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UPDATED AUGUST 2019
Christmas is a time for family, friends, food and… emptying our bank accounts. According to SMH, Australians spent a staggering $26 billion (with a b) on Christmas 2017. Sources can’t seem to agree on how much we spent in 2018, but it ranged somewhere between 11 billion and 25 billion. That’s big money either way.
So how can you attract some of that spending to your business this Christmas? One clever tactic is to use Christmas giveaways and competitions as a way of bringing in the sales. To help, we’ve put together The 12 giveaways of Christmas to inspire you to run your own silly season competition.
Christmas competition idea 1.
Your very own ’12 days of Christmas’ themed giveaway
Showcase 12 of your best and most attractive Christmas gift ideas or bestsellers to potential customers and run a giveaway to win a prize on each of the 12 days or collect entries over the whole period and award one very lucky winner all 12 gifts! Christmas all wrapped up for one lucky winner!
Christmas giveaway idea 2.
An advent calendar-style giveaway
You can choose to reward your subscribers or best customers with an advent calendar full of goodies and giveaways to say thank you for supporting your business this year. It doesn’t have to be anything super hi-tech, you can offer a discount code, PDF download or exclusive content delivered by email or a little present you pop in the post when they enter their address.
Advent calendar thanks to Torsten Dettlaff on Pexels.
Christmas giveaway idea 3.
Giveaways and sales go hand in hand
After you’ve run your giveaway and chosen your winner, say thank you to your entrants by offering them a discount or coupon for entrants only, to boost your sales and help cover the cost of your competition. After all, if they were entering to win it for free, they might just covet it enough to buy it.
Christmas competition idea 4.
One for you, one for me
You know when you buy that perfect gift for someone and you wish your friends and family would buy you the exact same thing? Or maybe you actually did buy one for them and one for you because you loved it so much? How about rewarding every sale over the Christmas period with an extra giveaway for the buyer? If you can’t afford to give everyone a free gift, hold a prize draw for all of the buyers and draw one lucky winner.
Christmas competition inspiration idea 5.
Say cheese!
If your socials could do with an injection of engagement, get your followers to post a photo or vote for their favourite photo in the comments to enter. You can collect some seriously awesome user-generated content with photo competitions, so remember to keep the photos relevant to your brand, service or product – for example if you make clothing for dogs, ask your audience to post their cutest Christmas creatures.
BONUS: You’ll have awesome comments and photos to repost throughout the festive season. Posts from members of the community generally get a lot higher engagement and conversion than regular posts. Besides, who doesn’t love the chance to post photos of their pet for the world to see?!
Christmas competition idea 6.
Get creative
Ask your customers to create something (preferably using your product or service!) that you can showcase on your website and social media. For example if you sell exotic spices, ask them to create the best spiced gingerbread houses or mulled wine using your spices and post the recipes.
BONUS: You won’t even need a licence as it’s a game of skill!
Christmas competition idea 7.
Share the love… Aw
Ask people to repost, retweet or regram your images to share the love to a new audience!
Make sure your image is repost-worthy and clearly shows your product or service – but whatever you do, DON’T ask people to reshare on Facebook to enter! It’s against their rules and you risk having your page and personal account shut down indefinitely. No one wants the Facebook grinch to steal your page.
Christmas giveaway idea 8.
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!
Partner with a like-minded business to run a bigger, better giveaway with higher value prizes. Just be sure to partner with someone with a similar target audience to you so that the prize is relevant and the leads you gain are valuable to your business and don’t forget share the work evenly – as well as the rewards. Just be careful if you get an invitation to join a Christmas loop competition.
TIP: Not sure where to find fellow competition collaborators? Check out our Competition Creators Facebook group.
Christmas competition idea 9.
All I want for Christmas is…
Fill in the blank competitions are easy, fun and there’s a huuuuge amount of inspiration to help you come up with the perfect phrase for your competition. If you run a home cleaning business for example, you could ask entrants to fill in a sentence like ‘All I want for Christmas is my _________ cleaned’ and ask them to explain why, for a chance to win a home cleaning experience.
BONUS: Games of skill like this don’t need a licence!
Enjoying our Christmas competition inspo?
There’s a lot more where that came from! Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for more competition ideas and giveaway inspiration.
Christmas giveaway idea 10.
Dear Santa…
In a similar style to the idea above, ask your entrants to write a short letter to Santa with their Christmas wishlist of items from your online store and why they think they’ve been good enough this Christmas to receive them. You can then play Santa and decide, based on the answers, who deserves a treat!
BONUS: you can easily repurpose awesome letters into social posts.
Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash.
Christmas competition idea 11.
Make their vote count.
Voting competitions are a great way to get some engagement and feedback on your products. You could put up a selection of products or service packages and ask people to vote for their favourite for a chance to win that product/service. People love voting competitions that are quick and easy, so keep it simple.
Christmas giveaway idea 12.
Wait until New Year…
Huh? Wait, this post is called the 12 giveaways of Christmas, not new year! Yes, but did you know the 12 days of Christmas are actually from Christmas day to January 5th? It’s the perfect time to stand out and do something a little different – without having to compete with a chock-a-block news feed over the pre-Christmas period. It’s also a great way to get your first sales on the board for the new year!
So there you have it, the 12 giveaways of Christmas – 12 competition ideas for Christmas that you can implement with very little budget, time and effort in return for some great engagement from your customers and fans. Just remember to make your giveaway relevant and attractive to your target audience so you get the right entrants for your brand (you know, the ones who are most likely to become paying customers), but also to ensure you set a goal to achieve with your competition so you know you’re getting something back for your competition investment too.
If you’re thinking of running a competition or giveaway this Christmas and need a little help figuring out what will work best for your business, why not book in a strategy session with our giveaway gurus (or should that be elves)?
