Giveaways, Sweepstakes and Competitions

A giveaway for growing your newsletter is where you offer an awesome prize to incentivize people to subscribe or share.

Contests and giveaways incentivize immediate action, with the chance to grab that awesome prize often enough for new subscribers to take a chance on you.

The hope is they stick around and become a loyal subscriber once they see your amazing content!

For this to work, make sure you choose a prize that specifically appeals to your intended audience. What would your readers love to get for free?

Then, you need to think about how you want to promote your contest!

You could launch your giveaway for new subscribers on social media, asking people to share to enter. This creates a lot of buzz around your brand and will expand your reach to put you in front of people who might not have heard of you.

On the surface, "subscribe-to-win" giveaways can be a very affordable source of new subscribers... but the quality and engagement varies dramatically. Unless you're giving away a prize that is targeted specifically to your ideal reader, it's probably not worth the effort.

Alternatively, you can make it a referral giveaway where existing subscribers can enter by referring others. The more referrals they make, the more entries they accrue, and the greater the chance they have of winning.

Referral giveaways drive fewer total subscribers than "enter to win" giveaways. But the quality is often much higher.