Note: The Village Emporium is a client of Breaking Even Communications.
My friend Dorrie runs The Village Emporium, a clothing and gift shop in Bar Harbor and launched her website a couple months ago. As the summer season approaches, Dorrie was looking for a way to begin populating her email list while getting ready to open the store to its regular full-time hours May 1. She also just started a Twitter account for the store to complement the Facebook page one of her employees started last year.
I told Dorrie she should have a giveaway of some merchandise in the coming weeks and she ran with it.
Every week until May 1, the Village Emporium is having a random drawing of the people who sign up for their email list for a prize of store merchandise. After the drawing, which happens every Sunday, the winner is announced over Twitter and Facebook and the prize is shipped directly to them.
In the first week of the giveaway, Dorrie has doubled her email list and gotten customers and potential customers excited about her upcoming store opening. Also, there could be the added benefit of having a fun way to ‘get rid of’ merchandise that might be difficult to move otherwise and the possibility of good online word of mouth from winners of your free swag.
So if you are looking to have website visitors take a specific action, like signing up for a mailing list or commenting on your blog, make a contest out of it and share it with your social (and other) networks. Having a regular giveaway will help the word continue to spread, and give website visitors a reason to keep tabs on your business.
If your business has done something like this, I’d love for you to share in the comments some the results, expected and unexpected, you got from the giveaway.
“Nice website Hi Nicole,I checked out the Emporium website to see if I remembered which one it is in Bar Harbor, and in fact I don’t, but it looks cute. I hope they do well with their give-away. Do you like suggestions for people’s websites? If there’s a way to make it picturesque, it would be cool/helpful to have a photo of their storefront (from the street) on the website so it would jog the memory of folks like me, so that next time I’m in town I might stop in because I remembered what it looked like. Some of us are better at that than street addresses! :-> Anyway, just an idea. Keep up the good work, and enjoy your upcoming dog adventure!”