Stop Wasting Giveaway Entry Actions (Use Them Like This Instead)
Learn how to use giveaway entry actions strategically to drive traffic, increase referrals, and generate meaningful growth instead of just more entries.
• Turn entry actions into tools for product research, validation, and audience insights
• Prioritise high-impact actions like demos, reviews, and signups over low-value follows
• Use giveaways to generate UGC, not just entries
• Warm up launches and educate users before they ever convert
• Build multi-channel growth and higher-quality leads from a single campaign
Giveaways are one of the fastest ways to grow an audience. But the campaigns that get the most out of Gleam aren't just using entry actions to collect follows and emails - they're using them to do things most people wouldn't think to try.
Here's a look at some of the more creative, less obvious ways to put entry actions to work.
Most brands run giveaways after a launch. But running one before can be just as valuable.
Entry actions can be used to gather real audience data before you commit to a direction. Ask participants to vote on a product name, choose between two colourways, or pick their favourite feature concept. You get entries and market research at the same time - without a separate survey tool or paid research panel.
For SaaS teams, this works well for roadmap validation. For ecommerce brands, it's a low-cost way to test demand before going into production.
Not all actions need to be equal. One of the more underused features in Gleam is the ability to weight actions differently - awarding more entries for higher-effort tasks.
Use this to steer participants towards the actions that matter most. Watching a product demo, leaving a review, or signing up for a free trial can each be worth significantly more entries than a basic social follow. Participants who want to win will do the work. And the work you're asking them to do can be genuinely useful to your business.
User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most valuable things a brand can acquire - and giveaways are a natural moment to collect it.
Entry actions can prompt participants to share a photo using your product, post a review, or tag you in a story. Done well, this creates a wave of authentic content during the campaign that you can repurpose long after it ends. For ecommerce and creator campaigns especially, this can generate more usable assets than a paid shoot.
If you have a product, feature, or piece of content launching soon, a giveaway run in the weeks before is a useful priming tool.
Structure your entry actions to build familiarity with what's coming - a teaser video to watch, a waitlist to join, a landing page to visit. By the time you launch, your giveaway participants are already warm. They've seen the product, they understand the offer, and they're more likely to convert than a cold audience seeing it for the first time.
A single giveaway can do the work of several channel-specific growth campaigns at once.
Rather than running separate efforts to grow your email list, YouTube channel, TikTok following, and podcast subscribers, you can use entry actions to grow all of them simultaneously - with a single prize and a single campaign. Each action targets a different channel, and participants self-select based on where they're most active.
For brands trying to build presence across multiple platforms, this is one of the most efficient uses of a giveaway budget.
Gleam's referral features are often used just to increase reach. But there's a more targeted way to use them.
Your existing customers - the ones who already love your product - are far more likely to refer people similar to themselves than a general audience is. If you run a giveaway seeded to your current customer base and build referral actions into it, the new participants coming in are pre-qualified by association. They arrived because someone who already buys from you thought they'd be interested.
That's a meaningfully different kind of lead than someone who found you through a prize aggregator.
Entry actions don't have to be purely transactional. Some of the most effective campaigns use them to educate participants about a product in a way that feels engaging rather than promotional.
A sequence of actions that walks someone through your product - watch this intro, explore this feature, read this case study - functions like a mini onboarding flow wrapped in a giveaway. By the end, participants who were curious are now informed. That's a much stronger position to be converting from.
This works especially well for SaaS products where the barrier to purchase is understanding, not awareness.
Most brands focus giveaways on acquisition. But they can be just as effective pointed inward.
If you have a large email list with low engagement, a giveaway is a legitimate reason to re-enter people's inboxes - and entry actions give those subscribers something to do beyond just opening an email. Re-follow, re-engage, leave a review, update their preferences. A well-structured re-engagement campaign can clean your list, reactivate lapsed subscribers, and surface customers who are ready to buy again.
The basics work. But Gleam gives you enough flexibility to go well beyond them - and the campaigns that do tend to get a lot more out of the same prize budget.
Pick one of the approaches above and build your next campaign around it.
Gleam does not promote your campaign for you, so only users with a link to your campaign will be able to enter.
The Competition widget can be embedded in multiple locations across the web. We offer multiple installation methods so your campaign can be displayed virtually anywhere
