The Giveaway Automation Stack We Built in a Week
Most giveaways generate a spike. A few hundred entries, some social buzz, a winner gets announced, and then it’s over. The brand is back where it started — no lasting audience, no data they can act on, nothing to show for the spend except a vague sense that it “built awareness.”
We built something different this week for a DTC brand running a trade-show giveaway. The same effort, roughly the same cost, but with a stack behind it that turns a one-day event into a six-month remarketing audience.
Here’s how we built it and why every decision matters.
The Problem With Most Giveaway Setups
Before I get to the stack, I want to name the problem clearly. Most brands collect giveaway entries through a Google Form, a third-party contest tool, or a comment thread on social media. They get a list of emails. They import it somewhere. They send one email. Done.
The issues with this approach compound over time.
You don’t own the data path. Google Forms can change. Third-party contest tools can shut down or change pricing. Social comment data belongs to the platform. If any of those things shift, your data is stuck or gone.
You mix audiences. Giveaway entrants are not paying customers. They entered to win something. Their intent, their behavior, and their purchase history are completely different from someone who has already bought from you. When you import them into your main email list, you contaminate your reporting and make it harder to understand either segment.
And the follow-up is usually weak. One email. Maybe a discount code. Then silence, because no one has built a proper flow to nurture these people over time.
The fundamental problem is that most brands treat a giveaway as a marketing event rather than an audience-building moment. The stack we built reframes that entirely.
The Stack
Three components. Each one chosen for a specific reason.
A dedicated landing page with an entry form.
Not a Google Form. Not a contest tool. A page we control, with a form that pushes data into our infrastructure. This matters for two reasons.
First, it’s owned data. The form submits to a webhook we control. That data goes where we tell it to go. If we change email platforms next year, we update the Make scenario — the landing page doesn’t change, the data flow doesn’t break, the audience is preserved.
Second, it’s brand-consistent. A Google Form looks like a Google Form. A dedicated landing page looks like a brand that has its act together. At a trade show, that first impression carries weight. People are deciding whether to trust you with their contact details based on everything they’re seeing about you in that moment.
Make.com watching form submissions and pushing to Klaviyo.
Make (formerly Integromat) is our automation layer. The scenario is simple: watch for new form submissions, validate the entry, add the contact to a dedicated Klaviyo list with the correct tags, trigger the welcome flow.
The key word there is dedicated. Not the main list. Not a segment of the main list. A separate list that only contains giveaway entrants from this specific campaign.
This is non-negotiable. When you run reporting on your paying customers next quarter, you don’t want their open rates and click rates muddied by three hundred people who entered a competition six months ago and have never bought anything. Separate lists mean clean data. Clean data means you can trust your reporting.
The Make scenario also gives us portability. We’re not locked into the integration that Klaviyo provides natively. If the native integration changes or breaks, the Make scenario adapts. If the client switches to a different ESP in the future, we update one automation, not their entire tech stack.
A Klaviyo flow: welcome, confirmation, soft offer.
Three emails. That’s it. But the structure matters.
Email one is the welcome. It goes out immediately. It confirms the entry, thanks them for coming to the stand, and sets expectations: “We’ll announce the winner on [date].” It also introduces the brand properly — many of these entrants will have entered quickly at the event without taking time to understand what you actually do.
Email two is the confirmation. It goes out 24 hours later. A soft reminder that they’re in the draw, with a bit more about the brand. No hard sell here. You’re still in the trust-building phase with someone who has only just heard of you.
Email three is the soft offer. It goes out three days after entry. By now the entrant has had two touchpoints. They know the brand. If they’re the right person, they’re warming up. This email introduces a product or offer — but framed gently. “While you wait to hear about the draw…” Not a hard pitch. An invitation.
The reason for three days (not one, not seven) is intent timing. Someone who entered a giveaway at a trade show was physically interested enough to stop at your stand. That initial curiosity has a window. Three days is inside it. Seven days is usually outside it.
Why the “Why” Matters More Than the Tools
I want to be direct about something. This stack isn’t particularly exotic. Make, Klaviyo, and a landing page are not new tools. What makes this work is the thinking behind each decision, not the technology.
Any agency can connect a form to an email platform. The discipline is in:
Keeping the audience separate, so your reporting stays clean.
Building a flow that respects the intent stage of the entrant — curious, not yet sold — rather than immediately trying to close them.
Owning the data path end to end, so you’re not at the mercy of a third-party platform’s pricing decisions or API changes.
The giveaway itself generates the initial list. But the value is in what you do with that list over the next six months. If you’ve set this up correctly, those three hundred entrants are now a warm remarketing audience. You can run targeted ads to them. You can email them periodically. When you launch a new product, they’re a pool of people who have already expressed interest in your brand.
That’s the compounding return on a trade-show giveaway that most brands never capture.
What to Do With the List After the Draw
The giveaway closes. You announce the winner. Now what?
Most brands stop here. The draw is done, the excitement is over, and the list quietly atrophies in the ESP.
A properly set up giveaway list is an asset that lasts well beyond the initial campaign. Here’s how we think about it:
In the first month, continue the Klaviyo flow. Let the soft-offer sequence do its work. Some people will convert. Track it separately from your main list — you want to know the conversion rate from giveaway entrant to paying customer.
At the 30-day mark, sync the list to a custom audience in your ad platform. Facebook, Meta, TikTok — whichever platform the brand uses. You now have a custom audience of people who have hand-raised interest in your brand. That audience can be retargeted directly, or used to build a lookalike for prospecting.
At the 90-day mark, review engagement. Who opened emails? Who clicked? Who bought? Segment those who are engaged from those who are dormant. The engaged segment gets continued nurturing. The dormant segment gets a win-back sequence — one or two emails, a stronger offer, then a clean unsubscribe if they don’t respond.
By month six, the giveaway list has been fully worked. You’ve converted who you’re going to convert, you’ve built lookalike audiences from the engaged cohort, and you’ve cleaned the dormant contacts. The list is smaller but cleaner and more valuable than it was on day one.
The Lesson That Applies Everywhere
This stack is about a giveaway. But the principle applies to any moment where you’re collecting contact details at scale — a webinar, a content download, a pop-up promotion, a referral program.
The principle is: always build for what comes after.
The moment of acquisition is not the value. The value is in what you do with the audience over time. And that requires owned infrastructure, clean segmentation, and a nurture sequence that respects where the person is in their relationship with your brand.
A Google Form gets you a spreadsheet. A proper stack gets you an audience.
If you’re running events, trade shows, or any kind of list-building campaign and you’re not thinking about the infrastructure before you start — you’re generating short-term buzz and leaving the long-term value on the table.
We built this stack in a week. It didn’t require a large budget or an enterprise tech setup. It required clear thinking about what we were actually trying to accomplish.
That’s the most transferable skill in this whole story.
