You don’t always have to tell people what you’re giving them in order for them to want it. In fact, one extremely powerful technique you can employ is the mystery item giveaway. As the name suggests, this is where you give away an item – without telling people what it is.

When you tell someone what an item is, they can instantly judge whether it’s something they want or not. On the other hand, when you make it a mystery, you can build up the item in their mind without them actually making a decision on whether or not they like the item.

==> What Kind of Mystery Item Should You Give Away?

There are a few different ways you can approach your mystery items.

First, you can just give away something cute. For example, an odd electronic item or a small book of quotes related to your industry. The item should make people smile or be mildly useful.

On the other hand, you could give away something that’s massively useful. This is likely going to be slightly more expensive. The idea is to impress people so much that their expectations are exceeded.

This generates a lot of goodwill. It also gets people talking about you and generates a lot of buzz.

==> Free Giveaways versus Purchase Bonus

Generally speaking, you don’t want to just give a mystery giveaway to everyone. They usually cost money to create, so you want to be a little more selective.

You can use it as a feeder for a sweepstake or contest. For example, everyone who gets 50 likes on their contest page gets the mystery bonus.

You can also use it as a purchase bonus. Whenever someone buys your product, they get the mystery item as well. Perhaps you can even have a random rotation of mystery items, so people never quite know what they’re getting.

==> Use It to Give Away Excess Merchandise

If you have too much merchandise stocked up, the mystery item giveaway is a great way to get rid of some of that merchandise. If you have discontinued items stocked up, those are great giveaways as well.

Before sending your old merchandise off as freebies, make sure that the customer hasn’t actually purchased that item in the past.

==> Multiple Mystery Items: The Grab Bag

Finally, you can give away multiple mystery items, grab bag style. Woot.com does this very well with their mystery bags.

Basically, you give away a bunch of small things instead of one big thing.

The mystery item can add a lot of style to your free giveaways. It can be used to build up excitement about a product or a launch. There’s a lot of room for creativity when you’re using this technique.