SOP 61 — Run a giveaway as an acquisition offer

1. The shape

Advertise a chance to win something substantial in exchange for contact information and whatever else you decide to ask for. Pick a winner. Then offer everyone else the same thing at a price. The line that carries the whole mechanism is that many enter and many win — one wins the prize, the rest win a discount on it.

Other labels are given for the same thing — sweepstakes, and scholarship — and all of them are said to mean the same: enter for a chance to win.

The condition that comes first. This structure is regulated. Running one and charging for entry is named as an illegal lottery. The instruction attached is to take the question to people who do law, and to confirm it is legal in your area and in the form you intend to run it. The reason given for the regulation is the offer's own strength.

2. The sequence

Pick the grand prize, and pick the offer everyone else will get.
Ask for contact information, and set eligibility criteria.
Put the entry on a deadline.
Announce the winner, and give the winner the prize.
Contact everyone else with their offer, on a second deadline.
Book the calls, and make them claim it.

Both deadlines matter and the reason is stated for the second one: told they have won something with no date on it, people do nothing.

3. Sizing the grand prize

Make it the thing you want everyone to buy. Every entrant has already told you they want it, so the second offer does not have to create the want — it only has to be good enough to say yes to.

Give it a monetary value, and advertise that value, so it can anchor the price of the second offer.

It has to be genuinely large, and the failure case is worked. One campaign offered event tickets worth about $300 and produced nothing. The business behind it sells a high-priced package, and the correction drawn was that a business selling at that level needs a giveaway at that level at minimum. The campaign was rerun with equipment worth $50,000 and worked.

Flag: the deal size in that case is given twice and differs. One figure names $40,000 and the correction is worked against $40,000. In the same breath the range is given as fifteen to forty. The replacement prize is $50,000, which is above both. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Prefer your own service to cash. A prize outside what you sell is named as something not to give away unless you are in that business. Cash is named as the least favorite kind and the reason given is that it is the least original; the offsetting point is that cash is valuable to everyone. A prize drawn from your own niche opens a gap between what it costs you and what it is worth, and the gap is named as the reason to do it: something retailing at $10,000 is put at maybe two to three thousand dollars of hard cost. The same gap is what makes giving two prizes affordable.

4. What to ask for at entry

Three things, and the third is where the leverage is.

What you ask for	Why it is asked
Contact information	Without it you cannot make the second offer
Eligibility for what you actually sell	Someone who could never buy is not worth a prize
Actions	Either they promote you or they raise the quality of the lead

Named actions: bring a friend, join the group, share the post, leave a review, attend a call or an event, make a post. The stated ceiling is friction — the more you add, the fewer people enter — against the offsetting observation, offered in general and as a personal one, that a prize grand enough buys a minute of somebody's time.

Named questions, in order: why should we pick you, and why this program; why now, and why does this matter to you; why it is important; what your goals are; and income. What they are for: they are ammunition for the sales conversation, and they let you rank the entrants by who looks most likely to buy. People will write at length here — pages of themselves — where an ordinary form struggles to get two or three fields filled.

5. The countdown

Three to seven days is given as what works best, stated as an opinion, with the reason attached to attention spans; a thirty-day version is allowed for situations that suit it, with the warning that daily contact over that length is probably not the way to run it and that entrants might drop out before the end.

Update entrants daily. Once a day, across whichever channels you have, is what tends to work. The part named as commonly missed: do not only count down. Spend each day describing the prize — the specific pleasures of it, one at a time — and, ideally, pair each benefit with proof from somebody who has had it. That way the daily contact is not a request.

6. Announcing, and the second offer

Announce the winner in one place with everybody present — a call, a room, a broadcast — because that is where the selling is done. Then message everyone else privately.

Give each of them a reason they are getting the offer: their answers, their participation, the story they told. The reason may be any of those; what matters is that one is given. Then restart the urgency, because otherwise the offer becomes something to do someday. The second deadline is given the same three to seven days, which is said to tend to work well.

7. Pricing the second offer

A rule of thumb is given, and the worked examples do not sit inside it on the same reading.

The rule as stated: make the promotional offer equal to 10 to 30 percent of your gross margins.

The worked chain: a prize advertised at $5,000 of value with a $2,000 retail price is offered to the runners-up at $1,800. That is 10 percent off retail. What the runner-up is told compares the $1,800 against the $5,000 — a 64 percent gap rather than a 10 percent one, and the instruction is to talk in those terms.

Flag: the rule and the examples use different bases. The rule is written against gross margin. Every worked discount on this page is computed against retail price. Where a $2,000 sale carries roughly the hard-cost share named elsewhere, 10 to 30 percent of margin is a much smaller number than 10 to 30 percent of retail. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Worked example	Retail named	Second offer	As a share of retail
Travel, stated band	$2,000	$200 to $600 off	10 to 30 percent
Travel, worked	$2,000	Sold at $1,800	10 percent
Dentistry	$6,000	$2,000 gift card	About 33 percent
Subscription food	$1,000	$300 gift card	30 percent
A year of service	$5,000	$2,000 voucher	40 percent
Consulting	$12,000	Either half the price or half the time, or one component removed	About 50 percent on the price reading

Flag: three of those sit above the stated band on the retail reading. The band is 10 to 30 percent; dentistry, the service year and consulting are above it. Nothing reconciles them on the gross-margin reading either, because no margin is given for any of the three. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The second offer does not have to differ from the prize at all. It may be the same thing at a discount, a shortened version, or the same thing with one piece removed. Whatever it is, it needs a reason to be slightly less and a reason to be bought now.

8. Two prizes, for twice the entrants

Give two identical prizes and award the second to whoever referred the winner. Every entrant then has a reason to recruit, because every referral is another chance at the prize. The claimed effect is to take the entries to two, three or four times what they were, conditional on the giveaway being good enough, and two ways to afford it are given: two prizes at the full size, or two at half the size in place of one. The recommendation to spend on this is conditional on having the cash or capital to do it.

9. Scarcity, and urgency in three places

Cap it by time, by entries, or by both, and the stated preference is both. The worked figures are seven days for the time cap and five thousand entries for the entry cap. In practice the cap is set by what you can actually service: with a team able to reach two hundred leads, cap the entries at two hundred and raise the qualification bar. The side benefit named is that a capped entry list raises each entrant's odds, which makes entering more attractive.

Urgency goes in three places, and each one maps to an action the entrant has to take:

Where	The action being driven
Entry	Enter before the deadline
Claim	Claim the second offer
Use	Consume the thing, so they become a customer in practice

The stated range for the third one is hours, with up to five days as the longest used.

10. The redemption call

Open by telling them their credit has two possible uses, and that you will help them find the one that fits. Offer it against the grand prize first. If that is refused, offer the same percentage against something else you sell — named as probably something at half to a third of the price. The stated reason to hold the percentage constant is that the entrant keeps the feeling of having won something.

The worked case runs through dentistry: $2,000 off the full treatment; refused on affordability; a narrower treatment at $3,000 with a thousand dollars off it. Both discounts are the same share of their price.

If in-person no-shows are a problem, stop mass-notifying and contact the qualified entrants one at a time, and tell each of them they have to claim it.

11. Where the offer is recurring

Spread the discount over the longest period the customer will agree to — stated as as long as possible — then let the subscription bill automatically at the normal rate once the discounted period ends. The worked chain: a $2,000 credit against a year normally priced at $8,000 leaves $6,000, billed at $500 a month, reverting at the end of the year to a twelfth of $8,000.

What to avoid is named with its own history: do not give the credit as a few free months at the front with billing starting afterward.

Collect as much up front as you can anyway. Take the discounted year in one payment if you can; spreading is the fallback, not the preference.

12. If it does not work

The diagnosis offered is single: the grand prize was not grand enough. Not established on this page is why any other part of the sequence might fail.

13. The checklist

Question	The answer
What is advertised	A chance to win something substantial
What is collected	Contact information, eligibility, and actions
Who gets an offer	Everyone who entered and qualified
The regulated line	Charging for entry is named as an illegal lottery
Entry window	3 to 7 days; thirty days is possible
Contact cadence	Daily, paired with value about the prize
How to size the prize	At the level of the thing you sell
The failure diagnosis	The prize was too small
Prize cost advantage	$10,000 of retail at maybe two to three thousand of hard cost
Second-offer rule of thumb	10 to 30 percent, stated against gross margins
Second-offer worked	$2,000 retail sold at $1,800
The comparison used in the sale	$1,800 against a $5,000 value
Doubling entries	Two prizes; the referrer of the winner wins one
Entry cap	Set by how many leads you can actually reach
Urgency points	Enter, claim, use
The back-pocket offer	Probably half to a third of the price, same percentage off
Recurring application	Spread the credit across the term, revert to full rate
How many entries a given prize will produce	This page gives no figure for it.

14. What this page does not cover

Everything this structure opens onto is ordered on SOP 59 — Assemble a money model from four prongs. Its four siblings at the front of that order, which the page does not rank: SOP 62 — Design a decoy offer; SOP 60 — Design a win-your-money-back offer; SOP 64 — Design a pay-less-now-or-pay-more-later offer; SOP 63 — Design a buy-X-get-Y-free offer; with SOP 65 — Convert a free consumption asset named beside them. Deadlines and limited quantities as a general device, rather than as the two clocks used here, are SOP 9 — Split scarcity from urgency. Naming the prize and the offer is SOP 10 — Name an offer with the five naming slots, and what the prize is worth against what it costs you is SOP 2 — Set a price from the value gap, not from competitors. Crediting a win forward into a larger purchase is SOP 69 — Run the rollover upsell. Where the second offer lands on a subscription, the pricing of that subscription is SOP 74 — Price continuity against upfront cash. The cost this whole structure is meant to bring down is SOP 56.

Sweepstakes and lottery law, prize fulfillment logistics and shipping are not covered on this page.