The 13 Best Holiday Season Contest Prizes

The holiday season is a great time for running contests and giveaways. Your customers are hunting for deals and primed to spend big on gifts or treat themselves. Giveaways help you attract leads in preparation for this spending spree.

Plus, the holiday season is a time for giving, generosity, and being thankful for others. So why not reward your customers with a prize?If you’re short on inspiration for your holiday season giveaway, here are 13 contest prize ideas.

#1. An experience

The holidays are just as much about experiences as they are products or physical gifts. It’s a time to connect with friends and family to create life-long memories. Instead of a physical product, give away an experience that will help your customers create memories. Some examples of a holiday season experience could be a Thanksgiving cooking class or a Halloween Haunted House adventure like the one below.

Halloween Haunted House Giveaway. View and Create Your Own.

#2. Meal giveaways

For families, the holidays can be expensive and stressful. Parents are juggling numerous back-to-back events, shopping days, and big cook-offs. You can help reduce this burden by giving away pre-cooked meals or a hamper of the ingredients they’ll need to cook for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

#3. Party supplies

As well as gift-giving, shopping deals, and cooking feasts, the holiday season is synonymous with parties. Whether you’re hosting a Christmas party with your family or a New Year celebration with friends, you’ll need supplies. Food, drinks, and decorations help your customers host a party without the stress of organizing everything. The example below is giving away Thanksgiving table printables for free:

Thanksgiving party supplies giveaway. View and Create Your Own.

#4. Products

Product prizes are an obvious choice for a contest at any time of year, and the holidays are no different. Offering your products as a contest prize ensures that all entrants are interested in owning what it is you sell - making the leads highly qualified. You could bundle together some of your most popular products as a prize, launch a new product with a contest, or simply give away a best-seller, the choice is yours. This Halloween giveaway is putting up limited edition products as the prize:

Product giveaway for Halloween. View and Create Your Own.

#5. Themed prizes

There isn’t a better period of time than the holidays to offer themed contest prizes. It gets your potential customers in the spirit of the season and increases engagement with your campaign. Consider a champagne giveaway for New Year’s Eve, a Turkey feast for Thanksgiving, or a North Pole experience for Christmas.

#6. Gift cards

They may sound a little boring but gift cards are the perfect prize for those that are indecisive. Perhaps your customers are unsure about which gift they should buy a family member, or they love your products but can’t decide on which one is right for them. A gift card giveaway removes uncertainty from the shopping experience and ensures they will make a purchase at a later date. The “Ugly Sweater Contest” for dogs is a creative approach to this style of a giveaway from a pet store:

Photo Upload Giveaway. View and Create Your Own.

#7. A year’s supply

As December rolls around, most people are reflecting on the year that’s been and planning for the new year to begin. While they think about the year ahead, it’s a great opportunity to offer a year-long prize to entice contest participants. Depending on your business, this prize could take different forms - brainstorm what your customers would use on a recurring basis throughout the year. The best year-long prizes are usually consumables or services, such as food items or a membership. You may also consider how you can align your prize with a New Year’s resolution.

#8. Cash

Much like the gift card prize, why not make things super simple and run a cash giveaway? Your customers will be eager to get their hands on extra cash to handle their increase in expenditure. This makes it an attractive contest prize.

#9. Vacations

A large portion of Americans travel during the summer months with June, July, and August having the highest rates of travel. But when do people plan these trips? For the most part, these are annual trips planned during the later months of the year when family and friends get together to dream of the next vacation they will go on. For this reason, a vacation giveaway is an enticing offer for people who are actively thinking about their next holiday.

#10. Wishlist

Window shopping is a favorite past time for many consumers. It allows us to theoretically buy all of the things we love without the financial burden. The process of creating a “wishlist” is something many eCommerce stores have adopted as a way to draw people back to make a purchase at a later date when they can afford to do so. In much the same way, you can create a “wishlist” contest where participants have the chance to win their dream shopping list from your store.

Wishlist giveaway. View and Create Your Own.

#11. Services

The manic nature of the holiday season presents more than just a financial crunch on families, there is also a serious drain on time and sanity. Anything you can do for your customers to ease this strain is going to be well received. Offering holiday-related services, such as Christmas lights installation or a Thanksgiving feast cook up, could be enticing giveaway prizes.

Pick your price giveaway. View and Create Your Own.

#12. Donations

As I mentioned previously, the festive season is a time for giving and helping those in need. Instead of running a contest with a physical prize or experience you could pledge a donation to charity on behalf of the winning entrant. This will help a charity in need as well as create an emotional connection between customers and your company. This builds trust and loyalty.

Donations giveaways.

#13. Multi-prize giveaways

Multi-prize giveaways create momentum and interest throughout the entire holiday season. These are often promoted as “Daily Prize” or “Weekly Prize” contests and have a chance to generate significant reach for your business. Of course, the prizes you give away will likely be of smaller perceived value to your customers, but because there are several opportunities to win people will still enter. This strategy is an excellent way of staying top-of-mind with customers during the biggest spending period of the year.

Giveaway calender. View and Create Your Own.

Conclusion

Are you planning a giveaway to increase your reach, attract leads, and maximize the revenue you generate this holiday season?

If so, try to get creative with your prize(s). As easy as it is to roll out the same old giveaway you’ve run dozens of times before, this approach will struggle to cut through the noise and catch the attention of your customers.Instead, get into the spirit of the season with themed prizes, experiences, services, generous donations, and multi-prize events.

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