Did you know that you can update your entry form when your giveaway ends? Rather than remove the form from your page you can update it to congratulate your winners and use it to promote other areas of your website or promote a call to action for users that will be interested in entering your next giveaway.

You probably received some inbound links from other websites or blogs to the page hosting your promotion as well as having put a whole slew of links out there yourself. These are not going to disappear just because the campaign ended. You don’t want all that time, effort and money wasted by allowing the page that was hosting the giveaway to be a dead end to users who reach your website from those links.

It is important to update your entry form and website to reflect that a winner has been chosen; posting that a winner has been chosen adds credibility to your promotions. This two minute task shows visitors that see that message in the future that a random person has won and they could be the random winner next time, increasing the chances that they will participate in the future.

After you’ve selected the winner(s) for your promotion click on the ‘Publish Winner to Entry Form’ button on the top right of the page. On this screen you can view the information for the entrants that were selected as winners to make it easy to write a congratulatory note to them. Most admins keep it simple with a message like ‘Congratulations to Mike H. from San Diego!’.

This section also allows full HTML to be added so that you can be creative with how you update this area. You will often receive visits to a page that hosted a giveaway even after the giveaway has ended. Instead of having visitors be completely disappointed that they’ve missed out on the promotion you can use this area to drive them to other areas of the site that may interest them. A few suggestions on how to customize this section include:

  • Add links to a page that lists your currently live giveaways

  • Include a message about a deal or discount that is available on your website

  • Use this space to promote your email list, Facebook or Twitter accounts so that they can stay in the loop on upcoming promotions

    • This is an area where creativity can allow you to capture the interest of visitors that came to your website for your promotion and would typically be let down. This is your chance to turn them into satisfied visitors who had a pleasant experience on your website.

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