The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Newsletter With Giveaways

If you want to grow your email list quickly, giveaways might be your secret weapon. 

As someone who covers the newsletter world and the creator economy, I’ve spoken to top newsletter creators and studied successful giveaways from brands like the Daily Drop and Colin and Samir.

What I’ve learned is fascinating: When done right, a giveaway can drive thousands of subscribers in a single day, but this isn’t some “get rich quick” scheme. 

To run a successful giveaway, you need to be strategic in both your planning and promotion; your primary goal should be to draw in people who genuinely find value in your newsletter and are likely to stick around. 

Want to learn more? In this post, I’ll break down why giveaways work, share lessons from successful creators, and provide a step-by-step guide to launching your own. 

Table of Contents

• The Power of Giveaways in Newsletter Growth

• Planning Your Newsletter Giveaway

  • Identifying Your Goal

  • Choosing the Right Prize

  • Setting the Rules

• Promoting Your Giveaway

  • Utilizing Social Media

  • Collaborations and Partnerships

  • Email Marketing Campaigns

• Implementing the Giveaway

  • Creating a Landing Page

  • Using Giveaway Bots

• Post-Giveaway Strategies

  • Announcing the Winner

  • Engaging New Subscribers

  • Analyzing Results

• Case Study: Taypedia Giveaways Fueled 10X Newsletter Growth

  • Taypedia’s Key Learnings

• Case Study: Daily Drop's Costa Rica Giveaway

  • Overview of the Strategy

  • Key Success Factors

  • Results and Impact

  • What I Like

• Grow Your Newsletters With Giveways

  • Giveaways are a powerful way to grow your newsletter when done right.

The Power of Giveaways in Newsletter Growth

Giveaways are popular because they’re exciting and easy. They tap into people’s natural love for winning. 

Whether it’s a vacation, a tool, or exclusive access to something valuable, giveaways create buzz and drive action.

Here’s why they work:

1. Giveaways are low effort, high reward: Signing up for a giveaway takes seconds, and the chance to win something valuable makes it irresistible.

2. Giveaways are inherently shareable: People are naturally inclined to share a great giveaway with their friends, which helps your newsletter grow organically.

3. Giveaways help build brand awareness: Even if someone doesn’t win—or even enter—they might still notice your giveaway if it goes viral on social media. That’s free publicity.

TL;DR: Giveaways are more than a gimmicky growth hack. They are used by many of the top newsletter creators to exponentially grow their subscriber base and build loyalty and engagement among their audience. 

For example, Matt McGarry, founder of Newsletter Operator, has gained more than 100k subscribers through giveaways alone. 

Let’s unpack some of the experts’ tips for success.

Planning Your Newsletter Giveaway

The biggest lesson I learned when studying successful giveaways is “the devil is in the details.” 

You’ll need to be extremely strategic in identifying your goal, choosing the right prize, and setting the rules — or else you risk a giveaway that flops, or subscribers who don’t actually care about your content, which is even worse.

Identifying Your Goal

The first step is to define what you want to achieve with your giveaway. This can include things like: 

• Subscriber acquisition: Grow your email list with targeted leads.

• Brand awareness: Increase visibility for your newsletter or brand.

• Engagement: Drive traffic to your social media or website.

As Alex Garcia explains in his newsletter, Marketing Examined, “The goal of a giveaway shouldn’t be to get everyone to sign up. It should be to attract highly interested and engaged leads.”

Choosing the Right Prize

Your prize is the heart of your giveaway. The better it aligns with your audience’s interests, the higher quality your leads will be.

Here are some examples of prizes by audience type: 

• Travel Enthusiasts: Offer a travel voucher, like Daily Drop’s Costa Rica trip.

• Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Provide free access to a premium tool or course, such as a Kajabi membership.

• Creators: Give away equipment like cameras or software licenses, as Colin & Samir did with their $1,000 Creator Starter Kit.

• Niche Audiences: Target hobbyists or professionals with specialized prizes. Josh Earl’s audience of programmers valued the Sublime Text license.

As marketing expert Neil Patel puts it: “Your prize is one of the easiest and most effective ways to attract qualified leads. Choose it wisely.”

Setting the Rules

Keep the entry process simple and straightforward. Overcomplicated rules can discourage participation.

Here’s a simple process you can require for entries:

• Subscribe to your newsletter.

• Refer friends via unique referral links.

• Follow your brand on social media for bonus entries.

Pro Tip: You can use a tool like SparkLoop or Gleam to streamline the process and track entries.

Promoting Your Giveaway

To maximize the impact of your giveaway, you need to promote it effectively. The more visibility your campaign gets, the more signups you’ll attract. 

Here’s how to get the word out across key channels:

Utilizing Social Media

Social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X (Formerly Twitter) are perfect for driving buzz around your giveaway. They’re visual, shareable, and designed for engagement.

Here’s how to make the most of each platform:

• Share a countdown to build excitement, like Colin & Samir’s 24-hour giveaway.

• Create a video reel showcasing the prize, as Daily Drop did on Instagram.

• Use X (Formerly Twitter) to post updates and engage directly with participants.

When Colin & Samir ran their giveaway, they tapped into a sense of urgency with their promotions. They titled their promo video “Deleting in 3 Hours” to pique their audience’s interest and spark them to action.

Collaborations and Partnerships

Collaborating with complementary brands or influencers can help you reach a larger audience. 

For example, teaming up with a travel blogger to promote a vacation giveaway ensures that your campaign reaches an engaged, relevant audience who are likely to enjoy your content, too.

Email Marketing Campaigns

If you already have subscribers, use them as your first layer of promotion. Announce your giveaway with a dedicated email and encourage subscribers to refer friends for bonus entries.

Pro Tip: Referral incentives are a huge driver for beehiiv creators. Take a look at The Brink’s case study to learn more.

Implementing the Giveaway

Creating a Landing Page

Every great giveaway needs a home base. A landing page is where participants go to learn about the prize, understand the rules, and enter.

Your landing page should contain the following information:

• A clear description of the prize

• Entry instructions

• A simple form to collect email addresses

Here’s what the landing page looks like for one of the Daily Drop’s recent giveaways to Aruba:

Pro Tip: Platforms like KingSumo simplify this process by creating pre-built landing pages for giveaways. You can also use our website builder to create a landing page directly in beehiiv.

Using Giveaway Bots

I recommend trying tools like Rafflecopter, Gleam, or KingSumo to make managing entries easy. They can track referrals, select winners, and provide analytics, ensuring that your giveaway runs smoothly.

Josh Earl is a freelance writer and programmer who started a niche newsletter called Sublime Text. Using KingSumo, which is a WordPress plugin, he offered a free license to Sublime Text (valued at $70). While that would just attract any general subscriber, it would be incredibly valuable to his target audience.

KingSumo helped Earl achieve awesome results, too:

• He collected 187,991 email addresses.

• His website received visits from 398,896 unique visitors.

• Thanks to the flood of tweets that mentioned his contest (and included his Twitter handle), his X (Formerly Twitter) following more than doubled, from 13,460 to 32,427.

Earl used this growth to directly sell new products. “These were his kind of people – people he knew he could sell to if he could get them on his list, and he did,” Hejny explains for Neil Patel’s blog. “Josh’s first book, Sublime Productivity, which he promotes with his email list, has sold more than 2,000 copies and earned him $38,000, and counting.”

Post-Giveaway Strategies

Announcing the Winner

Transparency is key. Announce your winner publicly — on social media, in your newsletter, or both. This builds trust with your audience and gives you a chance to thank participants.

Pro Tip: Use the announcement as a moment to tease future giveaways or exclusive content. For example: “Thanks to everyone who entered our [Prize] giveaway! Stay tuned—we’ve got more exciting opportunities coming your way.”

Engaging New Subscribers

The most important aspect of a successful giveaway is making sure that you actually engage — and keep — your new subscribers. That starts from your very first email. 

Here are some other best practices you can follow:

• Send a welcome email: Let subscribers know what they can expect from your newsletter.

• Deliver value quickly: Share your best content in the first few emails to hook readers.

• Stay consistent: Stick to your publishing schedule to build trust and familiarity.

I must admit that I’m guilty of signing up for various giveaway contests and then eventually unsubscribing. What has kept me around for the few that I’ve stuck with? High-value content. (Please don’t send me another spammy email that just takes up room in my inbox!)

When I subscribed to the Daily Drop, for example, I loved the personalized email I got from Mike, the newsletter writer. 

Daily Drop also does an awesome job of offering some interactive polling options, which do a dual service: they give the newsletter team more info about me as a subscriber and they get me engaged early on, which helps with future deliverability rates.

Analyzing Results

After the giveaway ends, take the time to reflect on its performance. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Did the campaign meet your goals?

• Was the prize effective in attracting the right audience?

• What could you improve next time?

Use these insights to refine your approach for future campaigns.

Case Study: Taypedia Giveaways Fueled 10X Newsletter Growth

Krista Doyle, founder of Taypedia, has successfully leveraged giveaways for Taylor Swift fans to 10x her newsletter audience. Her prizes have included things like an Eras Tour floor seat (what Swiftie could resist?!) and a daily holiday giveaway with Taylor Swift merch from both the official store and Swiftie-owned small businesses.

“I think it was successful because I tried to only target Taylor Swift fans — and her fans love giveaways, contests, and fan merch,” Doyle said.

These giveaways tactics have helped Taypedia grow from 500 to 5,000 subscribers in just a few months.

Doyle’s experiences offer key takeaways for publishers looking to use giveaways as a sustainable growth strategy.

“The biggest thing I've learned is to always put some money into boosting your giveaways on social platforms; they're great lead magnets!” Doyle adds.

Taypedia’s Key Learnings

• Highly targeted prizes attract engaged subscribers. By choosing Swiftie-specific prizes, Doyle ensured that she brought in fans who were genuinely interested in her content, rather than casual entrants who might unsubscribe after the giveaway ended.

• Video ads on Meta outperform static images. Doyle found that Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram) featuring a video of her explaining the giveaway drove more engagement than traditional image-based ads.

• Multi-day giveaways sustain engagement over time. Doyle’s holiday giveaway ran from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, keeping fans engaged over multiple weeks and adding 3,000 new subscribers in just four weeks.

• Testing and learning are key. One of Doyle’s biggest mistakes was giving away an Eras Tour floor seat but not boosting it with paid ads—a missed opportunity she wouldn’t repeat. Every giveaway is a chance to refine and improve the next one.

Case Study: Daily Drop's Costa Rica Giveaway

Overview of the Strategy

Daily Drop ran a giveaway offering a free trip to Costa Rica. 

The rules were simple: participants needed to subscribe to their newsletter to enter. The campaign was promoted heavily on Instagram with visually stunning reels showcasing the trip as the ultimate adventure.

What they offered was incredibly valuable to their target readers (aka travel enthusiasts):

• Free trip for 2 people

• 5-night stay in a deluxe villa

• Airfare credit

• Food and activities during the trip

Key Success Factors

Daily Drop followed many of the best practices mentioned here:

1. They offered a targeted prize: The trip to Costa Rica appealed directly to Daily Drop’s audience — people interested in travel and luxury experiences.

2. There’s a clear call to action: The entry process was simple, ensuring low friction for participants.

3. They had a compelling promotion: The team leveraged Instagram reels and stories to generate buzz, encouraging users to tag friends and share the giveaway.

4. The giveaway was timely: By running the campaign for a limited time, Daily Drop created a sense of urgency that drove rapid participation.

Results and Impact

Daily Drop’s giveaways were highly effective in driving newsletter growth, particularly in their early stages. Here’s a breakdown of their key takeaways:

• Scalable growth through paid ads: In addition to organic promotion, Daily Drop ran paid ads targeting new audiences. These campaigns consistently delivered low cost-per-lead (CPL) and scaled aggressively. 

• The giveaways provided an effective way to transition Kara and Nate’s audience (from YouTube and Instagram) into newsletter subscribers. Since their travel-focused audience was already highly engaged, this approach helped initially establish Daily Drop’s email list.

• As a creator-owned brand, the most effective promotion strategy was leveraging Kara and Nate’s existing platforms — YouTube and Instagram. Their direct endorsements drove strong engagement and participation. Additionally, paid advertising played a key role in reaching new audiences at a low cost.

The takeaway: A targeted prize + simple entry process = powerful results.

While giveaways can generate rapid growth, subscriber quality varies. The Daily Drop team has monitored engagement levels post-giveaway and has realized that some entrants may not convert into long-term readers. 

If you’re using giveaways to acquire a completely new audience, it’s crucial to track retention rates and optimize onboarding strategies.

What I Like

Something I love about Daily Drop’s approach is how they share testimonials from previous winners on the giveaway landing page. This immediately builds credibility and makes me excited to potentially win the next prize. 

Grow Your Newsletters With Giveways

Giveaways are a powerful way to grow your newsletter when done right.

Here’s why they work:

• They can bring in thousands of engaged subscribers quickly.

• A well-chosen prize attracts people who are genuinely interested in your content.

• Giveaways build your brand’s reputation while offering great return on investment (ROI).

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale, giveaways are a flexible and effective strategy.

Ready to give it a try? Choose an exciting prize, promote it strategically, and watch your email list grow with subscribers who care about what you offer.

P.S. if you’re not yet a beehiiv subscriber, you can try it out here for free for 30 days.