Gleam.io Review Results: Could You Use it to Grow Your Ecom Business

Gleam.io Review: What is Gleam.io and how it can help you grow your business

Today, the market is flooding with various contests and giveaway platforms, but Gleam stands apart. It is a famous marketing platform used by many leading brands and businesses. Gleam.io interface is intuitive, so learning is easy, and you can quickly get the most out of its valuable features and functionality (I’ll share my findings in this review).

In a nutshell, Gleam is a customer engagement platform that helps you grow your brand visibility. It offers a suite of tools to help you drive traffic, increase conversions, and measure success.

The software can be used to create custom contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways with the help of their templates, widgets, and integrations. You can also use it to engage with your customers by running timed-based competitions on social media or by rewarding them with coupons or discounts on their purchase at your store.

Gleam is also capable of integrating with Facebook Ads Manager to run campaigns on Facebook as well as Google Analytics to measure the ROI of campaigns on various platforms.

I’ve summarized below my thoughts on Gleam.io but you’ll need to read the review to see how you can make use of this platform to increase your users’ engagement with your brand on all the different social platforms.

Do I Recommend Gleam.io?

I’m detailing my findings in this review to help you make a sound decision in selecting the right platform. So, based on my review of the tool, I recommend Gleam to brands who value both simplicity and gamification, need something that does not require a lot of technical involvement, and want something that can be launched in just a few clicks.

Their documentation is extensive and easy to comprehend. In addition, they have given more than 50 ways to use the software platform, including distribution hacks, milestone campaigns, campaign launches, social campaigns, and much more.

Being a MarTech tool, Gleam.io is userfriendly, easy-to-use, and highly productive tool and you should definitely add to your tech stack.

How Do Gleam.io Giveaways Work?

You first start by selecting which type of activation you want to run… Competitions, Rewards, Captures or Galleries. Then you follow below 5 steps:

1. Setup: you enter the name of the campaign, starts and ends time, time zone, terms & conditions.
2. User Details: Choose how your users log in and what info they must provide. You can select to add an email form in this step to collect more data from users.
3. Entries: You select all the different ways users can receive points. You can select between Instagram Entry, Visit a profile, view a post, reshare a tweet, watch a YouTube video, signup to your newsletter and many more options to choose from. See screenshot below.
4. Prizes: here you can customize the Prize Area of the Gleam Widget. You can give a detailed description of the prize and add any exceptions for entries (like including or excluding a specific country, age restrictions, etc.)
5. Post Entry: in this section you will find the script to embed the Gleam widget on your own landing page. You can also select to have Gleam host the widget for you and you can get access to the specific URL to use for that. You should add your Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics ID in this section for better users’ tracking and Ad retargeting.

 

Here are the four Apps to build your campaign on Gleam Widget:

Competitions App:

Running a contest can help your company in many ways. It’s a great way to engage your audience, improve your brand awareness, and drive more traffic to your website. Gleam.io has various contest templates to choose from. One of the easiest one you could set-up in under 15 minutes is the Refer-A-Friend contest.

This one can help you grow your reach and build a bigger email list and followers.

Here are some examples of Contests you can run using the Gleam.io platform:

 

Rewards App:

You can reward your users in different ways, and the Rewards templates cover almost all possible ways to reward the participants and grab the opportunity to collect users information. You can begin with discounts and go for gift cards. Here are some templates:

 

Capture App:

As its name suggests, this collection of templates is for capturing emails for your next email campaign. You can employ different techniques to compel your prospects to give you their email address willingly! Moreover, it offers integration of a whopping number of providers which is around 25+.

 

Galleries App:

Suppose you have a treasure of user-generated content that speaks in your favor. In that case, a gallery is an app that gives you an opportunity to display them to your prospects and win their trust.

You can sync the content of the Gallery with the Competition and Rewards apps to get the most out of it. Moreover, it allows you to pull images from hashtags, Facebook pages, and posts. You also can let your users vote on images in the Gallery and share submissions with your audience.

Gleam.io Pros and Cons:

I’m summarizing what I like and what I don’t from my time reviewing Gleam. There are many pros to Gleam.io such as its ease of use, its ability to send out emails automatically to entrants, and the fact that it is free for anyone who wants to try it out.

Pros:

+ Ease of use
+ Integrates with more than 25+ services
+ Sends emails automatically to entrants
+ Offer a free plan to try it out
+ Upgrade, Downgrade or cancel any time
+ Offers various templates
+ Can embed the widget’s script any landing page
+ Can host the widget on Gleam’s URL
+ Randomly select a winner with one click
+ Create a recurring campaigns
+ Include or exclude countries

Cons:

+ Can be costly for solo entrepreneurs
+ The most affordable yearly plan (Hobby Plan) doesn’t offer email capture option.

Is Gleam.io Legit?

Gleam.io is a SaaS business incorporated in Australia and based in Melbourne. Gleam have a fully remote team from all over the world.

The company was founded on April 1st, 2013 and has grown to serve 1M+ businesses of all shapes and sizes worldwide, and surpassed the huge number of 2M sites created inside the platform according to Gleam’s website.

Gleam.io Pricing

Gleam offers three subscription tiers: Pro, Business, and Premium. The screenshot below lists the difference between the three. The differences are mainly the added features such as Linkedin entry, Product Hunt, and Viral share with SMS, Whatsapp, Messenger, and some options for integrations (infusionsoft, hubspot, API, etc.).

 

Gleam’s pricing structure is as follows:

ProPlan

• Monthly: $97 per site, billed monthly
  Yearly: $948 – works out to $79/month

BusinessPlan

• Monthly: $397per site, billed monthly
  Yearly: $3,588 billed yearly – works out to $79/month

PremiumPlan

• Monthly: $997 per site, billed monthly
  Yearly: $8,988 billed yearly – works out to $749/month

Save up to 24% when subscribing to a Yearly Plan and get double the limits with a yearly plan.

Gleam offers a Free plan which allows you to run unlimited competitions however it comes with limited features & user data.

See Gleam.io prices for each of their full package plans here.

Gleam.io also offers the option to buy a plan for one of their four apps individually (Competitions, Rewards, Galleries, Captures) or choose the full package plan, where you have access to a long list of features and you get access to all four apps. You should check for the price of each App that interests you more.

Should I buy a Subscription to Gleam.io?

I’ve been using Gleam for a few years, would I recommend it to others?

You bet!

Gleam offers a quality tool with a user-friendly interface. I strongly recommend it if you want to create giveaways with various supported platforms to get traffic, grow your business and community, build your email list, or gain momentum and engagement on all social media platforms. The apps are easy to learn and building the widget is easy and requires no technical skill. You can build a Contest and launch it in just 15 to 30 minutes.

You can cancel, upgrade or downgrade your subscription anytime just by just clicking cancel under your Plans tab and it’ll automatically switch you to the free plan on your anniversary date.

Visit Gleam.io