Last month’s giveaway had smaller engagement than did the first month. Of course, I half-expected that to be the case, but it still left me with some questions about how to do this successfully. I mean, the point of doing the giveaways is to learn how to ship photographs cheaply and safely to anyone, anywhere, but this leads to other questions too. Let’s go through a couple of those questions now.
What happens when a stranger doesn’t reply to their winner notification?
Ok, I have been wondering what to do about unclaimed giveaway photos since before I did the first one. How much time do I give the winners to respond, and what do I do with the prints if they never respond? I had an idea for that, and I think it’s a good one. Grab Bag Giveaway every January. This means that I’ll do an additional giveaway for New Years. I’m still fleshing out the details, but it’ll go something like this. On the Tuesday, right after my December giveaway completes, I’ll do an additional giveaway for unclaimed photos. Even then I may not get responders to my notification messages, so for that giveaway, I’ll set a time limit on responses of 24 hours. Then I’ll go to the next person on the list.
How do I drive up participation in my giveaways?
This one seemed a little trickier than answering the first question. Isn’t consumer reach/engagement the central question of every business? I took a look around all of my options, and I settled on advertising. Specifically Facebook/Instagram advertising. To do this, I needed a specific FB page and a business InstaGram profile. Man did that worry me. The thought of re-posting all of my InstaGram posts under a new account and reaching out to people all over again. That was a daunting thought. Well, as it turns out, doing this on InstaGram is a flick of a switch. You just shift your connected Facebook page profile to the new page and click the switch to business profile button on your phone’s IG settings. Now I can advertise my giveaways using InstaGram’s promote feature.
Will Advertising increase my website sales?
So far, I’ve done 5 small targeted advertising campaigns. Not bad for a week’s work but boy is this a whole new world. Turns out, advertising can become addictive, right at the outset. I would liken it to playing the slots in Vegas. Wow. I could really lose myself in all of the options for advertising through social media. The answer, so far, is that it hasn’t driven any sales what-so-ever, but boy did it increase my website traffic. I went from reaching people in two or three states to reaching people in 26 states last week. My Squarespace statistics started alerting me of visitation spikes, and watching this happen has been mesmerising.
I’m going to move on from here into some deeper considerations, but I may start selling signed prints sooner than I imagined. I think the issue on my site is that people don’t want to do their own photo printing, so a DIY digital download (my current store model) is not that popular. It also limits the creativity I can express on the printing side of things. Those are future considerations, however. I need to do a few more test runs to see if I can get my shipping costs manageable.