[UPDATED] How to Setup Successful Amazon Giveaways for More Sales and Profits

Check out this update to one of our previous blog posts on running successful Amazon Giveaways to drive more sales and profits as Amazon constantly updates their available promotional tools for sellers. Amazon Giveaways is an exceptionally great tool for sellers who want to leverage the benefits of running giveaways but don’t have the resources for a dedicated promotions department.

Below are just a few benefits of running Amazon Giveaways.

1. Running giveaways to your audience will help strengthen the relationship between your brand and customers by creating a sense of fun. Giveaways are great to entertain your customers while informing them about current and upcoming products.
2. Giveaways generate advertising content at a reasonable cost (the only cost is the product!). Amazon will help you promote and market your giveaway on their website to reach your audience.
3. It’s fairly easy to setup your own giveaway and Amazon will ship the prizes for you (minimizing cost and any delays).
4. You can require participants to watch your promotional video of any type which in return can create buzz about your products and help you with marketing.
5. Of course, running giveaways will potentially increase your Amazon product rankings from giveaway purchases when you offer participants a discount coupon.

Here are 5 steps you can follow to setup your own successful Amazon giveaway to drive more sales and profits for your business.

Step 1 — Create an Amazon Giveaway Promotion

The first step is to log in to your Amazon Seller Central account and navigate to the Promotions section under the Advertising tab. Click on the “Create” button to start a promotional giveaway.

Step 2 — Select Product for Giveaway

You will then be prompted to choose a product you want to use as a prize in the giveaway. Also, you have the option to search for other complementary products that do not belong to your brand for the giveaway.

Once you have decided on the product, click the ‘Set up a giveaway’ button to proceed to the next step. For this example, we have censored the product name for privacy purposes.

Step 3 — Enter Giveaway Details

The first detail you need to enter is the number of prizes you would like to give away. Amazon recommends 2 or more to maximize the participants.

Pro Tip: You can split test the number of products to giveaway and focus on what works best for your brand.

You will need to enter your seller name for branding purposes. Make sure your name does not contain any emojis or risk getting rejected by Amazon. Note that Amazon has removed the image uploading option and automatically selects your main product image as the giveaway image.

The next step is to select your giveaway type. Amazon has reduced the types of giveaways to only 2 options, “Lucky Number Instant Win” or “First-come, First-served”. I highly recommend the first option as the latter won’t give your product enough exposure. For instance, you are giving away 3 prizes, in the end, only 3 participants will know about your product. To us, this option doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense from an exposure point of view.

Once you have chosen the giveaway type, you need to select the lucky number for the winning entry. Amazon has changed this to a 3 options button instead of having you to enter the number.

Pro Tip: Split test the lucky number and use the one that works best for your brand.

Step 4 — Select Giveaway Requirements

Running Amazon giveaways can also be a great way for you to build your YouTube audience or increase your followers on Amazon if you are promoting your own book. As for the “Watch a Video Short” option, it’s great to keep participants within Amazon’s ecosystem so they are more likely to make a purchase.

If you don’t have any video shorts on Amazon and would like to upload your own, here’s a YouTube tutorial video on how to do so.

Next, you can choose to offer a discount to entrants as recommended by Amazon for pro sellers. This is a brilliant way to entice customers who really like your product and want to seize the opportunity to get it at a discounted price. You can obtain the promotion ID under the “Manage Promotion” tab within your Advertising section. See image below for a better understanding.

Note that Amazon has removed the option to set the giveaway duration. Giveaways are now run until your prizes are being claimed or automatically ended if prizes are unclaimed. Don’t worry, you will be reimbursed for all giveaway prizes not awarded at the end of the giveaway period (which is a maximum of seven days).

Next is the discoverability section where you can either choose to have your giveaway shown as Public or Private. If you have a huge list of followers and only want to run this giveaway for them, then set this to private so the link shared is only amongst your followers.

If you just launch a new product and want to generate more sales so you can increase sales velocity and reviews then setting your giveaway to Public is the way to go. Click the next button once you have completed all the details.

Step 5 — Preview Your Giveaway and Make Payment at Checkout

The final step is to finalize and preview your Amazon giveaway and then proceed to checkout. Once payment is complete, you will receive a confirmation email from Amazon and a second email once your giveaway is live.

A unique giveaway URL is also included in the email so you can share it with your audience to further increase the engagement rate.

To view the analytics and track your giveaway, you can log in to your giveaway dashboard HERE. The screenshot below shows all the information you can obtain from the dashboard. For instance, you can view the number of hits, promo codes claimed, product page visits, and attributed sales. Keep in mind that it will take 24 to 72 hours for all data to be collected by the algorithm.

Once your giveaway is live, you will be able to view it at Amazon’s Giveaway page as shown in the screenshot below.

Final Thoughts

It is important to track how your giveaways performed so you can decide how to tweak future giveaways to improve your success. In a nutshell, Amazon Giveaways can be an effective marketing tool used to launch new products, increase brand exposure and gain new customers. Have you tried running your own Amazon Giveaway? If so, how did it go?