When you think you've found some good keywords to target make sure you do your due diligence and use SEMrush, Ahrefs or another SEO tool to check out their search traffic.

You also need to consider how many keywords you want to go after. If you use too many it becomes less likely that your ad is going to be as relevant to the searcher, making your ad less efficient, and less likely to generate leads. Try to stay within the 5-20 keyword sweet spot.

Share It On Your Social Channels

Putting together high-quality blog posts will help you drive relevant users to your website through search engine results, but this is far from the only way you should be finding readers.

Share your blog posts across of your social media channels, and encourage readers who liked your post to like share or comment on it. This will help you reach an even wider audience and maximise your chances of driving leads.

Create Case Studies

When you set out to create a powerful content strategy it's always a good idea to diversify the types of content you're producing. This will allow you to cover more topics, appeal to a wider audience and figure out what works best for you.

One of the most valuable types of content you can start producing are case studies about customer success stories. This a particularly good move for SaaS businesses or agencies.

This is a tactic we've had great success with.

It's easy to say your product is great, it's a lot harder to show it's greatness in action. This is what makes case studies so powerful. By showcasing your success stories you will be able promote your offering in a highly authentic and engaging way which will build trust and help you generate leads.

Case studies are fantastic for displaying on your website to help convert visitors, sharing on social to drive traffic, and of course getting you discovered on Google.

The key to writing case studies that rank well on Google is focusing them on a problem you solve or a value you offer that coincides with the keywords your target market is searching for. This will help you attract relevant attention and generate promising leads.

Find Out More About Writing Awesome Case Studies

Create Product Guides

Another valuable type of content you can produce to help generate leads are in-depth product guides.

These pieces should aim to give readers a detailed look at how they can use your product to solve their specific needs. Try putting together unique guides on all the ways people can use your product, and guides that are tailored to the ways specific consumer segments can use your products.

This is an approach we have taken here at Gleam. We've put together a comprehensive library of guides that show users how they can best use all of our products. We've even put together a selection of unique industry-specific guides that showcase how users in different industries ranging from E-commerce to music can use our products.

When you're making product guides you should try to include live demos where possible. Giving users a feel for your product goes a long way when it comes to generating leads and encouraging adoption.

Putting together product guides is incredibly vital to generating leads. People might have a strong interest in your offering, but if they don't know how to use it they're far more likely to walk away without signing up.

Plus, if your product solves a problem that your market commonly faces then you're guides will be able to grab the attention of people searching for a solution.

Offer Content Upgrades

If you're able to produce high-quality content that provides your readers with real, meaningful value then it's quite likely they'll be keen to get their hands on more of it.

You can facilitate this by encouraging them to read more posts, or you can put together some exclusive high-value content and encourage readers to sign up in order to access it.

If you've put together a brilliant guide on a topic and you offer your readers more advice on the same or a similar topic just for signing up they will be very likely to do so.

You can easily do this by using Capture to create opt-in forms which redirect sign-ups to your bonus content, or add them to a list where you can send them the content via email.

Generate Leads From Social Media

Social media followers can, to some extent, be considered leads. Having said that, a social media follower is nowhere near as valuable as an email lead. They're harder to reach, communication is a lot less direct, and it's a lot easier to convert leads via high-quality emails than it is with a Facebook post.

Social media is still a highly valuable tool though, and you should be making efforts across all of your social platforms to not only bolster your online following, but also drive further action from your audience and generate leads.

Here are some of our favourite tips for generating leads from social media:

Post Engaging Social Media Content

Post engaging social media content. It's an obvious one, but it's still the single most important thing you can do to generate leads on social media. If you want to have any chance of driving traffic from social media to your website and converting them into leads then you need to be consistently engaging your audience and developing meaningful relationships with them.

To do this you need to understand your audience and what they want to get out of their time on social media. Focus on providing them with real value instead of barraging them with ads.

This will allow you to build positive relationships with your audience and when it does come time to promote your offering and drive traffic to your website you'll be a lot more likely to succeed.

For more advice on how you can post engaging content and get the most out of social media check out our posts on driving engagement on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Drive Traffic To Your Website

We mentioned the need to use social media to drive traffic back to your website, but how exactly can you do this?

The first way is to simply share links to your website as part of promotional posts. There's nothing wrong with using social media to directly promote your offering as long as it isn't all you do, and you do it in an engaging and valuable way.

Try enticing users to visit your website by encouraging them to learn more about your products, shop for new products, or even receive a special discount.

And remember, if you're operating on Instagram (which is a hugely valuable platform for the fashion, beauty and travel industry) then you can directly link back to your site from posts. You'll have to promote a link in your bio, or drive traffic to your site from inside your Instagram Stories.

Another effective approach you can take is to direct your social media audience to onsite content such as a blog post. If you can create content that your audience is interested in you should have no issues driving traffic, and we've already gone over how you can effectively generate leads from inside your blog.

Create Welcome Offers

If you're an E-commerce retailer then there probably isn't a better way to encourage your social media audience to visit your website than offering them a discount. You can do this by simply running a sale and promoting it through your social channels, or you can make the offer even more enticing by setting up some exclusive welcome offers.

Welcome offers are essentially discounts you give to website visitors who arrive from a specified place and sign up with their email. These offers are incredibly easy to set up with Gleam Capture.

Welcome offers allow you to share exclusive offers only available to users who were referred by your social channels. This is awesome, as posting on social media about exclusive discounts is an incredibly effective way to drive click-through from social media, generate leads, and even encourage some immediate sales.

If you want to create exclusive welcome offers for visitors arriving from social media websites as well as mobile apps (which get a lot more traffic), then you should take a look at this helpful guide:

Use Promoted Posts & Paid Ads

If you have a particularly high value post that you want seen by more social media users then it can be worth using Facebook, Instagram or Twitter ads to boost its visibility and put it in front of more users.

This can be a good idea if you have some high-value posts which will be able to drive traffic to your website and encourage sign-ups. This can include videos explaining your offering and linking to your website, or posts promoting exclusive deals or welcome offers.

The key to a good Facebook ad is targeting the right audience, and tailoring your message towards them. Facebook's Audience Insights tool can help out with this.

Your ads themselves should be visually appealing and use eye-catching, engaging imagery. You also need your ads to get to the point quickly, people don't have the longest attention spans when scrolling through their Facebook feed. You should promptly state your value, give users a reason to click-through and have a clear call to action in place.

Run A Giveaway

We've taken a good look at how you can optimise your website, content, and online presence to maximise lead generation, and now we're going to take a look at one of the most powerful tactics you can implement to skyrocket your lead generation.

We're talking, of course, about running online giveaways.

People like winning things, and they're willing to take action to do so. This simple fact is what makes giveaways such an effective lead generation tool.

Drive Sign Ups

With Gleam's Competitions app you can run giveaways which allow users to enter the draw to win an awesome prize by signing up to your list, or completing a host of other powerful actions.

You can create awesome giveaways which simply task users with signing up to your mailing list.

You can even require them to sign in to enter with a mandatory subscribe action, and then present them with other valuable actions that they can complete to earn extra entries and increase their chances of winning.

Have a play with this demo we put together to get a feel for what your own giveaway could look like:

As well as generating leads via email sign-ups, you can also use your giveaway to drive other powerful actions including visiting or following your social media channels, checking out high value web pages, watching product videos, sharing the campaign with friends, and much more.

Encourage Referrals

When you run a giveaway for lead generation purposes, the most powerful actions you can incentivise (apart from sign ups) are viral shares.

Our awesome viral share action allows you to award entries to users who share your giveaway with a friend who then enters the giveaway themselves.

Running this type of giveaway can be unbelievably effective as you will be able to generate leads and kick-start a powerful cycle of social referrals that spreads your campaign to masses of relevant users and drives sign-ups from people you would have otherwise been unable to reach. This is probably the best thing you can do to extend your reach and generate huge amounts of leads with one simple campaign.

Picking The Perfect Prize

Anytime you run a giveaway you need to make sure that you're offering up a prize that people want, and will be happy to sign up to your list in order to get their hands on it.

You also need to make sure that you're giving away something relevant to your target audience. This will maximise the odds of generating leads with a real interest in your offering, and the potential to convert into product users and paying customers.

Giving away your own product is often the best way to ensure that entrants have a real interest in you, but offering other prizes that are highly relevant to your niche should also do the trick.

Promoting Your Giveaway

If you want people to enter your giveaway you need to make sure they see it first. Actively promoting a giveaway is always vital to its success, even if this is just to get the ball rolling before social referrals start carrying the load for you.

Here are a few key things you should be doing to promote your campaign:

Share It On Social Media

One of the best ways to promote a giveaway is to share it on social media. You should post about on all of your social channels, and even encourage your following to share it around with their friends.

Learn More About Promoting Your Giveaway On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

Promote It To Your Existing Subscribers

If you're running a giveaway to generate leads then it might sound counterintuitive to promote it to users who are already subscribers, but it is still important.

Sharing a giveaway with your existing leads and customers is a fantastic way to engage them and help strengthen your subscriber relationships.

Plus, just because they're already on your email list it doesn't mean they can't still complete other valuable actions such as social referrals.

Announce It On Your Website

Website visitors are highly relevant users who make for great leads, and presenting them with a giveaway inside your site is an awesome way to get them to sign up.

You can try announcing your giveaway with a notification on your website, create a dedicated "Giveaway" or "Win" tab, or with Gleam you can run your giveaway inside a popup and present it to your visitors at the opportune moment.

Learn More About Promoting Your Giveaway Inside Your Website

Reach Out To Prospects

If you're still in your early days as a business and are looking to find those vital first customers you may want to consider directly reaching out to prospective leads, telling them about your offering, what problems it will help them overcome and give them a clear call to action.

This could be signing up for a free trial, entering an email sequence, or checking out your website. You can even try offering discounts and free accounts to early adopters to get the ball rolling.

This is an approach that's best suited for SaaS and B2B businesses, and if done well can be hugely beneficial to new businesses looking to find customers.

Finding Prospects

When it comes to reaching out to prospects to generate leads, there's nothing more important than reaching out to the right people.

The key is to find the people that would benefit the most from your offering, so look for businesses in industries your product caters for, businesses facing the challenges you can help them overcome, and even businesses who are using or have used your competitor's product.

If you try reaching out to your competitor's customers make sure you can come out on top of the direct comparison, whether it's by virtue of having an overall better product, better features, or a lower price.

Once you've found some some solid prospects you need to find the right person to reach out to within the business. Depending on the size and nature of the company this might be the founder, the sales team, or whoever else is the most relevant outreach target for your offering.

You can use tools like Hunter.io to find the right email address for all the companies you're targeting.

Send Cold Emails

Once you've found some lead targets to reach out to it's time to make contact.

One of the best ways you can do this is by sending cold emails to as many prospects as you can find.

Here are a few tips to make sure your sending effective outreach emails:

Keep Things Personal

Nothing will make email recipients tune out faster than a generic sales pitch. If you want to succeed you need to send out personal emails. Introduce yourself, use a personal name and email address, acknowledge the person you're emailing and their business, and give them some praise.

Focus On Them

You don't to use the precious time you've got with a prospect to talk about yourself. People are a lot more likely to be engaged by your email if you keep the focus on them, not you.

Instead, spend your time showing them exactly what you can do for them. Show them what value you offer and how you can help them overcome the specific challenges that they're facing.

You can even try mocking up a demonstration of how they could use your product. This is a tactic we've had success with.

Reach Out To People On Social Media

As well as sending out cold emails, you can also try reaching out to prospects on social media. This can provide you with the opportunity to reach out to prospects in an easy and friendly way. Plus, when you reach out with a public post you'll have the opportunity to welcome others into the conversation and attract more attention to your business.

For an approach similar to cold emails you can send prospects a personal message on LinkedIn, or if you want to take a more public approach you can hit up some prospects on Twitter. Just try to keep it light and friendly. Twitter isn't the place to launch into a full blown pitch.

It's also worth keeping an eye out for anyone talking about topics related to your business on social media. For example, if someone on Twitter mentions a challenge that you can help them overcome then being in a position to respond is invaluable.

A lot of this comes down to being in the right place at the right time, but there are a few measures you can take to increase your odds of catching something worthwhile.

You can try following relevant users in your niche, any businesses who could make for prospective customers, and people who follow your competitors. If there are any hashtags that are highly relevant to your business it's worth keeping an eye on them and looking out for any opportunities to reach out and make contact with potential leads. You can even for relevant terms such "alternatives to (your competitor)" to and see what pops up.

Leverage Your Personal Networks

Lead generation doesn't have to exclusively live online. Attending networking events and visiting coworking spaces can help you forge strong connections within your niche and generate some high-quality leads.

A lot of coworking spaces even have member perk noticeboards where you can share a free or discounted offering with members of the coworking space. This can help you get your foot in the door and start driving leads.

You can even checkout Meetup.com and look for groups that are highly relevant to your business. This can be a surprisingly effective way to make contacts and generate leads.

These cold outreach strategies will never be the bread and butter of your lead generation and customer acquisition strategies in the long run, but there's nothing wrong with doing things which don't scale in your early days. In fact, when you're getting started things which don't scale are quite often the best chance you have at success.

Bonus Lead Generation Tactics

Now that we gone through all the core strategies you should be using, we're going to share a few more nifty tricks and tricks that can help you generate even more leads.

Build Surveys & Quizzes

The key to generating leads is engaging your audience, and one of the best ways to engage an audience is with interactive content such as a surveys and quizzes.

Quizzes are a great way to get users to engage with your brand in an easy and fun way, and if you execute them well they can be used to generate leads by asking users who complete your survey or quiz to sign up to see their results, access more content, or even unlock a special deal or enter a giveaway.

Lingerie retailer AdoreMe uses a quiz as users' entry point to their website. Visitors are prompted to complete a quick quiz to determine the perfect products for them, and they can then sign up to access tailored product recommendations and a special welcome offer.

Contiki shares fun quizzes across social media as a way to drive traffic to their website, get users thinking about their offering, and encourage them to sign up for more engaging travel content.

When you're putting together a quiz here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Use lots of images.
• Keep it short and sweet.
• Make sure it's relevant to your business.

Write Guest Blog Posts

Writing a guest post on a relevant blog can be a great way to gain some exposure, engage a relevant audience and encourage them to go check out your own blog.

This can be a great way to tap into the larger audience of some well-established brands and publications and use it to bolster you own following.

Try putting together some content that you think is a good fit for some blogs that you know accept guest posts, and reach out to the appropriate people with your offer.

Just make sure you have some engaging content and lead generation strategies in place when you start encouraging readers to go check out more of your content.

Answer Quora Questions

Another solid way to gain attention from a relevant audience is to search Quora for any questions that are relevant to your offering or area of expertise.

If someone on Quora poses a challenge that you have the solution to then you should answer it in a genuine way that highlights the benefits of your offering and demonstrates how it can solve their issue.

If you can answer people's questions in a helpful and informative manner that demonstrates that you understand their challenge and how they can overcome it you will be able to boost your credibility, encourage people to check out your business and ultimately drive leads.

When you answer Quora questions you won't only be able to engage the question asker, but also all those who come across the question while searching for their own answers.

Launch On Product Hunt

If you're creating and releasing a new tech product then launching on Product Hunt is one of the best things you can do to expose yourself to a helpful and relevant community that will help you generate leads, encourage trial, and even get some solid advice on how you can improve you offering.

Product Hunt presents you with more opportunities than we can cover here, but you can learn all about putting together the perfect Product Hunt launch in our helpful guide:

Leverage Integration Partners

If your product integrates with other platforms and products then it's a good move to celebrate the integration with some mutually beneficial cross-promotion.

Depending on who you integrate with you can use this opportunity to:

• Get featured in newsletter and blog posts.
• Have the integration announced on social media.
• Produce joint case studies.
• Gain exposure in your integration partner's app store.

Here at Gleam we have integrations with over 60 platforms, and we've been able to leverage these integrations to boost our exposure and generate leads through cross-promotional efforts such as onsite recommendations and features in blog posts.

Put Powered By Links In Your App's Footer

If you've built an app that customers are using and putting in front of their own audience then you should build a Powered By link into your apps footer, or anywhere else it fits.

This will build exposure and give everyone who is interested in your app an easy way to click-through and check it out in more detail.

And remember, you don't have to stick to the classic Powered By phrasing. In face, we had great success when we split tested the phrase to find some better alternatives which you can read all about here.

Use Videos

As a general rule, videos are great. They're engaging, eye-catching and easy to consume.

Putting together an informative (and interesting) video about your product is a terrific way to concisely explain and demonstrate your offering in an engaging way that will help build favourable perceptions, build product interest and drive leads.

You can share product videos on your landing page and across social media, or you can even get users to watch them as part of a giveaway.

However it is you want to share product videos, it's always a good move.

Create How-To YouTube Videos

One particularly effective way you can use videos to aid lead generation is by creating helpful how-to videos on YouTube which provide viewers with real value whilst positioning your product as a solution and driving users through to your products.

Producing how-to videos on common situations that people are actively searching for will help you find viewers, but it's always a good idea to promote your content across social media (and possibly on your own website) to maximise views.

This is a strategy that Beardbrand have had great success with. They use their YouTube channel to share instructional videos that give viewers great advice on beard and hair maintenance and styling, as well as showcase their products in action and drive traffic to their store.

With this arsenal of powerful tactics and strategies at your disposal you should be feeling to get out there and start generating the leads you need to help your business grow.

Good luck and remember, leads are the key to your success, and you should never stop striving to generate them.

Want More Advice On Growing Your Business?

• How to Grow Your Business With Gleam
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• How to Drive Sales From Your Mailing List
• How to Market a New Business
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One of the most critically important components of running an e-commerce store is being able to convert the website visitors you attract into leads, or even better, customers.

There are lots of different approaches you can take to doing this, but none are as effective as triggering popups which offer instant discounts to anyone who joins your mailing list.

All users have to do is enter their email address and click a button. You get a fresh lead, they get an awesome discount. Simple as that.

This is as in incredibly effective strategy, as by incentivising sign-ups you will be able to generate leads and create a high-value mailing list which will help you promote your store and drive future conversions. Plus, by giving away discount codes which users can instantly access and copy you will put website visitors in a purchasing mindset and maximise your chances of driving immediate sales.

The promise of these valuable discounts can even help you drive traffic to your website in the first place when you announce and promote the offer through your social channels.

How to Create Your Own Discount Popup

Discount popups are the best way to generate leads and drive sales inside your e-commerce store, and with Gleam's Capture app you can easily create, customise and install your very own coupon popup in a matter of minutes.

With Capture, your discount popups will look great on any device and work perfectly with all the major e-commerce platforms including:

• Shopify
• Magento
• BigCommerce
• Squarespace
• Prestashop
• Jumpseller
• Weebly
• Any other e-commerce platform you use

We also integrate with 40 different email marketing platforms so you can use your discount popup to grow your list on Mailchimp, Autopilot, Drip, ConvertKit and heaps more.

Putting together your own powerful discount coupon is incredibly quick and easy with Capture. All you need to do is select our coupon template:

Then you can get to work customising and styling your popup. This includes customising your text, buttons, imagery, and background. You will also need to add your discount codes. You can choose to give out single code to everyone who signs up, or you can distribute a bunch of unique codes.

The type of discount code you give out is entirely up to you. You can offer codes for percentage discounts, dollar-off discounts, 2-for-1 deals, free shipping, or even free-trials and special gifts. Your e-commerce platform should have an easy way for you to create discount codes, all you need to do is add them to your popup.

Learn More About Creating and Giving Out Shopify Discount Codes

Once you're done designing your popup you can choose from our extensive range of behavioural rules that you can use to present your discount popup to the right people at the right time.

You can take a simple approach and display popup when users arrive at your homepage, or you can choose to trigger your popup when users visit particular pages, get referred to your site from certain sources, or even when they're about to leave your store. The possibilities are endless.

At this point all that will be left to do is add your email integrations and install the popup in your store.

We make installing your Capture popup incredibly easy for you. All you have to do is add one a single line of JavaScript into your website's template and you'll be able to manage everything through the Gleam dashboard.

Discount popups are truly one of the best tactics you can use to generate leads and drive e-commerce sales no matter what platfrom you operate on, whether it's Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce or anywhere else.

Types Of Discount Popups

Now that we've taken you through the basics of setting up your own e-commerce discount popup with Capture, we're going to show you the very best ways you can use discount popups to engage your audience, generate leads, and drive immediate sales.

Homepage Popups

Presenting users with a discount popup as soon as they land on your site is a great way to reach a wide audience, generate a lot of sign-ups and get users to consider purchase as soon as they arrive at your store.

This is a great approach to take for special sales events, or just to get your foot in the door with new customers.

You can easily trigger popups on your homepage with our Current URL rule.

Product Specific Discounts

If you just want to offer discounts on specific product or range you can easily do this by sharing the discount on your homepage and driving traffic to the product, or you can reach out to users who have already displayed interest in the product by using our Current URL rule to trigger your popup when users arrive on the relevant product page.

This is a brilliant way to connect with users who are considering buying your product and give them that little bit of extra incentive that they may need to make a purchase.

Welcome Offers

Offering exclusive discounts to users who have been referred to your store from a specific source is a fantastic way to build a sense of community around your social platforms. It's also perfect for converting your online audience into leads and customers by promoting the exclusive offers on social media.

Exit Intent Popups

Offering valuable discounts to users who are about to leave your store is a great way to grab the attention of exiting users and convert them into email contacts and hopefully even customers.

Exit-intent popups are perfect for re-engaging users and driving action from potential customers you would have otherwise lost.

Cart Abandonment Popups

Cart abandonment popups function in a similar way to exit-intent popups, except they target users who are about to abandon their shopping cart.

A price reduction is often all that stands between abandonment and purchase, and cart abandonment popups are the perfect way to make potential customers reconsider their decision and follow through with a purchase.

Post Checkout Discounts

Triggering a popup on your post-checkout page and offering discounts to customers who sign up to your mailing list is clever tactic for increasing customer retention, driving future purchases, and growing your mailing list.

Location Specific Discounts

With our geo-location rules you can create popup discounts that only display to users in certain countries, or within highly targetted geofences.

These types of popups can be great for hosting city-wide sales, or launching your business in a new country.

Countdown Timer Popups

If you want to add a sense of urgency to your discounted offers you should try putting together a countdown popup.

Countdown's are a great way to prompt users to take immediate action which will help you generate more leads, and drive more sales.

Coupon Bars

If you want to take a more subtle approach to distributing discounts you should consider our Capture Bar template. You can use these bars to capture leads and offer discounts in a subtle an unobtrusive way which will drive action without distracting from the rest of your site.

These approaches are all well-suited to different objectives and circumstances, but one key factor remains consistent across all e-commerce discount popups: They're easy to implement, incredibly effective, and perfect for boosting e-commerce engagement.

So if you want to take your e-commerce game to the next level then it's time to start creating your own powerful popups and offering discounts which will excite your e-commerce visitors, generate leads, and drive sales.

Want More Tips on Generating and Converting Leads?

• Converting E-Commerce Visitors With Coupons
• 50+ Awesome Email Marketing Ideas
• The Ultimate Guide to Generating Leads
• How to Grow Your Business With Gleam
• How to Grow a Shopify Store
• 80+ Ways to Market Your Business On Instagram
• Running a Successful Online Giveaway
• Convert GIveaway Entrants With Coupons

If you have an E-Commerce store or sell something online you'll be planning various sales, product launches & promotions throughout the year.

A very easy tactic that many stores use is to use a bar to let users know exactly how much time they have to order an item or redeem a specific promotion.

This leverages the psychology of urgency to provoke the user to take action in a subtle but not forceful way. You can run this type of promotion in specific sections of your site or across every page.

You can also interrupt your user with a popup that uses the same psychology. A popup can be jarring to the user, but it can also force them to make a quick decision on the spot (which can have positive or negative influences on your conversion rates).

Creating a Countdown Bar

Creating countdown bars and popups is incredibly easy with Gleam's Capture app. All you need to do is choose our Countdown template and select either the Popup or Bar layout and customise your countdown timer so it's look exactly how you want it to.

When you create a countdown bar you can completely customise everything including the text, fonts, colours, logos and of course, when you're counting down towards.

You'll also need to decide what happens when users engage with your countdown bar and click on your link. You can do this in the Post Capture tab of your Capture setup.

The best option is to simply redirect users to your sales page where they can follow through with the purchase (or other action) you're trying to drive.

Creating a Countdown Popup

Putting together a countdown popup with Capture is very similar to creating a countdown bar. You will need to customise your text, imagery, and timer. Only this time you'll have a different format to work within.

When you create a countdown popup you have two different options for what happens when users interact with your popup:

Click-Throughs

The first option is to simply capture clicks and redirect users to your sales page. You can do this by selecting Clicks under Capturing in the Layout tab of your Capture setup.

This is a great option for drawing attention to a limited time offer on your site.

Email Sign-Ups

The second option is to collect the names and email addresses of interested users who interact with your popup. All you need to do is select Email or Name + Email under Capturing in the Layout tab.

This is a highly effective approach to take, as it gives you the opportunity to use time sensitive offers and discounts to not only drive immediate action, but also generate leads which will give your future promotional efforts are major boost.

Once users sign up you can choose to:

• Redirect sign-ups to exclusive sales pages (perfect for special discounts, limited edition products and pre-release tickets).
• Give out discount codes using a thank-you message and direct users to you store to redeem their code and make a purchase.
• Email users an exclusive discount code to redeem at your store (just make sure they know it's on its way).

No matter what approach you decide to take, countdown timers are always a fantastic way to build urgency and encourage immediate action anytime you run a sale or promotion on your website.

If you're active on social media, (which let's be real, you are) you know exactly what hashtags are. If you're in the minority who doesn't tag your own posts with hashtags, you've certainly used them to find relevant content or stumbled upon them countless times in your feed.

Hashtags are a mainstay on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and to a lesser extend Facebook, having steadily risen in ubiquity since Chris Messina first pitched the idea in 2007.

While there was initial resistance to the idea, hashtags soon caught on.

In 2009 Twitter started allowing users to search for hashtags, in 2010 Instagram launched with hashtag functionality, in 2013 Facebook added hashtag search, and in 2014 "Hashtag" became an official Scrabble word.

Today hashtags are everywhere. They allow people to participate in global conversations, kickstart trends, rally communities, categorise content and drive mass engagement.

Hashtags play such an instrumental role in the social media landscape that it's imperative for brands, influencers and anyone else operating on social media in a professional capacity to know exactly how to use them.

Poorly implemented hashatgs can easily become spammy, irrelevant, and simply ineffective, but if you can master them and learn exactly what hashtags to use and when to use them they can be a powerful marketing tool that will take your social media game to the next level.

Why Hashtags Are Important

Okay, okay, so hashtags are an important marketing tool, but why?

What exactly is it about hashtags that make them so valuable to marketers, brands and influencers?

Well, there are few key benefits of hashtag use which we're going to take a look at:

Categorising Your Content

One of the core functionalities of social media hashtags is the ability to categorise your content and share it under a recognisable banner. This is advantageous for a few reasons.

Firstly, attaching a popular, familiar or recognisable hashtag to your posts will give context to your content and give your audience a greater understanding of your message.

A perfect example of this is #ThrowbackThursday. Anyone from brands to influencers to ordinary users can add #ThrowbackThursday, or even just #TBT, to an old photo and everyone will understand what they're posting, and why they're posting it.

Secondly, by attaching popular (and relevant) hashtags to your posts you will be able to anchor your content to a topic or conversation that users are actively seeking out and participating in. This will allow you to chime in on relevant discussions, draw attention to your social content and boost awareness and engagement.

For example, a lot of fashion influencers use hashtags like #ootd, #outfitinspo and #outfit ideas to grab the attention of users seeking out fashion advice. This is an awesome way to connect with a relevant audience, and even prompt further action such as follows and affiliate link click-throughs.

If you create your own branded hashtags you will be able to use them to create a sort of sub-brand within your social media profiles. You can used sub-branded hashtags to segment your content into particular categories relating to products, ideas, themes and more.

Extend Your Reach

One of the biggest upsides of using hashtags on social media is the abiltiy to gain exposure from new and relevant audiences who are actively seeking out or casually browsing the hashtag you use.

Social media users, particularly those on Twitter and Instagram, will often search for a specific hashtag they're interested in, or click and browse through one which catches their eye.

If you can identify the hashtags your target audience is likely to be browsing and cultivate a presence within those categories you will put yourself in an outstanding position to expose your content to a relevant audience, connect with them, and drive heightened brand awareness and interest.

Using hashtags to boost content discovery will lead to higher levels of engagement which will help the almighty algorithms look favourably upon your content, and in turn generate more awareness and engagement.

This means that as well as using hashtags, you also need to make sure that you're doing everything you can to make your posts as interesting, exciting and valuable as possible to maximise engagement and prompt further action.

Learn More About Posting Engaging Content On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Drive Engagement & Boost Brand Recognition

As well as helping you getting your content in front of a bigger audience, hashtags can also play a role in actually increasing how much people engage with your posts.

Tweets with hashtags have been found to elicit double the engagement and get retweeted over 50% more than those without. Hashtagged posts on Instagram also enjoying a similar boost in activity.

But when it comes to hashtags, this is far from where the engagement ends.

Creating your own hashtags and running campaigns based around them presents you with a unique and powerful opportunity to engage your audience, drive user participation, and encourage the creation of all kinds of valuable social media content.

Plus, when you create your own branded hashtags and encourage your fans to share their own content under the hashtag you will be able to expose your branded hashtag to a wide, relevant audience which will help you boost awareness and increase brand recognition.

Jump Ahead To Learn More About Creating Your Own Hashtags

It's All So Easy

We've taken a look at what makes hashtags so valuable to your social media marketing efforts. They can help you drastically extend your reach and expose your content to wide new audiences, they can help you boost engagement in a number of ways, and they can give context to your posts and make them more accessible.

What we haven't mentioned yet is the icing on the cake, which almost seems too obvious to mention. Hashtags are completely free and incredibly easy to implement.

Once you've figured out which hashtags you want to use for your different posts or types of posts implementing them literally takes mere seconds.

Hashtags are so simple to implement you would be remiss not to use them at every opportunity.

Of course, this all comes down to knowing the right hashtag to use at the right time.

To help you maximise the effectiveness of your hashtag usage we're going to take you through all the best hashtags to use for every opportunity.

Evergreen Hashtags

There are some hashtags which have endured the test of time and passed into a plane of perpetual relevancy where they can be used to drive constant impressions and engagement.

These are the hashtags that have entered the communal lexicon of their platform, and are often used to signify a category of post or a common topic of conversation.

But remember, just because a hashtag is popular on one platform it doesn't mean it will be as sought-after on them all.

When you use popular hashtags you also need to ensure that they are relevant to the content you're sharing, and the audience you're targeting. If you attach a bunch of irrelevant hashtags to your posts you may be able to gain exposure, but you're unlikely to connect with the audience you reach and drive meaningful engagement.

Most Popular Hashtags On Instagram

Instagram is a visual platform which is perfect for sharing and discovering engaging visual content. The most common use of Instagram hashtags is to categorise images, provide context for them, and make them easily discoverable for people looking for that kind of content.

Here's a look at some of the most enduringly popular hashtags on Instagram:

• #love
• #life
• #instagood
• #photooftheday
• #beautiful
• #fashion
• #happy
• #followme
• #like4like
• #follow
• #photography
• #picoftheday
• #selfie
• #summer
• #healthy
• #fitness
• #instadaily
• #friends
• #art
• #fun
• #travel
• #style

If any of these popular hashtags are relevant to your brand or the content you post then they can be a great way to boost your reach and maximise engagement.

Most Popular Hashtags On Twitter

Twitter is the birthplace of the hashtag and to this day remains one of if not the best platform for using hashtags to boost engagement. Here are some of the most popular hashtags of Twitter:

• #followback
• #funny
• #photography
• #pets
• #friends
• #love
• #photooftheday
• #picoftheday
• #style
• #fashion
• #food
• #travel

Twitter hashtags are often used to facilitate conversations, contribute content to a designated topic, and help gain exposure from people with an interest in a particular topic.

Because of the way Twitter hashtags are so intrinsically linked with particular conversations the best hashtags to use often aren't those which are most popular across the entire platform, but those which are currently trending, or popular within your niche.

Contest & Giveaway Hashtags

If you're running a contest or giveaway then announcing, sharing and even running them directly on social media is a great way to ensure that they get noticed by a relevant crowd.

If you want to maximise the promotion of your campaign on social media then it can be a good idea to attach a few relevant hashtags to your posts.

Here are some of the best hashtags you can use to boost the reach of your campaign and increase participation:

• #contest
• #giveaway
• #competition
• #sweepstakes
• #win
• #prize

It's also a good idea to include any hashtags related to the prize you're giving away, as this will help you find highly relevant users who are clearly interested in whatever it is you're giving away.

When you use these types of hashtags it's important to note that you will catch the eye of some users who simply want to win a prize without actually having any real interest in whatever it is you do.

The best way to mitigate this potential pitfall is simply by choosing a good prize which is highly relevant to your target audience (your own products are generally the best bet). This will make entry primarily appeal to those likely to be interested in you, and allow you to enjoy the increased exposure that comes from the hashtags without worrying too much about irrelevant entrants.

Learn More About Choosing The Perfect Prize

Hashtag Competitions

Another outstanding way you can use hashtags to help you run a contest or giveaway is by creating your own branded hashtag and encouraging users to tweet the hashtag or attach it to an Instagram post for a chance to win.

You can setup a hashtag competition which is simple as asking fans to post a simple tweet with your hashtag:

Or something as high-value as using a competition to generate a ton of powerful user-generated content which will allow you to drive mass engagement and provide you with a bunch of authentic, engaging and valuable marketing material.

When you run a hashtag campaign with Gleam's Competitions app we will autmatically import and validate submissions for you with our powerful import actions.

You can even send your submissions directly into a stylish gallery which you can use to showcase your user-generated content.

Daily Hashtags

Over the years a number of great hashtags have emerged for every day of the week, and users across platforms get in on the fun by posting relevant content under these hashtags and checking out what others are sharing.

These hashtags are fantastic because in addition to helping you increase the reach and engagement of your posts, they can also give you some quality inspiration for the type of content you can create which people will respond well to.

Let's take a look at the best daily hashtags you can get involved with:

Monday

• #MondayMotivation
• #ManCrushMonday
• #MondayBlues
• #MondayMood

Tuesday

• #TipTuesday
• #TransformationTuesday

• #TravelTuesday
• #TrendyTuesday

Wednesday

• #HumpDay
• #WayBackWednesday

• #WomanCrushWednesday
• #wcw

• #WellnessWednesday
• #WorkoutWednesday
• #WednesdayWisdom

Thursday

• #ThrowbackThursday
• #tbt

• #ThankfulThursday
• #ThursdayThoughts

Friday

• #FollowFriday
• #ff
• #FlashbackFriday

• #FridayFun
• #FridayNight
• #Friyay
• #FridayVibes
• #TGIF

Saturday

• #SaturdaySwag
• #WeekendVibes
• #SaturdayStyle

• #SalesSaturday
• #Caturday

Sunday

• #Weekend
• #SundayFunday

• #SundayReads
• #SelfieSunday
• #StartupSunday

Hashtags In Your Niche

Using broadly popular hashtags to get more eyes on your social media content is an effective strategy, but if you really want to make the most of your hashtags and use them to drive targeted awareness and engagement then you should be trying to find and use the hashtgas that are being used and searched for within your niche.

If there are particular hashtags that are highly relevant to your industry and popular amongst your target audience then you try to regularly use them.

Fashion

If you operate in the fashion space, whether as a seller or an influencer, there are ton of great hashtags you can use to put yourself in front of a relevant audience looking for high-quality fashion content.

Instagram still reigns supreme when it comes to fashionistas, but there's plenty of room for success on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Here are some of the best hashtags you can use:

• #fashion
• #OOTD (or #OutfitOfTheDay)
• #FashionDiaries
• #FashionBlogger
• #style
• #StreetStyle
• #OutfitIdeas
• #OutfitInspo
• #StyleInspo
• #look
• #LookOfTheDay
• #LookBook
• #MensFashion
• #WomensFashion
• #InstaFashion

It's also a good idea to include any specific hashtags which relate to the items you're posting about. This can include your own branded hashtag, the hashtags associated with the brand you're wearing if you're a fashion influencer, or even just a generic hashtag associated with an item of clothing.

This can include things like #boots, #dresses, #jumpsuit and any other relevant tage which can help get you in front of users looking for a particular item of clothing.

Beauty

Beauty brands and influencers can also get a lot of value out of hashtags, particularly on Instagram.

Here are the best hashtags you can use to help your social posts gain traction and connect with a relevant audience:

• #beauty
• #instabeauty
• #beautyblogger
• #makeup
• #makeupartist
• #makeuptutorial
• #makeupideas
• #model
• #wakeupandmakeup
• #skincare
• #nofilter

As well as using more general hashtags, it's also a smart move to use any brand specific hashtags that are relevant to your content.

Travel

Travel related content performs exceptionally well on social media, and using the right hashtags can help you attract more attention and drive more engagement for your posts.

These hashtags are great for anyone posting travel content, whether you're a travel company, a blogger, or an e-commerce retailer who sells products that are perfect for traveling:

• #travel
• #traveling
• #travelphotography
• #travelblogger
• #travelgram
• #wanderlust
• #travelmore
• #goexplore
• #roamtheplanet
• #solotravel
• #nomads

As well as using these more general hashtags, it's also worth using hashtags to tag any locations or landmarks you're posting from or about. This can be something as broad as #europe or specific as #phuket.

Health & Fitness

Personal trainers, lifestyle influencers, and activewear sellers alike can all use hashtags to get more eyes on their posts and help find potential followers and customers.

Here are our favourite hashtags in the health and fitness space:

• #fitspo
• #fitfam
• #workout
• #gymlife
• #yoga
• #health
• #fitfood
• #gethealthy
• #getfit

Food & Hospitality

If you operate in hospitality, sell food, or are food related blogger then there's a good chance you're serving up a lot of mouth-watering photos on social media.

To help these posts land on the right plate and help you build your brand you should try using some of these hashtags:

• #foodporn
• #foodphotography
• #foodgasm
• #feedyoursoul
• #eeeeeats
• #foodie
• #forkyeah
• #cleaneating
• #yum or #yummy

Just about every type of food you can think of also has it's own hashtag (or many), so always remember to tag the specific type of meal you're putting on display.

Streamers

Twitter is a great place for streamers to interact with their fans, grow their audience and promote their content. Using the right hashtags can make it a lot easier to connect with an audience seeking out the type of content you produce. Try using:

• #twitch
• #stream
• #streaming
• #twitchstream
• #live
• #twitchtv
• #TwitchFam
• #SupportSmallStreamers
• #gaming
• #gamer

As well as trying out some of these hashtags, it's always a good move to include any game-specific hashtags that are relevant to your stream.

This could be #Fortnite, #ApexLegends, or #RDR2. You can even throw in some console specific hashtags for good measure.

B2B

If you operate in B2B and are trying to generate some leads on social media then using the right hashtags can help you boost visibility and get your brand in front of the right person.

Here are some good hashtags you can try out:

• #startup
• #startups
• #smallbiz
• #businesstips
• #marketingtips
• #SEO

Your Location

As well as using hashtags specific to your industry, you should also be sure to use any hashtags which are relevant to your location. This is particularly important if you're a business with a physical location or a content creator trying to drum up a local audience.

When you're deciding which hashtags to use, it's important to keep in mind that the more popular a hashtag is, the harder it will be to stand out and get ranked as a top post.

Having an established audience gives you a leg up in this department as it will be easier to drum up engagement, get listed as a top post and gain massive exposure. However, there will always be a trade off between how many people are browsing a hashtag and how easy it will be get noticed within a hashtag that you need to consider.

In our suggestions we included a mixture of super popular and more accessible hashtag that should help you strike a balance, but it's still important to experiment with these hashtags to see what works best for you.

It's also worth doing some of your own research to find the hashtags that are most relevant to your niche.

A good way to do this is by checking out what hashtags your competitors are using, and finding prominent influencers in your niche and seeing what hashtags they use.

Once you've found a few good hashtags to use you can use best-hashtags.com to find more relevant hashtags to use based on the ones you're already using.

Use Trending Hashtags

Using hashtags that are continuously popular in your niche, or across social media, is a fantastic way to maximise your visibility and build engagement, but if you really want to capitalise on the massive power of social media then it's crucial that you stay on top of what's going on around you.

The internet moves at a breakneck pace, with new trends and conversations constantly emerging and captivating users. You can use this to your advantage by getting involved with trending hashtags and making posts which will help you engage your existing fanbase and grab the attention of a relevant new audience.

You can use trending hashtags to post about holidays, discuss current events that are relevant to your niche or even just get in on the fun of an online trend.

Just make sure that you're posting content that's relevant to the hashtag and not just spamming.

Twitter makes it easy to find trending hashtags with their personalised "Trends for you" feature, which you can also use to see what's trending in particular areas or worldwide. When it comes to Instagram you can observe trends simply by looking what prominent and influential figures are posting about, or you can use a tool like RiteTag to get more in-depth suggestions.

How To Make The Most Of Your Hashtags

Now that we've taken a look at all the best hashtags you can use to take your social media content to the next level we're going to quickly take you through some tips on how to make the make of your hashtags.

Figure Out What Works For You

Social media is flooded with hashtags, people posting hashtags, and people searching for hashtags. What works for someone else is far from guaranteed to work for you.

Seeing what hashtag prominent posters in your niche are using is a highly effective tool to gain an initial understanding of which hashtags are likely to work for you, but once you've started to engage in your own hashtag use it's important that you're carefully monitoring the performance of posts with different hashtags and seeing what works best for you.

This is likely to vary across platforms, and even across different types of content.

Use The Right Amount Of Hashtags

Speaking in general terms, you're better off using fewer high quality hashtags than a bunch of borderline irrelevant ones.

On Twitter and Facebook it's been found that only using 1-2 valuable hashtags is ideal, with increased usage resulting in diminishing engagement.

On Instagram you can get away with casting a wider net and using more hashtags, with anywhere between 6-11 hashtags producing the best results.

The downside of using so many hashtags in a single post is that things can start to look a little too cluttered. A lot of people try to circumvent this by commenting a huge list of hashtags in the comments, but unless you make the comment almost instantly it's unlikely it will actually have any effect. Instead we recommend putting a few line breaks in between your caption and some of the hashtags to keep things looking cleaner.

It's also worth incorporating your hashtags into your captions when possible. This will keep things looking clean and draw extra attention to the hashtag which is particularly important if you're using one of your own design.

Avoid Toxic Hashtags

Just because a hashtag is popular or trending it doesn't mean it's something you want to get involved with. Before you try out any new hashtags always do your due diligence and make sure there's nothing unsavoury associated with it.

If you use a hashtag that's been overrun with inappropriate content Instagram can even enact a shadowban which will prevent the other hashtags you've used in the post from getting you discovered.

If there are any hashtags you're suspicious of you can check this list of banned hashtags to see what you need to avoid.

Use Your Posts To Drive Engagement

Using hashtags is a great way to boost awareness and get your social media discovered, but if you want people to do more than just glance at your post and move on then it's important that you're producing high quality content that encourages users to check out more of your content, follow you, and possibly even become customers.

Having said that, you don't need to view everyone as a lead or bust. Using hashtags will undoubtedly expose you to and engage with users who are never going to make a purchase, and that's alright. There's still enormous value to be gotten from online fans who like and share your content as it will help you continuously expose yourself to a wider audience of potential followers and customers you would have otherwise never been able to reach.

Learn How To Drive Engagement On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Create Your Own Hashtags

Now that we've gone over how to choose and use all the pre-existing hashtags social media has to offer we're going to go over another hugely powerful way you can put hashtags to work for your marketing efforts.

Creating your own branded hashtags is a truly exceptional way to categorize your content, engage your audience, encourage conversation, increase visibility and even generate loads of highly valuable user-generated content.

Brand Hashtag

One outstanding way you can use branded hashtags is by simply creating a hashtag for your brand and attaching it to your posts. You can create an overall brand hashtag or create different ones for each of your products, or categories of content.

This can help you add context to your post and make your products and social media content far more searchable.

Hashtag Campaigns

Another outstanding use of your own branded hashtags is encouraging users to submit their own content under your hashtag. This will help you expose the hashtag to new audiences, encourage them to browse the hashtag, and get them to view all the outstanding branded content your fans have made, as well as the high quality content you post under the same hashtag.

Hashtag campaigns like this have the power to gain viral traction, expose your brand to a massive new audience, build positive associations across social media and spread a ton of highly valuable, engaging and authentic branded content that will give your social media efforts a serious boost.

To put it simply, creating your own branded hashtags and using them to run a hashtag campaign is the single most powerful way you can use hashtags as a part of your social media strategy.

This is especially true if you use your hashtag campaign to run a competition where users can submit photos for a chance to win a prize. This will add an extra layer of engagement, maximise participation and allow you to get your hands on the best user-generated content you can.

Plus, when you run a hashtag competition with Gleam's Competitions app you can use our awesome import actions to automatically collect UGC and award entries to everyone who gets in on the action. You can even create a stylish customer gallery which you can populate with a currated selection of hashtagged images.

Encourage Mentions

If you're planning on using hashtags to collect user-generated content, then you should also consider encouraging users to tag you in posts that are relevant to your brand, your products, or a campaign you're running.

Instagram now allows businesses to easily access @mentions, and you can use Gleam's Instagram Mentions import action to automatically collect user-generated content, award entries, and compile a gallery.

Encouraging mentions can be a really advantageous approach to take, as by getting users to mention you directly in their posts you will open up more of a direct line of communication with your fans.

Plus, by getting users to tag you in their posts you will be able to directly expose your brand to everyone who sees the branded photos your fans upload. This is a great way to boost exposure and strengthen your online presence.

Want More Ideas For Your Next Social Media Campaign?

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Acquiring a new customer takes a lot more cost and effort than retaining an existing one, so it's well and truly worth putting some tactics in place to ensure that your customers are always coming back for more.

One of the best ways you can do this is by offering up discount codes to customers as soon as they make a purchase. There's no better way to encourage potential customers to make a purchase than offering them a discount, and offering existing customers a discount on a future purchase is the perfect way to drive retention.

Let's take a look at a few of the best ways you can boost retention by distributing post checkout coupons with Gleam:

Trigger Popups After Checkout

One of the best ways you can increase retention with post checkout coupons is by triggering a popup containing your discount code when customers complete a successful checkout.

Creating a post checkout popup is easy with Gleam's Capture app. WIth Capture you can trigger a popup at the perfect moment and give customers an exclusive coupon as soon as they reach your post checkout page.

You can create a post checkout popup coupon by using our Current URL rule and setting it to trigger as soon as customers reach your post checkout page.

When you use a popup like this to distribute coupons, you will be able to gate your discount behind an email signup. This will allow you to use your discounts to not only drive sales, but also grow your mailing list which will help you keep your customers in the loop and sustain long-term customer retention.

Run a Rewards Campaign

You can also use post checkout coupons to increase customer retention and bolster your online following by running a campaign with Gleam's Rewards app. With Rewards, you can gate your coupon behind a wide selection of actions including email signups and social media visits.

Just remember to make it nice and easy for customers to unlock their discount, you don't want users dropping off because you made it too difficult to claim a coupon.

Take a look at this demo campaign we put together to get an idea of what your own coupon campaign could look like:

Running a Rewards campaign on your post checkout page is an outstanding way to keep customers coming back time and time again. By offering up enticing discounts you will drive future sales and incentivise actions which will bring users into your online community where you can continue to build loyalty and promote all of your products and special offerings.

When you run a post checkout rewards campaign you can embed it directly into your post checkout page:

Or you can run it in an eye-catching popup tab:

Use Giveaways to Offer Coupons

Another fantastic way to drive action and boost retention is by running a giveaway on your post checkout page.

Giveaways are perfect for driving a wide array of powerful actions which can help you solidify your relationship with recently acquired customers and encourage the sharing of your brand via Tweets, Retweets, and Viral Shares.

Plus, you can use Gleam's powerful Coupon action to give out discount codes from within your giveaway and drive a whole lot of repeat purchases.

Take a look at this demo Competition to see what your own post checkout giveaway could look like:

You can even lock your Coupon action until users have completed your other actions, allowing you to use your valuable discounts to drive the actions that matter most to you.

Just like with Rewards campaigns, when you run a post checkout giveaway you can choose to embed your campaign directly into the page, or run it in a popup tab.

One question that comes up a lot when we talk with businesses is:

Should we buy Facebook Likes? Since we’re a new business we need to quickly appear more credible to potential users. Achieving this number through Facebook ads directly could cost upwards of $1,000 & we don’t have that sort of money to spend.

As a general rule, we advise against buying Likes. While there are some upsides to buying Likes in specific situations, the practice comes with an array of negative consequences, and there are far superior alternative approaches you can take which will allow you to more effectively drive meaningful results.

In this post we'll take you through the benefits and pitfalls of buying Likes, and show you a whole lot of powerful strategies for driving real, organic engagement.

Why Might People Buy Likes?

Let’s have a look at why people might buy Likes, then we’ll look at how it could impact their business in the long run:

New Band Looking for Gigs

Let’s say you’ve just launched a brand new band and you’re looking for gigs. Having a band page with 47 Likes might make you less appealing to anyone that might want to book you.

So you go out & purchase 1000 Likes for $50.

Now this particular motivation is hard to argue against, because essentially it comes down to ethics. Are you willing to fake your popularity in order to have some short term success?

New E-Commerce Business

Let’s say you launch a brand new E-Commerce business, often users will look at Facebook as a gauge of credibility when making a purchase. Would you buy something from a brand new company that only has 24 fans on Facebook? Even if their prices are cheaper? Whilst I think some still would, there’s a large proportion of people that wouldn’t – credibility means everything.

So again in this scenario, jump starting your Likes could be a good way to fake that popularity initially until you start getting traction organically.

Anyone Else Trying to Grow Their Online Presence

This same logic applies to anyone who is trying to grow a presence on Facebook. You could be an influencer, content creator, e-commerce brand or anything else, if you want to grow your audience on Facebook then the idea of buying Likes can be very appealing.

It can seem like buying Likes is a quick way to jump start your profile while you start organically gaining traction, but what you have to remember is that buying Likes has some major downsides.

How Might it Harm You in the Long Run?

Buying likes is a short term strategy, I’m sure you already know this. But you may not know exactly how it can impact your business as you start to scale.

Reducing Your Organic Reach

Your ability to organically reach users and show up on people's News Feeds is largely contingent on Facebook's algorithm for determining which posts go into user's News Feeds.

Facebook's algorithm takes a huge array of different factors into account, but what it tends to value above all else are pages who post content which drives lots of likes, comments, replies and shares. So finding ways to drive these outcomes is a lot more valuable than a bunch of meaningless page likes.

If you are consistently engaging your following and generating lots of Likes and comments Facebook's algorithm will reward you and allow you to build exposure and grow your organic reach.

On the other hand, if you have a Facebook following that never engages with your posts you generally won't do very well with the algorithm. This will make it incredibly difficult to get your posts in front of users, including those who have liked your page.

You can probably see where we're going with this.

When you buy Likes, the users who like your page won't be real fans and therefore won't be engaging with your posts. This can seriously harm your newsfeed exposure and drastically reduce your organic reach.

Ineffective Advertising

On average in Facebook posts only organically reach about 16% of your users. Therefore many business have to rely on boosting posts or running Facebook ads to drive more interaction & engagement on their pages.

On average we reach about 10-25% of our organic fans with a post. With posts we boost we have been able to reach up ~2600% more people.

Facebook ads can be a great way to reach users, but it will cost you. If you buy a bunch of Facebook Likes then every time you boost a post through Facebook ads you're going to end up wasting a lot of money delivering ads to fake or uninterested users who you have no chance of converting.

The $150 that you paid upfront for 5000 Likes could end up costing you much more when you start investing in Facebook Ads, so you're far better off focusing on building your following organically.

Hurting Your Credibility

I’ve seen examples of businesses that launched & instantly had thousands of Likes overnight. Depending on your industry this can be pretty easy to spot (seeing when someone has purchased Likes isn’t all that hard). If this happened you may well be called out for it, which can hurt your credibility with users.

This is a risk that you take when buying a large number of Likes quickly after launch. I’m sure you’ve seen the story of Mitt Romney being exposed for buying large numbers of Twitter followers. Whether it was his doing or not, who knows?

Likes Aren’t a Measure of Success

Likes are a really fuzzy measure of real business success. We could have 40k Likes on Facebook & still be making the same monthly recurring revenue. Do not buy Likes if you think they will make your business successful overnight, because you will be sorely disappointed.

It’s all about how you engage your community & use Facebook as a platform to drive business outcomes. Likes themselves will not equate to revenue, they do help with credibility – but only up until a certain point.

Here’s a Facebook success story from one of our own customers MIISHKA.

Don’t Expect Conversions

Buying Likes is purely a vanity exercise, you have to think closely about where these users are coming from:

• On some sites you will get Likes generated by bots – fake accounts that will never engage with you at all.
• You may get a large number of Likes from Foreign countries where it’s cheaper to acquire Likes.
• You may get Likes from people who really don’t care about your business.

Would you prefer a like from an interested user who only likes 100 pages vs someone who likes 5,000 random pages?

Facebook is a great platform for building a community, finding relevant users, promoting your offering and driving conversions. The truth is that buying Likes generally won't help you drive any of these outcomes. In fact, it's actually far more likely to hurt your efforts.

How to Drive Organic Engagement

The key to succeeding on Facebook is finding ways to drive organic engagement and building a real, loyal following. This will allow you to consistently reach new users, build a relevant audience, cultivate a strong brand identity and drive conversions.

To help you start ramping up your engagement levels on Facebook we're going to take you through some of our favourite tactics for engaging an audience, building an organic presence, and of course, driving Likes:

Post Engaging Content

It will take a little longer, but organically building up Facebook Likes will be far more beneficial in the long run.

One of the best ways to start building a following is simply by posting engaging content which people want to see on a consistent basis. You need to post content which is relevant to your target audience, fits into the social media landscape and works to drive likes, comments, tags and shares. This will help you reach new, relevant users who you can then convert into followers.

Here are some ideas for content you can post to start building engagement:

Use Memes & Other Funny Content

Facebook, like most social media platforms, is a place users flock to as a means of communicating with their friends and sourcing entertaining content. If you want to excel on Facebook it helps if you fit into this landscape.

Posting memes and other funny content is a great way to build a friendly and likable brand persona while also helping you drive likes and tags. There probably isn't a better way to get people to tag their friends in a comment than posting funny content that people want to share.

Just make sure you're gearing your posts towards your target audience, and keeping things at least tangentially related to your brand.

Ask Questions and Generate Discussion

Generating comments and replies isn't only a great way to appear more favourable in the eyes of Facebook's algorithm, it's also outstanding for engaging your audience and shaping positive perceptions.

Try using your posts to ask questions and generate discussion. Bonus points if you can get users to tag their friends in the comments.

Post Lots of Images

Images are both highly engaging and highly valued by Facebook's algorithm, so you should to try to add some visual flair to your posts as often as possible.

Images will help you catch people's eye, draw attention to your post and heavily boost engagement. You can use images to share funny jokes or photos, showcase your products and customers, and much, much more.

Use Videos

Facebook really likes video content right now, and as a result their algorithm rewards it quite handsomely. You may have noticed that your newsfeed tends to be filled with videos.

You can capitalise on this by sharing videos that will engage your target audience. Here are a few ideas for videos you can post:

• Product demonstrations.
• Behind the scenes videos.
• How-to guides.
• Funny videos and viral content.
• Anything you think your audience will enjoy.

Live Videos

Using Facebook's Live Video feature is another great way to capture people's attention and expose them to your content.

Live Videos are perfect to use in a number of situations including:

• Attending or hosting a special event.
• Debuting a new product.
• Conducting an interview.
• Showing a product demonstration.
• Giving a behind the scenes tour.

Promote Your Brand and Products

As you set out to drive organic engagement on Facebook it's important to remember that you're ultimate goal should be to find a highly relevant audience and convert them into followers and customers.

A great way to attract users who are interested in your offerings and guide them towards conversion is by using your Facebook posts to promote your brand and products. Here some engaging ways you can do this:

Showcase New Releases

Anytime you have a new product or range coming out make sure that you're announcing it on social media. This is a great way to build hype for your release and get people taking out and sharing your offering with friends.

If you're a content creator without a physical product you should be using Facebook to promote all of your new content.

Share Special Deals

Another great way to use your products to drum up excitement and build engagement is by hosting a sales event or giving out discount codes. This is a sure-fire way to find relevant users, encourage brand sharing and start driving sales.

Offering exclusive deals to your Facebook fans will also encourage users to pay close attention to your page going forward so they don't miss out on any future deals.

Show Your Products in Action

Showing your products in action is arguably the best thing you can do to create product desire and generate interest in your brand, so it's a good move to devote some of your Facebook content to show off what your product can do.

Try to show off some really high-value and advanced use cases which demonstrate the full potential of your product and make people eager to try it.

If your brand or product revolve around long-term outcomes in any way then it's worth showing some success stories. This is perfect for brands who offer any sort of weight loss or exercise solution.

Get Creative

As important as it is to promote your brand and products on Facebook you need to ensure that you're still being entertaining and engaging. If people see your posts as nothing more than an advertisement they'll be quick to tune you out.

Try to show your product in a creative way, or even get your customers to show it off for you by running a fun content submission challenge.

Showcase Your Music and Other Creative Content

If you're a content creator such as a musician, YouTuber, or streamer then you should be using Facebook as an avenue for promoting your talents and exposing relevant users to your content.

If you're a musician or artist you should try posting footage from studios sessions, gigs, or exclusive behind-the-scenes perfomances.

If you're a video producer or streamer then you can post snippets of your videos on Facebook and direct users to your YouTube channel or Twitch stream where they can get more content.

Promote Your Onsite Content & Other Social Channels

As well as using Facebook to promote all of your products, you should also try to use the platform to draw some attention to onsite content such as blogs and videos, or even your other social media channels.

This will allow you to cross-pollinate your online following and build up a stronger presence on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and any other social media platforms you use.

Set Your Page Up For Success

As well as posting engaging content, it's also important to set your page up in a way which is instantly appealing and actively works to engage your audience.

Make Your Profile Appealing

A visually engaging profile picture and cover photo which clearly communicate who you are and what you do will help you grab the attention of page visitors and encourage them to check out your content and Like your page.

The header of your Facebook page is essentially free billboard space, so it's important that you don't let it go to waste.

Create a Call to Action

Having a custom CTA on your Facebook page is a great way to drive action from Facebook users and convert them into more than just a visitor.

Depending on what type of brand you are you may want to have a call to action which encourages users to "Shop Now", "Call Us", "Make a Reservation" or "Learn More".

CTAs are incredibly easy to set up. All you have to do is go to your page, click "Add a Button" and follow the simple steps to create your very own CTA.

Pin Your Best Post

Pinning a high-value post to the top of your Facebook page is a fantastic way to ensure that users are seeing something good as soon as they visit your profile.

You can use pinned posts to showcase any special deals you are currently offering, display an introductory video which highlights your brand and products, or direct visitors towards your website (where you can offer them a special welcome offer.

Allow Users to Message Your Page

Presenting Facebook visitors with a prompt to message your page with any questions they may have is an easy way to give your page an open and welcoming feel. It will also encourage users to put forward any questions they may have which can help you familiarise them with your brand and drive further action.

You can easily set this up in the messaging section of your page's settings.

You can tweak these settings to make your chat box automatically appear, prompt users with frequently asked questions, set automatic responses and create messenger greetings.

Ask For Reviews and Recommendations

Prominently featuring your reviews and recommendations at the top of your Facebook page can be a great way to establish credibility, build brand trust and encourage trial. Reviews can be particularly important for restaurants and other food providers, but they can be vital to the success of any business with an online presence.

All you need to do to display reviews is go to your page and click Settings > Templates and Tabs > Reviews Settings and make sure reviews are turned on.

If you're going to feature your reviews and recommendations then it's worth asking customers to leave you a review. You can do this directly on Facebook, on your checkout page or via a post-checkout email.

Other Tips For Boosting Engagement

As well as all of these ideas for setting up your page and posting content in an engaging way, there are a few other things you can do to help maximise engagement.

Interact With Your Fans

You should try to interact with your audience on Facebook as often as you can. This includes responding to posts on your page and comments on your posts.

Not only will this help you with Facebook's algorithm, but it will also help you build connections with your audience which will help you cultivate a loyal following and drive conversions.

Create Events Tied to Your Page

Creating events from your page is another awesome way to build excitement, boost engagement and drive actions. If you have an online store you can try running an online sales event and creating a Facebook event for it. If you're a brick and mortar retailer you could do the same but host a sale at your physical store. If you're going to be making an appearance at some sort of event or convention it's worth creating a Facebook event to make your presence known and drive attendance.

Partner Up With Influencers and Other Brands

Partnering up with influencers or other brands to engage in some cross-promotional activity is a truly fantastic way to expose yourself to a new targeted audience and seriously boost interest and awareness.

You can try partnering up to run a joint giveaway or another promotional campaign such as a sales event or a series of sponsored content.

Get More Ieas For Promoting Your Brand On Facebook

Run a Giveaway on Your Timeline

A particularly effective strategy you can use to drive likes and comments is running a giveaway from within your Facebook timeline. All it costs is the prize and it can help you engage your audience, drive Likes and help you grow your reach.

Find Out More About Running a Facebook Giveaway

Run a Giveaway on a 3rd Party App

As effective as running a giveaway directly on your Facebook timeline can be, if you really want to grow your online audience and drive Likes from new users you should consider running an in-app giveaway with a platform like Gleam's Competitions app, and promoting it across all of your social channels. This will allow you to drive Likes (and other awesome actions) from highly relevant users who may just become loyal followers and customers.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see how you can use Gleam to grow your presence on Facebook and beyond:

While Facebook won't allow you to directly incentivise Facebook Likes when you run a 3rd party giveaway, you will still be able to use your giveaway to drive traffic right to your Facebook page and ask them to Like it once they're there.

The best part about running your giveaway with Gleam is that you will be able to drive users to your Facebook page from a wide range of sources which will allow you to cross-pollinate your online following and expose your Facebook page to huge pools of new users.

Here are a few tips for how you can make the most of your giveaway and use it to boost your presence on Facebook and drive other powerful outcomes:

Use Your Giveaway to Drive Likes From Visitors

When you run a giveaway with Gleam you are able award entries to anyone who visits your Facebook page. You can then ask users if they've Liked your page and give them the chance to Like it from within your giveaway. While they will get their entry no matter what, this will still encourage many users to start following your page.

Drive Likes From Your User Details Form

When you run a giveaway with Gleam you can use a user details form to require users to sign in to your campaign with their email address before they start completing actions. Not only is this a great way to build your email list, it's also a solid way to give your Facebook page a boost as you can allow users to Like your page from within your giveaway.

Use Giveaways to Promote Your Content

You can also use a giveaway to incentivise users to view a Facebook post. This is an exceptional way to expose users to some high-value content, encourage them to check out your Facebook page and hopefully drive some Likes.

Use Secret Codes to Encourage Likes

Here's a nifty little trick you can use to drive Facebook Likes with your giveaway.

You can use Gleam's Secret Code action to award a bunch of bonus entries to anyone who enters your secret code, which you announce that you will be revealing on Facebook at some point during your giveaway.

This will encourage relevant users who want to enter your giveaway to not only Like your Facebook page, but also pay close enough attention to it that they don't miss out.

Redirect Giveaway Entrants to Your Facebook Page

You can also use Post Entry Redirects to send participants right to your Facebook when they complete every action in your giveaway. This will encourage highly relevant users to check you out and, if they like what they see, start following you.

Use Viral Shares to Find New Users

Sharing your giveaway across all of your social channels is a fantastic way to drive Likes and other powerful actions from your existing following, but if you really want your online presence to blow up you'll need to start exposing yourself to new users.

One particularly effective way to do this is by using Gleam's Viral Action to award entries to users who share the campaign with their friends. This will kickstart a cycle of peer-to-peer sharing and giveaway entries which expose your brand (and Facebook page) to hordes of relevant people.

Drive Other Important Actions

As truly fantastic as it can be boost your Facebook presence, Likes are only a fraction of what you can achieve with giveaways.

You can use giveaways to drive email signups, Twitter follows, YouTube visits and much more. You can also get users to visit your website, share your giveaway with friends, submit content and help promote your brand via Tweeets and Retweets. When it comes to running a giveaway with Gleam, the possibilities are endless.

Learn More About Running a Successful Giveaway

Ask Website Visitors For Likes

The key to a good Facebook follower is someone who is genuinely interested in your brand or products, as they are likely to engage with your content, respond to your promotions and act as a brand evangelist.

There may not be a group of users who fit the bill better than your website visitors, so it's a good move to make efforts to convert these visitors into Facebook followers.

A great way to do this is by using Gleam Capture to built targeted pop-ups which ask users to Like you on Facebook. If you can offer your Facebook following any special deals this will boost your chances of generating Likes.

If you want to make your pop-up extra targeted you can use our referring domain rule to only target users who have arrived at your website from Facebook. This will allow you to reach out to incidental Facebook visitors who showed enough interest in your brand to visit your website, and turn them into longterm followers.

Build Your Own Facebook Popup

What the Big Brands Are Doing to Drive Engagement

Now that we've gone through our favourite ideas for how you can organically build engagement on Facebook, we're going to quickly show you how a few brands who are incredibly successful on Facebook drive engagement:

GoPro Harnesses the Power of UGC

User-generated content is the cornerstone of GoPro's social media strategy. GoPro constantly sources new, high-value content through their GoPro Awards contests and their array of branded hashtags and post the content they receive on a daily basis.

This is a truly brilliant strategy, as UGC is cheap, authentic, relatable and downright engaging. There may not be a better way to connect with your audience and promote your brand in a trustworthy and reliable way than by collecting and sharing user content.

Find Out How You Can Easily Collect and Display User-Generated Content

Red Bull Understands Their Audience

Red Bull's Facebook feed is a constant stream of extreme sports, amazing feats and incredibly entertaining videos. It's brilliant.

Red Bull has a clear understanding of who their target audience are, and what they want to get out of their time on Facebook. This content appeals directly to the youthful and the adventurous, the exact market that Red Bull is going for.

While these videos may not directly promote the energy drink, they all appeal to the right audience, convey the right emotions and build a whole lot of engagement. This helps build favourable associations and keeps the Red Bull brand in front of a massive audience comprised of the 1.5 million users who have Liked the brand on Facebook.

Contiki Creates Product Desire

Contiki offers pre-planned holiday packages all over the world, so it's important for them to help instill a desire to travel in their audience.

This is an endeavour their Facebook page expertly succeeds at. Contiki's expert mix of wanderlust inducing travel photos, helpful travel blogs and entertaining travel memes make it hard for anyone visiting their site to not want to book a holiday immediately.

Contiki has amassed close to 1 million Facebook Likes and driven a lot of product interest from the platform. This just goes to show the value you can get from using your social channels to not only engage your audience, but also to promote your product and create a desire for it.

BirchBox Strikes the Perfect Balance

Facebook is filled with countless users looking for countless things on the platform. Some want to be entertained, some want to be informed, and some simply want to kickstart their online shopping journey.

Birchbox, a prominent beauty company excels at offering something for everyone. By striking the perfect content balance of product announcements, beauty blogs, memes, funny videos, user-generated content and special deals Birchbox has been able to cast a wide net and build a loyal following of over 2.7 million Facebook followers who all of the potential of becoming customers.

Jane.com Runs Weekly Giveaways

Every week, Jane.com runs a new giveaway and offers their audience the chance to win vouchers for their store and a fresh prize from their partners.

These giveaways have allowed Jane.com to consistently drive new traffic to their Facebook page, and convert their Facebook audience into followers on other platforms, and even customers.

By running weekly giveaways Jane.com has been able to acquire a constant stream of new leads which boosts their online presence and drives customer acquisition for a fraction of the cost of a traditional ad campaign.

This just goes to show the enormous power of using giveaways as a part of your marketing strategy.

Run Your Own Giveaway With Gleam

When you weigh up the pros and cons of buying Facebook likes en masse it becomes quite apparent that the tactic generally isn't worth it, especially when you factor in all the far more effective tactics and strategies you can take advantage of instead.

With all of these outstandingly powerful tactics for engaging your audience on Facebook you should be feeling ready to go out there and start driving Likes, building organic engagement and growing your brand!

Want More Facebook Growth Advice?

• Ultimate List of Facebook Marketing Ideas
• Forget Facebook Likes: 10 Alternatives to Grow Your Business Online
• Facebook Image Size Guide
• 40+ Awesome Giveaway Ideas
• Ultimate Guide to Running a Contest on Facebook
• Using Gleam to Run a Facebook Contest
• How to Promote a Contest on Facebook
• How to Run a Successful Hashtag Campaign

When properly executed, giveaways can be one of the most powerful promotional tools you have at your disposal, no matter what type of business or brand it is you're running.

Giveaways are incredibly engaging, outstanding for attracting attention and drawing in a new audience, and a perfect way to drive the actions which matter most to you. These can include newsletter subscriptions, social media follows, content creation, social referrals, promotional material exposure and much, much more.

To help you run your own powerful giveaway and reach all of your marketing goals we're going to take you through how you can easily run your own successful campaign and give you all our top tips for getting the most of your giveaway.

Getting Started

When you set out to run your own giveaway there are a few things you'll need to do before you launch your campaign to set yourself up for maximum success and ensure that you're going to get as much as possible out of your campaign.

Know Your Goals

Every time you run a giveaway you're putting yourself in an outstanding position to boost your promotional efforts, drive a host of powerful actions and enjoy a diverse array of valuable benefits.

There's so much that can be gained from each and every giveaway you run that it's important to figure out exactly what your goals are before you start. This will help you figure out what type of giveaway you should run, where you should run it, what entry actions you should drive and how you should promote it.

Some of the best goals you can set for your giveaways include:

• Generating brand and product awareness.
• Building hype for a product launch, sales event or other special promotions.
• Driving email signups.
• Growing your online following.
• Driving traffic to your website.
• Increasing social media engagement.
• Generating user-generated content.

All of these goals are incredibly achievable when you run the right type of giveaway and use it to drive the right actions. We'll take you through exactly how you can do this soon, but first we're going to take a look at another important consideration you'll need to make before you launch your giveaway.

Choosing the Perfect Prize

When you start to setup your giveaway one of the first (and most important) decisions you'll need to make is what you actually want to give away.

At the end of the day, the prize you offer up is what will ultimately drive participation and encourage users to complete your entry actions. Without a compelling prize you won't be able to attract entrants and maximise the value you get from your campaign.

As you set out to choose the perfect prize there are a few key considerations you need to make to ensure you're picking a prize that will attract the right entrants and drive meaningful value:

• Make sure your prize is relevant to your target audience. You always want to offer a prize which appeals to users who are likely to take an interest in your brand and products. This is the best way to ensure that you're driving meaningful actions from relevant users and potential customers.
• Choose a prize which helps your promotional efforts. The core purpose of a giveaway is to promote your brand, so it's important that your prize is contributing towards this goal. This may mean giving away a new product of yours, items newly available on your store or a prize from within your area of expertise.
• Make sure your prize is suitably valuable. You want whatever you give away to be well and truly worth the effort you're asking users to put in to win your prize. As a general rule, the more you're asking users to do to enter your giveaway, the more you should be offering in return. This can be more prizes, more valuable prizes or more winners.

Giving away your own product, or a bundle of your own products is generally an outstanding approach as it will allow you to attract a relevant audience and promote your brand in a way no other prizes can. However, if you don't have a product of your own or you simply want to take a different approach then there are plenty of other brilliant prizes you can offer up with your giveaway.

Running Your Giveaway

Once you've decided what you want to give away, and what you're hoping to achieve with your giveaway you'll be ready to put it into action and start driving engagement and powerful entry actions.

Types of Giveaways

There are a huge number of different types of giveaways you can run, it all comes down to you're trying to reach, and what entry actions you are trying to drive.

Some of the quickest and easiest types of giveaways you can host are those that are run directly on social media and offer entries in exchange for some simple actions.

Facebook Giveaways

Facebook is a great platform for reaching new audiences, building a community around your brand and promoting your products. A great way to increase your presence on the platform is by running a giveaway directly on your timeline and ask users to enter by:

• Liking your post.
• Commenting on your post.
• Upload a photo or other post with a designated hashtag.

These are all great ways you can use your giveaway to engage your audience, gain exposure and promote your offering to a new and excited audience.

Learn More About Running a Facebook Giveaway

Twitter Giveaways

Twitter is the perfect platform for spreading your content and promoting your brand to a huge new audience through tweets and retweets. Running a giveaway is a great way to incentivise the sharing of your content and grow your audience, as you can run a campaign which requires entrants to:

• Follow you.
• Retweet a post.
• Send out a tweet or post a photo with a hashtag.

Learn More About Running a Twitter Giveaway

Instagram Giveaways

Instagram is another platform which is suitable for running giveaways. You can simply post a photo which offers your audience the chance to win a prize by:

• Following you on Instagram.
• Liking your post.
• Tagging friends in the post.
• Posting a photo with your hashtag.

Learn More About Running an Instagram Giveaway

3rd Party Giveaways (The Best Option)

Running a giveaway directly on social media can be a quick and effective way to engage your audience and drive some actions, but if you want your campaign to reach a massive audience, drive and administer a diverse array of powerful actions and gain viral traction then you should be running your giveaway with a 3rd party app.

If you use Gleam's Competitions app to run your giveaway you will be able to put together a stylish and powerful campaign which will allow you to connect with your audience and drive a wide array of powerful actions which will help you reach any number of marketing objectives.

Take a look at this demo we put together to get an idea of what your own giveaway could look like with Gleam:

When you use Gleam to run your giveaway you will be able to host the campaign on your own website, or on one of our hosted landing pages. This gives you the opportunity to drive traffic to your giveaway from a multitude of sources which allows you to increase participation, drive more actions across more platforms and ultimately maximise the value you get from your campaign.

Choosing Entry Actions

If you run your giveaway directly on social media the entry actions you can incentivise are limited to the platform you're running the campaign on.

When you use a platform like Gleam to run your giveaway you will be able to incentivise a multitude of powerful actions across all of your social channels and much, much more. This is one of the key advantages of using a 3rd party app to run your giveaway.

Here are just some of the awesome actions you can drive with your own Gleam giveaway:

• Email subscriptions.
• Website visits which can drive traffic to you home page, a landing page or anywhere else.
• Facebook and Instagram profile or post visits.
• Twitter follows, tweets and retweets.
• Content submission via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and direct uploads.
• Watching promotional videos.
• Visiting your YouTube channel.
• Sharing your giveaway with friends.
• Answering questions, providing feedback and entering secret codes.
• Checking out your crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
• Downloading your app.
• Interacting with you on SoundCloud and Spotify, including following you and listening/sharing your songs.
• Engaging with you on a range of other platforms including Twitch, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and more.
• Getting Loyalty Bonuses for having entered your previous giveaways.

The huge selection of actions you can drive with Gleam means that matter what it is that you want to get out of your giveaway, you will be able drive relevant actions and reach your goals.

Another plus is that Gleam automatically administers and validates all entry actions so you don't have to sink all your time into making sure people are properly completing actions.

Find Out How to Setup Your Own Giveaway With Gleam

Promoting Your Giveaway

Once you've decided on the actions you want to drive and launched your giveaway it will be time to share it with the world. No matter how well you've put together your giveaway it won't be a success unless you can put it in front of an audience.

It's important that you announce your giveaway to your entire online audience as soon as it goes live. This includes sharing it with your mailing list and posting across every social media platform you operate on. You can also try announcing your giveaway to your audience before you go live to build some hype and get people excited to enter.

Hosting your giveaway on your own website is another great way to attract entrants, as you can use popups and dedicated pages to draw attention to your giveaway and drive action from highly relevant users.

These tactics are all fantastic for promoting your giveaway to your audience and getting the ball rolling on participation, but if you want to maximise your reach you'll need to encourage users to share your giveaway with their friends and kick off the cycle of social referrals.

You can achieve this by asking your follows to share/retweet your giveaway posts or tag their friends in the comments. You can also use your giveaway itself to drive social referrals by using our retweet or viral share actions to award extra entries to users who help you promote your campaign.

Check Out Our In-Depth Guide On Promoting Your Giveaway

What's Next?

So you've successfully run a giveaway, driven a bunch of powerful actions and reached your campaign goals. Now what?

The first thing you should do is take a moment to enjoy the benefits of all the actions you drove.

The second thing you should do is get right back to work. In the immediate aftermath of your giveaway you should have a freshly expanded following and switched on and engaged audience who are primed to take further action. Now is the perfect time to get your audience to take action.

Re-Engage Your Audience

Giveaways provide you with the perfect opportunity to engage your existing followers and substantially grow your online audience.

If your giveaway leaves you inundated with new followers it's crucial that you make efforts to re-engage them in the immediate aftermath of your giveaway. This will help you solidify your relationship with them and prevent your following from dwindling in the time following your campaign.

You can do this by sharing high quality social media content which really engages your audience, or running one of the following types of follow-up campaigns.

Drive Sales With Coupons and Discounts

Running a giveaway will help you attract an audience of relevant and excited users who have displayed a clear interest in your brand and products. The immediate aftermath of your giveaway is the perfect time to convert these users into customers by offering up coupon codes and discounts.

You can do this by emailing out discount codes to giveaway entrants, running a rewards campaign, giving out coupons to website visitors or hosting and promoting a storewide sale.

Find Out More About Using Coupons to Drive Sales

Run Another Giveaway

If you had success running a giveaway once, chances are you'll have success again.

Running giveaways on a regular basis is an awesome way to consistently engage your audience, drive meaningful actions, promote your brand and grow your following. This is especially true if you are using the viral share and retweet actions to constantly expand your giveaway's reach.

Our Top Tips For Running a Successful Giveaway

We've seen and facilitated an enormous amount of giveaways here at Gleam. We've even run a lot of our own campaigns.

While running and examining all these giveaways we've developed a pretty good sense of what makes a giveaway successful. So to help you get the most out of your giveaway and find success we're going to take you through our favourite tips for running a successful giveaway, many of which we've used ourselves to drive powerful results.

Also Make Sure You Check Out The Top 10 Giveaway Mistakes You Must Avoid

Use a Good Feature Image

Anytime you run a giveaway the first thing everyone will notice is your visual copy.

Accompanying your giveaway with eye-catching, engaging, informative imagery is key to the success of your campaign. The visuals you use to promote your giveaway should grab people's attention and communicate exactly what your giveaway is and what entrants stand to win. You want to make your prize as alluring as possible.

When you run a giveaway with Gleam you can include a feature image will be displayed on your giveaway itself, as well as when you share your campaign on social media. Using a good feature image will make your campaign much more visually appealing and encourage increased participation from all users.

Using a high-quality 1080x567px image will optimise your feature image's display in the widget and on social media on all devices, so if possible this is the image size you should aim for.

Be Descriptive

As well as creating some captivating visual copy, the written language you use to promote and provide instructions on your giveaway is also of paramount importance. You need to make sure you're:

• Describing your prize in an enticing way.
• Providing clear and succinct instructions on how to enter your giveaway.
• Draw attention to your brand and promote whatever it is you do.

Run It On A Custom Page

Running your giveaway in a page on your website is a savvy move. It gives you ultimate control of how you present your giveaway to your audience and allows you to use your giveaway to drive traffic to your website where you can encourage further brand exploration, build further interest and possibly even drive some sales.

You can also take a slightly different approach and embed your giveaway in a page where your website visitors will naturally come across it. This could be a popup on your home page, in a relevant blog post, or even on a post-checkout page.

Have a Dedicated Giveaway Page

Another effective approach you can take to running your campaign on your website is setting up a dedicated giveaway page. This is a particularly good move you run giveaways on a regular basis and want to give your users a familiar location they can visit to enter your giveaways time and time again.

This will make it a lot easier for you to consistently drive traffic to all of your giveaways or any other promotional campaigns you may be running.

Having a dedicated giveaway page can be particularly effective if you're running multiple giveaways or promotional campaigns at once and want to encourage users to participate in them all.

Check Out Our Giveaway Page

Use the Promote Feature

If you're running multiple giveaways then it's safe to assume that you want to the people entering one giveaway to enter all the rest. An outstanding way to encourage the participants of one giveaway to enter another one is by using Gleam's promote action to award extra entries to users who enter another one of your campaigns.

You don't even have to use this action to promote your own campaign. If you have formed a promotional partnership with another brand or influencer and are both running a giveaway you can use the promote action to send traffic to each other's campaign and cross-pollinate your entrant pool.

Get Users to Follow You On Various Social Channels

A strong online following is one of the most valuable assets any marketer can have. Building up a social presence makes it significantly easier to connect with your target audience, promote your brand, encourage social sharing and drive sales, subscriptions, and any other actions you strive for.

Giveaways are the perfect opportunity to grow your social presence by incentivising users to follow you on various social media platforms. Facebook and Instagram don't allow you to incentivise page like and follows with 3rd party giveaways, but a combination of incentivising profile visits and asking entrants to follow you in your copy will allow you to drive plenty of follows on these platforms.

The power of using giveaways to grow your online following isn't just limited to popular social media platforms. With Gleam you can use giveaways to expand your following and engagement on a huge range of platforms you may be active on, including...

• YouTube
• Twitch
• SoundCloud
• Spotify
• Pinterest
• ...and more!

Whatever online channels you choose to reach your audience, giveaways can always help grow your following.

Use Bonus Actions to Encourage Users to Complete Everything

The beauty of running a giveaway with a 3rd party platform is that you have the opportunity to drive a wide array of valuable actions rather than the limited selection you are faced with when you run a giveaway directly on social media.

When you use a giveaway to drive a wide breadth of actions you will want as many people as you can to complete as many actions as possible. The entries users earn with every action they complete will help you drive multiple actions from every entrant, but if you really want to get every last drop of value you can from your campaign you should check out Gleam's bonus action.

With the Bonus action you can award a bunch of extra entries to anyone who completes every action in your giveaway. This is a tactic we've used many times to drive more actions from entrants and maximise the value we get from our giveaways.

Use Custom Actions to Drive Onsite Activity

If there's a specific action on your site that you want to drive then chances are you can use Gleam's custom actions to put it into play.

With custom actions you can ask users to complete a specific task and then validate their entries with questions, Tracking, or both.

A popular use of custom actions is to award giveaway entries to users who successfully create a profile or account on your website. This is an awesome way to generate new leads and acquire relevant users.

Use Viral Shares to Create Buzz

When you run a giveaway you can easily and effectively promote your campaign to your existing followers with social media posts, email notifications and onsite advertising. There's no doubt that this will give your giveaway a major leg-up, but if you want your campaign to be a massive success you'll need to generate social referrals which will get your campaign in front of a new audience of relevant leads who you can convert into social followers, subscribers and customers.

As effective as simply asking users to share your giveaway or tag their friends can be, there isn't a more powerful way to drive social referrals than incentivising them with Gleam's Viral Share action.

We touched on this tactic earlier but it is so effective that we're mentioning it again. With viral shares you can use entries to incentivise users to share your campaign with friends. This is the perfect way to expand your audience and drive more actions from highly relevant leads.

Viral shares are so effective that we include them in every giveaway we run. We've even had customers achieve terrific results by basing entire campaigns around viral shares.

Give Out Coupons Inside Your Giveaway

Giveaways are an outstanding way to build awareness and grow your following. This makes it a lot easier to drive future purchases, but did you know that you can also use your giveaways to drive immediate conversions and sales?

People who enter your giveaway are highly likely to have in interest in your brand and products, and you can convert this interest into action by offering everyone who enters your giveaway a coupon code which entitles them to a discount at your store.

You can execute this tactic by emailing out a coupon to entrants, or you can give out coupons from within your giveaway (and your website) with our powerful Coupon action.

You can use our coupon action to offer up discounts to everyone who enters your giveaway, or you can lock your coupon until users have completed a bunch of entries to incentivise the completion of more promotional actions whilst also driving sales.

Find Out More About Distributing Coupons From Your Giveaway

Use Your Giveaway to Collect User-Generated Content

User-generated content is one of the most valuable things you can get your hands on as a marketer. It's endearing, relatable, and it allows you to promote your offering in a way which seamlessly blends into the social media landscape.

One of the best ways to collect a ton of high quality user content is by running a giveaway where users can enter by submitting photos according to your specifications. You could choose to pick a winner at random or award your prize to the best entry or entries.

Running a photo contest is easy with Gleam, as you can use our select photo actions on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or you can use our Import actions to create a giveaway hashtag and automatically import social media photos with your hashtag into the giveaway.

This is a brilliant way to use your giveaway to drive some serious engagement and get your hands on a lot of valuable marketing material.

Find Out More About Using Giveaways to Collect User-Generated Content

Use Mandatory Actions

Running a giveaway is a brilliant way to drive a multitude of powerful actions with one powerful campaign. However, when you run a giveaway which drives a lot of different actions it's likely that there will be some actions you want to drive more than others.

If this is the case you can use Gleam's mandatory actions feature to require users to complete one or multiple high-value actions before they can access the rest of your actions and earn more entries.

You can use mandatory actions to drive high-value actions such as email signups, Twitter follows and subscriptions across any platform you operate on like Twitch, Spotify, SoundCloud and more.

Just be careful, when you use this tactic you run the risk of alienating any users who don't use a platform you may be basing your mandatory action around.

Redirect Users Post Entry

When you use Gleam to run a giveaway you have the option of automatically redirecting users to a specified URL once they have completed the actions in your campaign.

This can provide you with a great opportunity to drive some further action in the aftermath of your giveaway when users are engaged, excited, and feeling very good about your brand.

There are loads of awesome ways you can put post-entry redirects to good use.

• You can redirect entrants to a blog post which promotes your offering.
• If you're a content creator you can take participants to some of your most popular content, whether it be music, videos, or writing.
• If you're using your giveaway to promote a product or sales event you can use post-entry redirects to take entrants right to your store.

Promote Your Contest on Social Media

We've said it before and we'll say it again: promotion is the key to your giveaway's success.

If you really want to make the most of your campaign then you need to be actively getting on every social media you operate on and promoting your giveaway.

This includes: announcing the giveaway, hyping up the prize, telling people how and where they can enter and encouraging them to spread the word to their friends.

Create a Giveaway Subscriber List

As well as promoting your giveaway on social media you should also be sharing the promotion with your email subscribers.

Your mailing list will be populated with users who have already displayed a clear interest in your brand. This makes them perfect giveaway entrants who shouldn't be overlooked.

As well as using your mailing list to promote your giveaway, you should also be using your giveaway to promote your mailing list. This is an easy task thanks to our Subscibe action.

Building your mailing list won't just make it easier to promote your future giveaways, it will also give the rest of your marketing efforts a massive boost, as email marketing remains one of the most powerful promotional methods around.

Find Out How You Can Drive Sales From Your Mailing List

Select Multiple Winners

The more winners you include in your giveaway, the more likely people will think they are to win. And the more likely they think they are to win the more likely they are to enter.

Running a giveaway which offers up prizes to multiple winners can be a really effective way to drum up participation.

You may want to announce a bunch of winners all at the end, or you may want to run a campaign which draws a daily winner over the course of a week.

This can be a great way to hold people's attention, keep your brand at the top of their mind and drive more actions from users trying to boost their odds of winning on a daily basis.

Run Regular Giveaways

Giveaways are a hugely effective way to drive meaningful actions, engage your audience and grow your business. If you run one successful giveaway and then call it quits you're missing out on the opportunity to constantly grow and drive powerful actions with regular giveaways.

Making giveaways a cornerstone of your overall marketing strategy can be an outstanding way to constantly get your brand in front of new audiences and drive non-stop acquisition.

Check Out How Jane.com Drive Constant Growth With Regular Giveaways

Create a Prize Bundle

A great strategy for exposing your giveaway (and therefore your brand) to a huge new audience is to partner up with other brands to give away a valuable prize bundle in a collaborative giveaway.

Partnering up with other brands to give away a prize bundle is an awesome way to increase participation, drive powerful actions from your partner's users and help promote your brand to a new and relevant audience.

This strategy can be particularly effective for emerging brands teaming up with more established partners to help build awareness.

The key to partnering up with other brands is to know who you should be partnering up with. You want to team up with relevant brands who share a common target audience, but offer a complementary product rather than a competing one.

This will allow you to tap into a relevant audience without the risk of being outshone by a competitor.

Find Out Everything You Need To Know To Run Your Own Partner Giveaway

With the help of all these powerful tips and tactics (plus plenty more you can check out here) you should be feeling ready to go out and start running you're own successful giveaways. Keep our advice in mind and you'll have no issues reaching a sizable audience, driving the actions that matter to you and achieving all of your marketing goals.

Good luck!

More Tips For Running a Successful Giveaway

• 50 Growth Hacks Using Gleam
• 40 Powerful Ideas For Your Next Giveaway
• 150 Awesome Prize Ideas
• Using Contests to Collect User-Generated Content
• Running Photo Voting Contests
• The Ultimate Guide to Generating Leads
• Running the Perfect Facebook Giveaway
• Running Giveaways on Instagram
• How to Run a YouTube Giveaway
• 50+ Awesome Email Marketing Ideas
• Check Out More Tips & Tricks For Your Competition

If you're an online retailer then you're well aware of the power of distributing coupons to your customers and subscribers, whether they are incentivised or not.

To take your coupon campaigns a step further, we're going to introduce you to Gleam's new Coupon feature which can be used in both Competitions & Rewards.

One way of using Coupon is by creating tiered coupons which allows users to complete actions to earn increasingly valuable incentives. This is a highly effective tactic to engage with customers/subscribers, plus it's a much more interactive way to engage with visitors while rewarding the both of you.

Here's a demo:

One way of using tiered coupons is by setting up a welcome offer on your homepage, like this:

In this tutorial we're going to teach you how to create tiered coupons as well as provide some ideas on where to use them in your E-commerce business.

How Tiered Coupons Work

Curious how our tiered coupon system works? Coupons are locked intermittently until you complete a specified number of actions. Once you reach a milestone, you get to redeem a coupon.

Here's how the coupon redemption process looks like:

Alternatively, you could continue performing more actions to redeem the final coupon, which is assumed to be of the highest value.

The final coupon will be unlocked and presented like this:

How To Create Tiered Coupons

1. How Many Coupons?

First, you'll want to figure out how much of a discount, as well as how many tiers of coupons you would like to offer to your customers or subscribers.

For this example, we're going to keep it simple and set up a 2-tier coupon system:

1. Visitor performs some 'light' actions, gets a 10% discount
2. Visitor continues to perform some slightly more time-consuming actions, gets a 20% discount

2. Implement The Actions

Once you have a good idea of the tiers of coupons you'd like to distribute, you can set up the list of actions you would like the visitor to perform in order to redeem your coupons.

3. Tier Coupons In Between Actions

Now it's time to nest the coupons in between tiers of actions. For this example, we implement a Coupon for the 10% discount, and then a Bonus action that will unlock the final reward, which is a 20% discount.

The final list of actions, or redeem methods, will look like this:

To lock the 10% coupon, all you have to do is set the 'Actions Required' parameter to '3', which is the number of actions required before redeeming the first-tier coupon:

4. Configure The Final Tier

For the final tier, you could write an instruction in the Reward description area stating that the final coupon will be presented to the entrant once they have completed the required number of actions.

A better alternative would be to add a final Bonus action so that your final offer is listed among the redeem methods, resulting in an easier to understand interface.

Once you have the Bonus action implemented, all you have to do is fill in the configurations under 'Reward' tab:

The only thing to note here is that 'Actions required to unlock Coupon' is '6' instead of '7'. This is because the Coupon is not considered as an action.

From the widget, clicking on the last Bonus action will lead visitors to the final coupon. Here is how it will look like to your visitors:

Everything looking good? We're going to show you how and where you can implement this growth hack:

Welcome Offers On Your Website

With Gleam Rewards, you can introduce tiered coupons to new website visitors so they get to enjoy a discount on their first purchase.

When installed on your homepage, you can implement certain actions to help introduce your brand to visitors, or keep potential customers in the loop by offering the option to subscribe to your mailing list or follow you on social media.

Since it's a welcome offer, you're probably targeting new website visitors, so make sure the actions you implement are not too invasive or context-dependent.

For that reason, we recommend implementing actions that will help introduce your brand and provide context to new visitors. The goal is to make them feel right at home with you, as well as drive awareness to what kind of products or services you provide as well as your latest additions.

Here are some examples, sorted by increasing effort:

• Subscribe to your mailing list
• Visit profile on social media platforms
• Answer some questions about what or who they're shopping for
• View a video about your product or brand

Check out the full list of actions or redeem methods for Gleam Rewards

Install The Welcome Offer As A Tab

To present the welcome offer on your homepage, it's advisable to keep it hidden in a tab, so that only those who are interested can click on it to see what you have up on offer.

To keep your Rewards app hidden, just install it as a tab by embedding our script on your homepage. Here's how it will look like on a website:

Exclusive Email-Only Offer

Another option is to create an exclusive offer for your subscribers only. This can help target a more specific audience so that your campaign is more effective when it comes to achieving your goals - whatever they may be.

Furthermore, you already know subscribers are interested in your brand so they are primed to take action and redeem your coupons. That means the engagement rate is much more effective, as well as a higher chance of those coupons converting into sales and revenue.

Since existing subscribers are more aware of your brand, you can then implement actions that are more context-dependent, such as surveys or quizzes.

Distribute The Exclusive Offer In A Landing Page

If you're wondering how you're going to get subscribers to perform actions from their mailbox, then we've got you covered.

For each Gleam campaign you run with us, you'll get a unique, beautiful hosted landing page for your campaign that you can distribute to entrants, like this:

And don't worry, that's free. You'll get a unique landing page to your campaign with a link that looks a bit like this one:

https://gleam.io/wAayB/4th-july-flash-sale-tiered

Get Started With Your Own Tiered Coupon Campaign

If you operate in E-Commerce then using coupons to promote your business, capture your audience's attention and drive sales should be at the top of your to-do list.

Discounts and coupons play a huge role in the purchase decisions of most online shoppers. If you're not distributing coupons to customers for your online store, you're essentially passing on the opportunity to communicate with over half of online shoppers in the USA:

In addition to being one of the best strategies you can use to drive sales, coupons are also outstanding for driving other powerful actions which can give your immediate and long-term  promotional efforts a significant boost.

In this post we're going to take you through how you can use your coupons to incentivise actions which help you promote your business, acquire new customers, retain your existing ones and ultimately drive revenue growth.

What Are Action-Based Coupons?

Coined by our team here at Gleam, action-based coupons are digital promotional codes that your customers can unlock when they perform designated actions that are beneficial for your business.

You can use locked coupons to incentivise actions such as social follows, content creation, referrals or even purchases. For example, you could offer website visitors 10% off their purchase if they follow you on Twitter, or a huge discount on their first purchase if they sign up to your mailing list.

The most common type of action-based coupons are opt-in forms on websites which ask users to sign up to a mailing list in exchange for a discount code. This is an outstanding way to convert website visitors into customers and grow your mailing list, but this only scratches the surface of how you can use coupons to drive actions.

We're going to show you how some of our customers at Gleam have used Gleam Rewards to take advantage of the flexibility in building coupon campaigns and how you can gate your own coupons.

At the end of this post, you will be able to drive multiple actions that are essential to your business by using rewards or coupons as an incentive.

Why Should I Gate My Coupons?

Publicly distributing discount coupons will undeniably help you drive more sales and acquire more customers. However, there's something else worth considering - how much value are you getting in return for the discounts you are offering?

While there are certainly benefits to making your coupons freely accessible to everyone, gating your coupons can also be incredibly helpful for growing your business and keeping your customers engaged with your brand.

Let's take a look at a few of the benefits of gating your coupon codes to incentivise action:

Drive Powerful Actions

By distributing action-based coupons, not only will you provide a stellar customer experience in a cost-effective manner, you'll also get to enjoy the tangible results of the actions you drive.

Depending on the actions you choose to incentivise, you could be looking at benefits such as:

• Increased revenue from coupon sales, as customers tend to spend more if they have a promo code.
• Increased social media following from using your coupons to drive traffic to online platforms.
• More customer insight from surveys and feedback forms.
• Getting customers to understand your unique value proposition better via website visits or video views.
• Collecting more user-generated content to be used in future marketing campaigns.

Cost-Effective To Distribute

Compared to distributing coupons freely without reciprocation, action-based coupons are much more cost-effective to distribute because you are getting actions performed in return.

The actions performed by your customers/visitors will often act as extra promotion for your business. This can help you save on marketing budget by using a coupon campaign distributed across social media to drive website traffic, social follows as well as customer acquisition in place of costly ad campaigns.

Foster An Engaged Audience

Using action-based coupons can really show you who your true fans are. When distributing coupons that are 'locked' behind actions, you'll attract an audience that is willing to perform the actions to 'unlock' their reward.

At this stage of the funnel, deal seekers will usually fall off, leaving you with an interested and engaged audience that is primed to take action and purchase products from you.

This will allow you to grow your mailing list, social following and customer base with an audience that is well and truly engaged with your brand and will continue to support you for the years to come.

This is especially powerful for early-stage businesses, as having a group of early adopters who are engaged is essential when it comes to gaining traction and carving out your market segment.

What Are Actions?

We've taken a good look at why you should be using your coupons to drive action, but what exactly are the actions you can incentivise with a coupon campaign?

Actions are anything your customers, visitors, or subscribers can perform for you that will eventually help grow your business through various means.

For example, you can incentivise your customers to complete a product survey for you to enjoy a 15% discount off their next purchase - so the action they perform is the completion of your survey.

By using action-based coupons, you create an opportunity to interact with customers or subscribers where you may otherwise not be able to. For the product survey action, not only do you secure a sale from the discount, you also receive precious feedback and insight from beloved customers.

Other actions beneficial to your business include but are not limited to:

• Subscribing to your mailing list
• Following/visiting you on social media
• Reading a blog post
• Visiting a web page
• Watching a product video
• Sharing discounted offering with friends
• Making a purchase*

In fact, here at Gleam we have close to 90 actions that can help you achieve lofty business goals while distributing action-based coupons. Later in this post, we'll fill you in on how you can use our Apps to 'gate' your coupons and incentivise more actions with your discounts and rewards.

How To Gate Action-Based Coupons

There are three main components when it comes to distributing the action-based coupon:

• The Action
• The Coupon
• The Gating and Redemption Experience

1. Incentivised Actions

Gating your coupons behind actions will naturally make some users less likely to claim and redeem your discount code. In order to maximise the amount of actions you drive, as well the amount of users who claim a coupon and make a purchase it's important that your actions aren't too challenging to complete. Here are a few considerations you should make to ensure the barriers to your coupon aren't too high.

Action Is Quick And Easy To Complete

The actions you are requesting from customers or subscribers should be relatively quick and easy to complete. If it is too time-consuming or challenging, the shopper may attempt to complete it but eventually drop off. You need to make sure there is a balance between the risk of drop off and driving desired actions.

You also want to make sure the action and coupon redemption experience is mobile-friendly, so that actions like requesting for user-generated content (UGC) (e.g. photos of customers using your products) becomes an easy feat.

Value Received Is Proportionate To Effort Exerted

As a rule of thumb, the value of your discount should be proportionate to the effort required to complete the actions required to unlock it. It simply doesn't make sense for visitors to write you an essay in order to redeem a 5% discount.

You'll also want to consider how many actions you would like the shopper to perform for them to redeem a specific coupon.

If the actions are easy to complete (e.g. visiting a webpage or following you on Twitter) you can stack multiple actions to redeem the same coupon.

If you would like the shopper to complete a few lofty tasks such as completing a survey, or watching a promotional video, then you'll need to make sure you are offering substantial value to incentivise completion of those actions.

2. Choose Your Reward

You can use coupon codes to offer up a wide range of rewards including discounts, free trials, exclusive content and much, much more. The reward you offer your audience is what will prompt them to take action, so it's important that you get it right.

Offering up discounts on specific products or across your entire store is always a good bet, as this will act as outstanding incentive for relevant users while also helping you drive some immediate sales. Just remember to keep the size of the discount proportional to the actions you are demanding.

If you want to steer clear of reducing your prices there are a number of other valuable rewards you can dispense with coupon codes. This includes:

• Free samples, e.g. a mini version of the customer's desired product, or a sample of your bestselling/upcoming product.
• Brand merchandise, e.g. stickers with your brand logo on it.
• Free shipping and/or returns.
• Gated content, e.g. an advanced guide on how to use your product.
• Entry to exclusive community for fans of your brand.

3. Incentivising And Gating The Action-Based Coupon  

Once you have planned out the actions you want to drive and the reward you will be offering it's time to think about how you can setup a campaign to distribute your coupons and drive your desired actions.

A lot of this comes down to where you want to distribute your coupon and what actions you want to drive.

If you're simply driving email signups you can easily email out the coupon code to new subscribers or display it in a popup.

If you're asking for more comprehensive actions then you can ask users to email or message you with verification that they have completed the action, and you can respond with your coupon.

If you use Gleam Rewards to drive actions, we will automatically verify each action from the user, and we'll even email them their coupon code in a beautifully designed template:

Distributing Coupons On Your Website

Opt-in forms situated on your website are a great way to drive more visitors into your mailing list and there may not be a more effective way to drive more signups (and sales) than offering a coupon.

Using this method, you can create popups situated strategically across your website for different intentions and behaviours, while offering a discount in exchange for an email signup.

Since a popup is invasive by nature, you will want to limit the number of actions you want to ask for. For that reason, we recommend limiting to only one action - entering an email address to subscribe for your newsletter for example.

To make sure that the person is indeed entering a valid email address, you can also choose to send the coupon code to the person via email once they have entered their email address.

Distributing Coupons On Social Media

Distributing coupons on social media can be an outstanding way to reach a huge audience and share your discounted offering with as many people as possible, but it can be a bit challenging to exchange these coupons for actions.

It's easy to ask users to complete actions on social media. If you're offering up a coupon on Twitter you can ask for retweets or follows, if you're using Facebook you can encourage likes, comments and shares, and so on. The real challenge arises when it's time to validate entries and distribute coupons.

Without using a 3rd party platform, you will have to ask users to send you a DM asking for a coupon, you will then have to manually validate their entries and send them back a coupon code.

This is generally way too much of an effort, especially if you're distributing coupons on a large scale. It's for this reason that we recommend using a 3rd party app such as Gleam Rewards to distribute your coupon codes.

Gate Action-Based Coupons With Gleam Rewards

When it comes to using your coupons to drive powerful actions, there isn't an approach you can take which will be more effective than running a Rewards campaign with Gleam.

Our modular app allows you to integrate multiple actions into one coupon campaign, and it automatically verifies each action performed by your visitors so your coupon codes are distributed more effectively.

Plus, when you use Rewards you will be able to house your campaign on your website or on one of our hosted landing pages. This will help you maximise participation as you can easily drive traffic to your coupons from an array of sources including your website, your email list, and social media.

Have a play with our Rewards demo and see how it works:

Gleam offers over 90 different actions you can integrate into each coupon campaign so you can always drive the actions that matter to you. To you help you get an idea of exactly what you can accomplish with Gleam we'll take you through some of the most powerful types of Rewards campaigns you can run to drive powerful actions and generate sales:

Retain More Customers

Regardless of what you're selling, the post-checkout experience is extremely important in the competitive world of E-commerce. If you want more customers to return to your store and make purchases from you, then the journey doesn't just end at the post-checkout page. In fact, it has just begun.

New customers should have the option to stay in the loop with your new offerings or future sales promotions. You can do this by embedding our app on your post-checkout page and using it to drive actions such as email subscriptions and social media follows.

You can easily incentivise these actions (as well as future sales) by offering a discount on their next purchase:

Get More Social Media Followers

If you're looking to drive more traffic to your social media channels as well as grow your followers, then you're in luck. Did you know that 71% of consumers reported they follow their favourite brands on social media to get coupon codes?

Our customer Teami Blends uses our app to connect visitors to multiple social media channels they are on. In exchange, Teami Blends offers a 5% discount to new subscribers:

Get More People To Try Your Product

Instead of using monetary benefits as an incentive, you can also use your product as the incentive itself. Free trials or free samples can be a great foot in the door technique to drive more customers your way.

One of our customers, XSplit strategically gates free trials of their new product by getting customers to share the product release with their friends and family.

Get More Insight With Customer Feedback

Have you ever ordered a Subway sandwich and found a free cookie offer on the back of your receipt? Subway routinely collects customer feedback by offering up free cookies, all the customer has to do is fill up their receipt reference number, then complete their 1-minute survey.

You don't need to give out cookies if you're an online business, you should know by now what tools are at your disposal. If you don't...we mean coupons 🎟

Our Rewards app have actions like answer a question or complete a Typeform survey so you can build customer feedback or product survey campaigns while also distribute your rewards in the same space.

Our simple app can be embedded on your online store's post-checkout page to collect feedback on the checkout experience:

Collect User-Generated Content From Fans

User-generated content (UGC) is essentially a collaboration with your customers to develop high-quality content you can use for your future marketing campaigns. If you have a lot of customers who are fans of your product, there's no reason not to ask why exactly they love you.

Besides, featuring customers on your newsletters, website or social media channels are also great ways to interact with beloved customers and make that part of the post-purchase experience.

Just look at how Frank Body uses photos and testimonials from their customers to engage with subscribers and bring attention to their bestselling products:

If you want to start collecting UGC for your own E-commerce business, using coupons is the way to go. Let's look at what kind of UGC you can incentivise using action-based coupons:

Collecting Photos From Customers

You can get customers to submit photos of them enjoying your product in exchange for your coupon.

Using our Rewards app, Simply Straw runs an ongoing #PledgeAgainstPlasticStraws campaign by getting new visitors to submit photos and spread the word about their movement.

In exchange, Simply Straws offers a coupon to new shoppers to redeem a free glass straw.

Want your own? Have a play with our demo to see what the UGC collection process is like:

Collecting Reviews From Customers

Regardless of what kind of online business you have, you'll know customer reviews are the cornerstone for getting more sales and gaining your customer's trust.

Depending on the platform's regulations, it's possible to incentivise your reviews by offering a coupon for some reward.

Just make sure you've read the review platform's policies before implementing this action, as some platforms don't allow incentivised reviews.

Why Not Both?

If you want to build a repertoire of gleaming testimonials along with high-quality images provided by your customers themselves, why not request for both?

Have a look at our demo and see if you can replicate your own testimonial collection campaign:

Get Customers To Refer Their Friends

Referral programs are great when it comes to acquiring more like-minded customers. You can get your existing customers to recommend your product to their friends and family in order to get more customers.

But of course, it goes without saying that you need to incentivise your customers in order to receive referrals. Gleam Rewards allows you to set up referral programs that reward both you and your customers.

Our app can help you create a referral program that can be installed anywhere on your website. Check out our demo below:

Distribute Action-Based Coupons In A Landing Page

While you can drive most of the actions mentioned from your website by embedding it on a page, you may want to experiment by limiting the campaigns to a specific audience from time to time.

That's when having a secret landing page come in handy - you can target specific segments in your customer base by offering different coupon campaigns based on purchase behaviour and intention.

Since we host a free hosted landing page for each Gleam Rewards campaign, you can distribute secret or 'limited' coupon codes in a few ways:

Create Exclusive Email-Only Deals

Landing pages are the perfect ally for email campaigns because it is not exposed on your main website or social media channels. You can communicate directly with your subscribers and experiment with what coupons work without the noise of deal seekers or cold traffic.

Imagine you want to limit a special flash sales session to existing customers or subscribers only. You can then setup a Gleam Rewards campaign then share the hosted landing page link with your mailing list via email:

Your subscribers can then complete the actions you requested and then claim their discount coupon - all of this done out of public view.

More Effective Influencer Marketing

If you're an online retailer then you must have considered influencer marketing at some point. The challenge when it comes to partnering with influencers is that results may vary a lot and it's difficult to measure the effectiveness of each influencer's power to...influence.

Using Gleam Rewards can help ensure actions prompted by both you and your influencer are completed before the coupon is being redeemed. If your influencer operates on a third party channel such as Instagram or Twitter, then it also allows them the extra flexibility of implementing actions outside of those channels.

All your influencer has to do is send their followers to our landing pages where followers can complete the actions and redeem your coupon:

Learn more about using Gleam to partner with influencers

Drive Highly-Targeted Traffic To Amazon Product Listings

If you are an Amazon seller, then you will know the challenges of ranking your products within the platform, as well as driving traffic to your product listings externally.

Since external traffic is a great factor in influencing your product rankings, you can try sending secret deals to your mailing list so you gain more control over the traffic going to your Amazon product listings.

Since your subscribers have a higher purchase intent than cold traffic, it's likely your bounce rates will go down, hence improving your Amazon internal rankings.

Our Amazon Growth Guide has more ideas on how you can drive more sales

Pair Giveaways With Gated Coupons In Competitions

It should go without saying that we're going to include coupon codes in giveaways too, because why not?

Giveaways are a fun and engaging way to drive more awareness about your brand, create excitement for customers and fans as well as drive more traffic to your business.

In the midst of all that excitement, you can take the opportunity of including a little discount in your giveaway so that all entrants can get an instant win before they even win something at a later date. That's double the reason for them to enter a giveaway, and a potential spike in sales for you.

And yes, by that we mean including a coupon in your giveaway.

Plein takes a spin on their sales campaign by offering shoppers a discount, plus a chance to win something from their partner. In exchange, they ask shoppers to follow them and their partner on Instagram:

If you're a Gleam Competitions user, action-based coupons are great to include mid-way through your list of entries because it's a good opportunity to encourage completion of all of them:

Drive More Actions With Tiered Coupons

So now you have a few tricks up your sleeve when it comes to incentivising coupons for your business growth, we're going to show you one last tactic that will sure to drive even more actions from your customers and subscribers.

Gleam has a Coupon action that allows you to offer a coupon from your Competitions or Rewards campaign before the user completes all your required actions. That means you can stack up different offers halfway through your actions to encourage completion and thus drive more actions.

Don't believe us? See how it works with our demo below:

Resources & Gleam Guides For Coupons

• How To Give Out E-commerce Coupons
• Distributing E-commerce Coupon Codes With Capture Bars
• Distributing Shopify Discount Codes
• Giving Out Claim Codes On Amazon
• Creating Tiered Rewards To Incentivise More Actions
• Documentation for Gleam's Coupon Action

More E-commerce Growth

• Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts With Gleam Capture
• 10 Ways To Grow Your E-Commerce Sales
• 50+ Awesome Email Marketing Ideas
• Driving Sales From Your Email List With Email Marketing
• E-commerce Opt-In Forms 101
• Tactics For Growing Your E-commerce Mailing List