How do you run an effective Kindle Giveaway? We’ve outlined all the steps we took in our recent campaign, one that netted us a large number of subscribers for a very low lead cost. Follow through the steps and results in our Guide.

Set a Goal for Your Kindle Giveaway

Before you start any campaign, you should know what you are trying to achieve. Last year we added 1300 new subscribers with a giveaway of children’s books run through KingSumo. This time I wanted to test the effectiveness of giving away a Kindle.

Our overall goal was to gain more email subscribers, ideally at least the 1300 we got from the previous competition.

Decide on Your Prize for your Kindle Giveaway

What sort of prize do you want to offer to entice subscribers?

As I mentioned, I wanted to test a Kindle giveaway. The Kindle Fire was an obvious choice as it’s the only one with a colour screen. So the only one suitable for digital children’s books. I did debate between using the Kindle Kids edition or a standard Kindle Fire. But with many bad reviews around adult use of a Kindle Kids edition, I thought standard Kindle Fire would be more flexible as a family device.

I added in one of our books, our newest in paperback, as a direct link back to our products.

Kindle Giveaway Method

There are so many different apps and methods to use, it’s best to do a little research. We chose KingSumo – as it’s very easy to use and quite effective. Their system is set up to encourage sharing and bonus entries.

We followed the same template we used for our earlier competition, creating bonus options that drove people to our social accounts and our Amazon author page. We also set referral prize options to encourage entrants to refer their friends.

Here is an example of one of our emails sent out during the competition here

Promoting Your Kindle Giveaway

There are many different ways to promote your giveaway and the options you choose will depend on your target audience, your budget and your current platform size.

For this competition we used a mix of free promotion and paid advertising to encourage entries.

Our free promotions were:

• Promoting to our email lists
• Promoting to our social following
• Listing on free giveaway promotion sites
• Encouraging social sharing of our competition to organically drive traffic

Our paid promotions were:

• Facebook advertising – overall spend of $18.90 USD
• Paid listing on Giveaway Promote – cost $20 USD

Our Facebook advertising generated 147 clicks, not that many. But it also generated a lot of likes and shares, which helped create a stronger organic result.

The Giveaway Promote ad generated 275 clicks, which works out to a cost per lead of $0.07USD. A great result. I do like Giveaway Promote as a paid option and will use them again.

This was our Facebook ad

Results

At the end of the Kindle Giveaway we had 1,745 entrants generating 21,134 entries. A great result. The huge number of entries showed that people were willing to take part in the bonus components to gain more entries in the competition. Which means that we had the bonuses set up well, encouraging but not too challenging.

After our you’re not the winner email, we lost 75 subscribers, which I think is pretty good. We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks as we keep sharing information about us. I’m always quite open to people unsubscribing if they don’t like our style, so I am very open about how we work in our early emails.

Overall – including the prize cost (and the unexpected sales tax) we spent $105 USD to generate 1745 email sign ups. This works out to a cost of $0.06 per subscriber.

Things that we didn’t do in our Kindle Giveaway

Of course there are always things that you can do better with each campaign and that is true of this one too. Chris and I both have quite large LinkedIn followings now, whilst Old Mate Media still has a relatively small following. We promoted the competition heavily on the Old Mate Media LinkedIn, but neglected to share to our profiles.

We also didn’t heavily promote this Kindle Giveaway to authors with the idea of cross sharing. That has worked for us in the past, and it’s definitely something I will do more next time.

If you are interested in partnering with us in running one of these competitions, let me know. Or, if you are interested in cross promotion of giveaways like this, also do let me know.

Where to Next

Now we have this bigger list, I want to engage them and really draw them into our community. I want them to be invested in us and our books. I know not all will be, but hopefully we’ve generated some fantastic future fans with our promotion.

If you have any thoughts or questions about this Kindle Giveaway do let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, please sign up to our reader newsletter to hear about future competitions or our author newsletter to get more guides and tips like this. Plus of course you can find us on all the major social channels; Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.