Most business giveaways exist to get something. Tag three friends to enter. Follow to win. Hand over your email address for the chance at a prize. It’s a lead-generation tactic wearing a party hat.
This is a different kind of giveaway. It’s for the people who are already your clients - already on your list, already paying you, already choosing you over the alternative. No new-lead angle, no strings, no growth hack dressed up as generosity. Just a genuine thank-you.
It’s also one of the cheapest goodwill plays available to a small business. Research from Bain & Company puts the cost of acquiring a new customer at 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one, and a 5% increase in retention can lift profit by 25% to 95%. A modest giveaway aimed at people who’ve already chosen you isn’t a marketing expense competing for attention against acquisition spend - it’s a small, direct investment in the relationships that are already paying off.
What This Actually Is (And Isn’t)
This is a private appreciation giveaway run on your existing client list - not a public acquisition campaign. That distinction matters for how you set it up. You’re not trying to harvest new email addresses, force social shares, or grow your following. Your audience already opted in when they became clients. Keep the entry mechanic simple and keep it contained to people who already know you - that’s what makes it feel like a genuine thank-you rather than a marketing funnel with a prize attached.
Game of Chance vs. Game of Skill
There are two broad ways to pick a winner: a random draw, or a judged entry - something like “tell us in 25 words why you’d love to win this.” The mechanic you choose has a real legal dimension, which we’ll get into properly further down. For now, the practical difference is this: a skill-based entry needs to actually be judged on merit, even lightly - a couple of people on your team picking a favourite from a shortlist is enough. It doesn’t need to be rigorous. What it can’t be is a skill-based entry in name only, where the “answer” is never actually read and the winner is picked at random regardless. That’s not a shortcut worth taking, and we’ll explain exactly why later in this article.
Done properly, judged entries have a side benefit beyond picking a winner: the answers themselves are often worth reading. Genuine client responses about why they value your business are the kind of thing worth holding onto, not just sorting through to find a winner.
Bring Other Local Businesses In
Here’s the catch with funding the prize entirely yourself: a voucher redeemable at your own business doesn’t make attractive competition fodder, no matter how much real value it actually contains. For example, if you’re an accountant or a financial planner, free tax advice or a discounted service package might genuinely be worth hundreds of dollars, but it doesn’t have the same pull as something a client would want regardless of whether they’re already your customer.
That’s the case for bringing other local businesses in, rather than supplying the prize yourself. A local restaurant, a bar, a theatre, a florist, a day spa - whoever’s nearby and relevant - can often be brought in to contribute.
The way to approach this is as a value exchange, not a favour. A donated prize is the best outcome - you’re offering another business exposure to your entire client list in return for the prize, which is genuinely worth something to them - but a donation isn’t the only outcome worth pursuing. If a business isn’t in a position to give a prize away for free, it’s still worth simply paying for it. You still end up with a better, more appealing prize than you could offer alone, you still get to credit and cross-promote another local business, and paying removes any awkwardness from the ask entirely - it becomes a straightforward purchase with a promotional mention attached, rather than a favour you owe someone.
A few things make either version of the ask easy to say yes to:
- Start with businesses you already have a relationship with. A client, a supplier, someone you already know personally - the ask lands very differently from a cold approach.
- Keep it specific and small. “Would you be open to donating a $50 voucher for a client giveaway we’re running, in exchange for a mention to our list?” - or, just as reasonably, “We’d love to buy a $50 voucher from you for a client giveaway, in exchange for a mention to our list” - is a much easier yes than an open-ended request either way.
- Give real credit. Name them, tag them, link them, thank them properly in the giveaway announcement and the winner announcement. Whether the prize was donated or paid for, the exposure is the reason they said yes - so make sure it actually shows up.
Done well, this doesn’t just make the prize better than what you’d have offered alone - it puts your business in front of other local business owners as someone worth partnering with, which tends to open more doors than the giveaway itself.
The ‘Comments (Optional)’ Field
Here’s a small addition to the entry form that’s produced some of the most useful, unplanned results we’ve seen: an extra field, labelled simply “Comments (optional),” with no instruction about what to put there.
We’ve used this on client giveaways before, and the results are consistently good. Most people fill it in anyway - and not with throwaway text. Genuine feedback about the business. A “the new website looks great” message on a giveaway run to celebrate a site launch. Countless unprompted “Merry Christmas, thanks for everything this year” messages on Christmas competitions.
The reason it works is the lack of instruction. An unlabelled, optional field carries no expectation, so people fill it with whatever’s actually on their mind rather than performing an answer to a prompt. The moment you add a leading question - “Tell us what you think of our service!” - you change the psychology and get more guarded, on-brand responses instead of what people would genuinely say.
That feedback has real practical value beyond the warm fuzzies. If someone leaves a glowing comment about your business and you don’t know whether they’ve left you a Google review yet, that’s a natural, low-pressure moment to check - and if they haven’t, ask without it feeling pushy. One caveat worth keeping in mind: using that feedback privately to decide who’s worth asking for a review is a reasonable, related use of something they volunteered about your business. Quoting it publicly - as a testimonial, on social media, wherever - is a different degree of use, and worth a quick “would you mind if I shared what you wrote?” first, rather than assuming a private aside doubles as permission to publish it.
The Legal Bit
This is the part most businesses skip, and it’s the part that can quietly go wrong. If your giveaway is a genuine game of chance - winner drawn at random, not judged on merit - the permit requirement depends entirely on which state or territory you’re running it in:
- NSW requires an “Authority to Conduct a Trade Promotion Lottery” once the total prize value exceeds $10,000.
- ACT requires a permit for trade promotions regardless of prize value.
- SA requires a permit once the prize pool reaches $5,001 or more.
- NT requires a permit once the prize pool reaches $5,001 or more, unless you already hold a permit from another state or territory covering the same promotion.
- QLD, VIC, WA, and TAS don’t require a permit for a standard trade promotion, but each still imposes its own conditions - entry must be free, the draw has to give every entry an equal and random chance, and there are restrictions on what the prize can be. Tasmania is a partial exception: if your promotion is classified as “minor gaming,” a permit is required there too.
Running a national promotion open to clients in every state means complying with all of these at once, not just the strictest one - so if your client list spans multiple states, check each one that applies rather than assuming the rules from your home state cover everyone.
A genuinely judged, skill-based entry sidesteps this in most cases - which is exactly why we flagged it earlier as the practical default for most small businesses. But it only works if the judging is real. Labelling a random draw as a “skill” competition while never actually reading the entries isn’t a loophole - regulators assess this on substance, not the label on the entry form, and a skill competition that isn’t genuinely judged is treated as a game of chance regardless of what you call it. If you do want to run a straightforward random draw above the threshold, the honest path is applying for the permit, not dressing it up as something it isn’t.
Check the current requirements for your state before you launch, not after - the permit process is straightforward, but it needs to happen up front.
Running a genuine appreciation giveaway is a small, low-cost way to strengthen the relationships you’ve already built - and done right, it can bring other local businesses, real feedback, and a few honest reviews along with it. If you’d like help setting one up properly, from the entry form through to the legal side of it, get in touch with our online marketing team to talk it through.
Photo by Ekaterina Shevchenko on Unsplash
