8020 Hustle, Author at 80/20 Hustle

Facebook ROAS Explained

October 6, 2020 by 8020 Hustle

I recently came across a post in a Facebook group where someone was asking what is considered to be a decent Facebook ROAS number (ROAS = return on ad spend).

This blog post is not only in response to this initial question but also aims to address some of the generic and quite frankly, uneducated replies I saw like this one:

“Somewhere over 2 is good.”

Really? How did you come to this number?

So the problem with the original question is that there’s no context and we’re lacking important information about the business in order to determine what their target or ideal ROAS should be.

What is the goal of the campaign?

What are you trying to achieve?

Who are you targeting?

What is your gross profit margin on this product you’re trying to sell?

You can also look at the age or maturity of the business. This can help you to set some ROAS expectations.

SPOILER ALERT: there is no one-size-fits-all response.

It depends on many factors which I will go through in this post.

You’ll need to calculate a few things in order to determine what a “good” or “bad” ROAS is and it also depends on your business model and what you’re selling.

If you’re selling a subscription, membership or there’s recurring revenue from the same customer, you can afford to have a lower ROAS and pay more to acquire a customer.

Digital vs physical products will also have an impact.

If your product is a 1-time purchase, generally speaking you need to have a higher ROAS to remain profitable since you don’t have another future opportunity to earn more revenue from that same customer.

So let’s start with a basic calculation of ROAS.

How to Calculate ROAS?

The equation to calculate return on ad spend is quite simple.

Take the revenue generated from your ad and divide it by your ad spend.

So for example, if you spent $10 and you generated $100 in revenue, your ROAS would be $100 / $10 = 10x.

ROAS is represented as a multiple.

Another example would be that you spent $100 and only generated $50 in sales.

The ROAS in this case would be $50 / $100 = 0.5x.

A ROAS over 1x means that you generated more revenue compared to what you spent.

Conversely, a ROAS under 1x means that you spent more than what you generated in revenue.

You cannot have a ROAS less than 0.

Another term that gets thrown around is ACoS.

ACoS stands for Ad Cost of Sales and is a metric used in the Amazon world.

If you’re ever advertised on Amazon using their PPC Advertising Platform, you’ll be familiar with it.

ACoS is the inverse of ROAS in terms of how it’s calculated but it’s just a different way of saying the same thing:

How are my ads performing?

ACoS is calculated by dividing your ad spend by the revenue generated multiplied by 100%.

So using the same example above, if you spent $10 to generate $100, your ACoS would be $10 / $100 = 0.1 x 100% = 10%.

So a 10% ACoS is the same as a 10x ROAS.

25% ACoS = 4x ROAS

50% ACoS = 2x ROAS

Now that we know how to calculate ROAS, let’s go over how to calculate your business’ target ROAS.

Know Your Numbers: Calculating Your Target ROAS

Before you go out and start spending money on ads, you need to know your numbers.

I’m going to go over calculating your target ROAS for 2 different business scenarios I mentioned earlier.

Membership / Subscription / Recurring Revenue Model / Consumable Product
1-Time Purchase

So the only difference between these 2 is qualifying what an “acceptable” target ROAS is.

With a recurring revenue model, you can afford to spend more to acquire a customer which means a lower ROAS would be acceptable.

Why is that?

Because once you make the initial sale, you have their email and can reach out to them whenever you want without having to pay Facebook to reach them again.

You can break even or even lose money on the initial purchase because you’ll have more opportunities in the future to continue selling to them.

With a 1-time purchase model where you only have 1 product to sell them, you should aim to be profitable with your initial campaign.

That’s because you have 1 shot to make the sale so you need to aim for a higher ROAS.

So with that in mind, let’s go into figuring out how to calculate your Target ROAS.

You need to know a few things:

Average Order Value or your Expected Revenue per Sale – let’s use the example figure of $50.
Your cost of goods sold (COGS) – let’s say it’s $25
Any fulfillment costs (warehouse, shipping) – let’s say it costs $5 in warehouse and shipping fees
Payment processing fees – let’s assume 3% of $50 which is $1.50

Essentially, you need to know your gross profit and revenue.

So on a $50 sale, we need to deduct our product cost which is $25, fulfillment fees which include shipping of $5 and processing fees of $1.50.

$50 – $25 – $5 – $1.5 = $18.50.

So after selling our $50 product, we’d be left with $18.50 (our gross profit).

The next step would be calculating our breakeven ROAS.

How to Calculate Breakeven ROAS?

Our breakeven ROAS calculation tells us the maximum we can spend before we start losing money.

This is an important metric to keep in the back of your mind while you’re monitoring the performance of your ads.

Breakeven ROAS Equation

Revenue / (Revenue – COGS – Fulfillment) = Breakeven ROAS

In the case of our example, our target ROAS would be $50 / $18.50 = 2.7x ROAS

So if we spent $18.50, we would need to make 2 sales @ $50 to generate the required $100 to break even on our ads.

$100 in revenue – ($25 x 2 COGS) – ($5 x 2 in fulfillment) – ($1.50 x 2 in processing fees) – ($18.50 x 2 in ad spend) = $0.

That would yield our breakeven 2.7x ROAS.

In this scenario, we are spending the equivalent of our gross profit to make the sale.

Wait a second!

Don’t we want to make a profit? In what scenario does this make sense?

Determining your Desired ROAS

There are indeed a few scenarios where breaking even or even losing money on your ad campaigns makes sense:

You’re just getting started
You have a brand new Facebook pixel
You’re launching a new product and want to get product out in the wild

Circling back to what I mentioned earlier, it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and the current situation of your business.

This scenario can be justified for both recurring revenue models and 1-time purchase models depending on your goal.

Recurring revenue makes sense because you’re breaking even to acquire this customer so any future sales you make from this customer don’t have any additional advertising costs associated with them and you’ll be profitable in the long run.

1-time purchase models also make sense if your goal is to simply season your Facebook pixel or just get some products into the wild with the intention of generating some reviews for example.

If your goal is to be profitable on these ads, well then it doesn’t work.

If you want to be profitable, you’d need to aim for at least a 2.8x ROAS and in that case, you’re making just over $1 in profit.

In the case that you’re selling a digital product and assuming it only cost you your time to create what you’re selling, you have no cost of goods sold associated with your product.

Let’s say you have a digital eBook that you’re selling for $19.

No COGS or fulfillment fees.

Processing fees are 3% of 19 = $0.57.

Your breakeven ROAS is $19 / ($19 – $0.57) = 1.03x

In this example, you can spend up to $18.43 which means you can afford to pay more to acquire a customer and still break even.

A 2.7x ROAS selling a digital product like this would mean you’d spend $7.04 to make a sale.

So a 2.7x ROAS selling the digital product is amazing and highly profitable whereas a 2.7x ROAS selling our $50 physical product earlier yields no profit.

I hope it’s not clear that you can’t make a blanket statement that a certain ROAS is good.

As you saw, it depends on many factors.

Summary

In closing, you now know how to calculate ROAS, calculate your breakeven ROAS and how to qualify what an acceptable ROAS is.

Now you’re armed to evaluate your ad’s performance based on the ROAS.

Good luck!

Smartphone Addiction: This is How I Stay Focused

February 15, 2020 by 8020 Hustle

Smartphones are extremely powerful but they can have devastatingly adverse effects on productivity.

The problem is that these devices are loaded with notifications, vibrations, sounds and banners all screaming for your attention.

Text Messages.

Phone Calls.

Emails.

Facebook.

Instagram.

YouTube.

Appointments.

News.

Dating Apps.?

I think you get the idea.

By default, all notifications and alerts are turned on so not only do you hear something, you also feel a vibration and your phone displays a Banner Notification on the home screen.

Sound, Touch and Sight all get activated.

That’s 3 out of your 5 senses.

No wonder our immediate reaction is to grab our phones!

Luckily our phones don’t emit the smell of french fries or cookies or else we’d be doomed.

Most of us already know deep down that we’re addicted to our phones but many of us don’t actually do anything about it.

The other issue is that if we get distracted, we don’t continue right where we left off.

It can take a while to regroup and regain your focus.

So a 2 minute distraction can actually turn into a 20 minute productivity derailment.

And considering we get several notifications per hour, this can lead to some pretty unproductive days.

I’m by no means perfect but I’ve implemented a few changes that have helped reduce my distractions.

A lot of what I’m about to lay out is based around the 4 Laws of Behavior Change from James Clear’s Atomic Habits book.

If you haven’t read this book, I strongly recommend that you do.

I enjoyed it so much that I read it 3 times…

Understanding this Bad Habit

We can agree that reaching for your phone after you hear/see/feel a notification is a bad habit.

So we need to break this bad habit, right?

Kind of.

It’s not that we want to break or even get rid of this habit. That’s almost impossible since your brain is wired to react.

You’d be relying on willpower to resist the temptation or urge to initiate this habit and honestly, we’re weak when it comes to this.

But there is something we can do and it has to do with the First Law of Behavior Change.

Rather, the inversion of the First Law.

Make it Invisible.

By deactivating the notifications in the first place, your brain won’t receive the initial cue to start that bad habit.

No notification, no distraction.

So for me personally, I keep my phone on silent for most of the day.

I also disable notifications for emails and apps.

No sounds. No banners. No vibrations.

I do keep banners on for text messages but since my phone is in silent mode, I don’t hear them.

I also don’t see them because I keep my phone face down behind my laptop where I can’t see the phone.

Seeing the phone also acts as a visual cue which leads to a craving to pick it up and start checking apps aimlessly to see if I missed anything.

This means that I check my phone on my time. Not when a notification tells me to.

This way, I can work on the task I have set out to accomplish free of distractions.

But Won’t I Miss Important Things? What if Something is Urgent?

Yeah, sure. But is everything critical?

No.

In fact, a very, VERY small percentage of notifications that you would get are time sensitive or critical.

There’s even a setting in your phone that allows you to pre-program a few phone numbers or contacts so when they call 2 times in a row, it will play your ringtone even if your phone is on silent.

Crisis averted!

No Phone in the Bedroom

This one is a biggie. So many people bring their phones to bed.

Scrolling through your Instagram feed is the new bedtime and wakeup ritual.

I keep my bedroom for relaxing and sleeping.

I keep my phone in the other room charging.

No Phone in the Morning

This one might not work for everyone but I don’t touch my phone until I’ve accomplished the first thing on my list for the day.

Sometimes this happens by 10am or sometimes it doesn’t happen until noon depending on the task.

Do I fail occasionally?

Of course.

But I’ve noticed a pattern.

On the days that I check my phone in the morning before completing my first task, I’m generally not satisfied with how my day went.

So I know that checking my phone sets the wrong tone for my day.

This experience helps me stick to this habit because the reward for not checking my phone is generally a productive day.

Summary

So wrapping this up, you can use the knowledge of habits to reduce your smartphone addiction. This is what I do:

Deactivate all notifications, banners and vibrations
Don’t bring your phone to bed
Don’t check your phone first thing in the morning

Over to You

What sort of tactics or techniques are you using to fight smartphone addiction?

Do you disagree with anything I said?

I’d love to hear from you.

Andrew

How to Create Facebook Product Catalog for Shopify Store: Start to Finish

May 26, 2018 by 8020 Hustle

If you want to learn how to create a Facebook product catalog that syncs up with your Shopify store and save hours with Facebook and Shopify’s support team, give this post a read.

Setting up a Facebook Product Feed with your Shopify store has some pretty powerful benefits. Once you have your feed working, you can:

Run Dynamic Ads on Facebook
Tag your photos in Instagram (business accounts only)

This means you can scale up your marketing efforts and show only relevant products to your potential customers which means more efficient ad spending and higher return on ad spend.

Ready to get started? Let’s go.

Step 1: Install Flexify in your Shopify Store

Start by opening the admin of your Shopify store. Navigate to the Apps section and download the Flexify Facebook Product Feed App.

Essentially, this app will create an RSS feed for your products so that your Shopify Store and Facebook can communicate between each other.

That was easy, right?

Step 2: Create a Product Catalog within Facebook

I’m assuming that you already have a Facebook Business Manager Account so head on over to Business.Facebook.com and select the appropriate business manager.

Click the menu in the top-left hand corner to reveal the bigger menu and look for Catalogs.

Once you’re on the Catalogs page, click the Create Catalog button.

Under catalog type, select E-commerce.

You’ll be presented with a Drop Down menu, select your Business Manager name, give your feed a name and hit Create.

Step 3: Add your Product Feed

You’ll now want to add your products to this newly created catalog so go ahead and click “Add Products.”

Select the Use Data Feeds option. No sense in manually uploading it unless you’re only ever going to have the same products.

Under the setting, “How do you want to upload your data feed”, I select the “Set a Schedule Option.” This means that I can make sure Facebook has the latest product catalog hourly, daily or weekly.

For the Data Feed URL, head back to your Shopify store and open up the Flexify app. At the very top, you’ll find your RSS product feed. Copy that and paste it in the Data Feed URL field.

Username and Password is blank.

Choose your schedule. I have mine set to daily at 5 in the morning.

Name your data feed, make sure the correct currency is selected and hit the Start Upload button!

If all is set up correctly, you will see a progress bar like this one:

Once all 4 steps are done, just hit the blue Done button.

Step 4: Connect your Product Catalog to your Facebook Pixel

This step is super easy.

Hit the settings button in the top menu and then click “Connect Event Source.”

A pop-up will appear where you simply need to select the appropriate Pixel. This will allow you to properly run Facebook Dynamic Retargeting Ads since your product catalog will now be tied to your Pixel which is collecting data on every visitor including which products they’re looking at.

Troubleshooting & FAQs

If for some reason, you’re not seeing your Facebook Pixel, you will need to make sure your Business Manager has access to all the necessary assets under your Business Settings.

From there, click through the options on the left side such as Pages, Ad Accounts, Catalogs and Pixels and make sure you see the right assets.

Under Pages, you should see your business Facebook page.
Under ad accounts, you should see your business ad account for this particular brand.
Under catalogs, you should see your newly created catalog.
Under pixels, you should see your business pixel.

If you don’t see them, you need to add them or give yourself access.

Catalog is Owned by Shopify

If you see this, you need to delete the catalog and re-create it. You selected the wrong business in Step #2.

For some reason, there is no way to properly reassign the catalog to the correct business manager once you see this.

And if you click on Manage the Shopify business manager, you won’t be able to edit anything. It brings you to the original business.facebook.com page where you will see your actual Business Manager.

Hopefully that helps! Post up questions below if anything is unclear.

Shopify Quietly Releases Buy X Get Y Discount Codes

May 29, 2018May 18, 2018 by 8020 Hustle

Shopify Releases Buy X Get Y Discount Codes - 8020 Hustle

In case you haven’t visited your Discounts Section in your Shopify backend lately, Shopify quietly released a new kind of Discount Code:

Shopify Buy X Get Y Discounts

Until now, you’ve had to use an app to give customers this kind of deal.

Customers can now enter a coupon code during the checkout process to take advantage of the deal you have to offer.

With Shopify’s Buy X, Get Y discount code, you have two options as the seller:

Offer your customer a percentage off the deal item(s)
The deal item(s) is FREE

? There is no fixed price discount option.

Here is a screenshot in the admin view:

You must specify the quantity the customer needs to purchase as well as the specific products or collections.

You then need to specify the quantity as well as the products or collections the customer will receive at a discount or for free.

From the customer’s perspective, they need to add the necessary items and quantities to their cart before they can enter the coupon code and the discount takes effect.

That means they need to add the entire combination of items: what they need to buy at full price and then what they will receive at a discount or for free.

So if the deal is buy 3 items from Collection A and get a 4th item from Collection A for free, they need to add 4 items from Collection A and then apply the coupon code.

If they do not have the correct items in their cart, they will receive an error message that looks like this:

“Your cart does not meet the requirements for the XYZ discount code”

This is a bit problematic if you have any complicated offers since it doesn’t tell the customer what they are missing so my suggestion is to keep things simple.

Here are some potential ideas for this new discount code:

Buy 2 items from a Collection A and get a third item from Collection B for free
Buy any item in the store and get the second item for 50% (or any other discount)
Buy 3 of the same item and get the 4th free

Does the Shopify Buy X Get Y Discount Replace my Paid Upsell & BOGO Apps?

I think this new discount code a good option for anyone who has a new store and wants to get their feet wet with a BOGO offer WITHOUT having to purchase an app.

However, I think that dedicated Upsell Apps like the one from Bold Commerce and the Ultimate Special Offers app by Supple Apps are still much more powerful and offer a better (different) customer experience.

So the answer to that question is no and for a very simple reason: Shopify’s discount requires that the customer knows the coupon code and enters in the correct combination of items.

At the end of the day, this is simply another coupon code you can offer to your customers.

I think it’s a good option if you want to run a flash sale on certain items or offer a secret deal to VIP members. That’s what I would do at least.

With the Bold Upsell app for example, the customer experience is a little different.

The customer adds an item to their cart
The app will present the customer with the upsell offer (either immediately or during the checkout process)
The discount will automatically apply

So hopefully that brings you up to speed on Shopify’s new coupon code!

What do you think of the new discount? Will you be using it in your Shopify store!

How to Capture 1000s of Emails for $0.13 Each with Social Media Giveaways

May 17, 2018May 15, 2018 by 8020 Hustle

Using Social Contests to Generate Thousands of Email Addresses - 8020 Hustle

Have you ever ran a campaign with the goal of growing your email list? You know it’s hard to do and it can get pretty expensive. Trying to come up with a compelling reason for people to join can be tough. Free Guides, Checklists and eBooks are the usual suspects that you’re probably used to seeing.

The tactic I’m going to show you brought me almost 3,000 emails!!

Here are the final numbers:

Ad Cost: $209.97
Total Number of Emails: 2,914 (1,661 from paid FB ads)
Average Cost per Email: $0.07 ($0.13 from paid FB ads) ?

Note: If you want an explanation of these numbers in a bit more detail, I’ve included it at the very bottom.

So what is this tactic?

SOCIAL GIVEAWAYS

Before I get started, I want to be fully transparent with you and set the proper expectations (something I find a lot of people fail to do which make the results look EVEN better and even MORE unattainable).

We’re already an established brand with over 10,000 Facebook Fans
I used previous page engagement and existing likes to create Facebook Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences
Our top-performing campaign targeted existing fans and converted them into email subscribers

Disclaimer: Even if you follow my exact steps, your results may differ than mine (they could be better or worse). Some of these links are affiliate links and I may make a commission if you purchase any of the tools I recommend.

WITH THAT SAID…

I think this is definitely something you can achieve within a few months even if your brand is new to the world. I think with the right Promotion Strategy, Proper Tools and an Interesting Prize, you can be successful with building your email list with Giveaways.

I definitely plan on using this strategy to help launch one of my new Shopify Stores so keep an eye out for another case study covering this same tactic with a new brand.

?Here are the exact tools that I used for this particular contest that I recommend you also use:

Facebook Ads Manager
Viral Sweep – Contest Tool
Klaviyo – Email Marketing Software
Animoto – Video Ad Creation Tool (this one is totally optional but it’s super quick and easy to create video ads)

I’ll go step-by-step so you can replicate exactly what I did.

Here’s a summary of what the process looks like:

Pick a Prize and make sure it’s a Good One
Set up your Contest
Create your Video
Announce and Promote your Contest
End the Contest & Next Steps

1. Pick a Prize and make sure it’s a Good One

First thing’s first: you’ll need to figure out what you’re going to give away, and you better make it good because if not, (*spoiler alert coming) you won’t get any emails.

The prize that we gave away was valued at just over $350 USD. It was essentially a product bundle consisting of everything we make where the winner got to choose which color and style they wanted from each of the product categories.

I got the idea from GoPro. If you were following them a few years ago, they used to do a contest called “The Win Everything We Make” contest.

And as I’m sure you can guess, they gave away 1 of everything they made. When you added it all up, it was well over $500 including a camera, every mount, a memory card, etc.

Was it a no-brainer to enter the contest?

YES.

Who wouldn’t want $500+ worth of camera gear??

Oh, and they ran it daily…for about 2 years.?

Do you think they collected a lot of email opt-ins?

You bet they did!

Now, if you only make 1 or a couple products and the value of the prize isn’t that high, don’t worry. You can still run it like that but just don’t expect a ton of emails to come through.

Just know that the higher the prize value, the more attention it’s going to attract and the more entries you’ll get!

Something you can do is partner up with another business complementary to yours and ask them if they’d be willing to throw in a few of their products in exchange for the brand exposure you’ll give them. Ask around and put together a cool bundle to give away.

Once you have a prize that you’d be excited to win, it’s time to set up the contest.

2. Set up your Contest

There are quite a few options when it comes to running the contest.

I think contests are one of the easiest ways to collect email addresses so I see the value in spending a monthly fee to use a quality piece of software that is reliable and does the job right.

Viral Sweep is my personal recommendation for a few reasons:

It’s really easy to set up. You write a description, set the contest duration, the number of winners, entry frequency, social actions (this is HUGE…see my 3rd point below) and it connects with your favorite Email Service Provider (Klaviyo, Convertkit, Active Campaign, MailChimp and many more) so as people enter your contest, your email lists get updated almost immediately.
It integrates with several platforms very easily such as Shopify, WordPress, ClickFunnels, LeadPages and more. We use Shopify for our eCommerce store and they have a Shopify app you install which allows for 1 click integrations. This means the contest shows up on a page within your store and not on another website. It couldn’t be easier.
You can grow several assets simultaneously with incentives with the social actions I mentioned earlier. What I mean by this is that once someone enters the contest, the next page shows a list of Bonus Entries that you can choose from which gives the entrant a higher chance of winning.Some of these include Visiting your Facebook Page, Visiting your Instagram Page, Following your Pinterest Channel, Visiting our Website, answering a question, sharing the contest with a friend, etc. You can assign points to each one so if you really want them to take a specific action, assign more bonus entries to that particular action! See the screenshot below for a list of all the social actions you can do!
It’s extremely reliable. The software does exactly what it’s supposed to and has worked for me without a hitch. It collects emails, syncs them up with my email provider, I can pick a winner with a single click at the end and that’s it. I’m able to focus on running my business and monitoring my ad performance or responding to comments and not performing tech support.
The customer support is second to none. Whenever I had a question, I was responded to within minutes (seriously!) and even when I thought I was asking questions that were outside of the scope of their product, they STILL helped me and gave me an informative response. I can’t say the same about a lot of other services out there who would simply paste in their default reply of, “Sorry, that’s not part of our offering.”

Simple + Easy + Reliable = The Perfect Solution

If you want to learn more about setting up a Viral Sweep contest and read my full review, I’ve got content coming soon.

3. Create your Video

You’ve probably heard it time and time again…Facebook Video is the way to go.

Running a giveaway is no different. I recommend using video for the following reasons:

If you’re giving away multiple items, it’s tough to showcase them all on one image. It’ll look too cluttered and too busy. Video is perfect to showcase multiple products in a slideshow format.

Videos are more engaging than static images so you’re more likely to grab their attention.

You can create custom audiences based on people who have watched your video after the contest is over.

This is extremely powerful and I’ll tell you why in Step #5.

As for the creation of the video itself, I created a very simple video using Animoto. It’s a very easy to use drag and drop software, it adds in some style and transitions, you can add text and choose music from a massive library.

It’s everything you need and nothing you don’t.

If you’re good with Adobe Premiere or iMovie, feel free to use those. But personally, I find I can create something very high quality in a fraction of the time with Animoto. You have too much control in more advanced video editing software which could end up costing you too much time.

Remember…80/20!

4. Announce and Promote your Contest

It’s time for the grand reveal! Time to go live and start collecting emails.

We started by publishing the contest on our Facebook page and then did some cross promotion on Instagram. If you have an email list, let them know about your contest as well!

Once the Facebook Post was published, we grabbed the post ID and we ran a paid FB campaign targeting a couple different audiences to the same post (both warm and cold audiences). Running the paid traffic to the same page post is important since all of the engagement and comments will be contained in one post and not spread out over different ones.

Social Proof is a powerful thing!

We then added a little bonus strategy I came up with which helps with the Facebook algorithm and generating some additional organic reach.

Facebook likes to see post engagement, right??

In the post caption along with the video, we added a Facebook-specific bonus where if you posted a picture, you would be eligible to win a runner-up prize.

Make sure it’s relevant to your niche. If you’re in the fishing niche, ask them to post a picture of them fishing, their tackle box or the biggest fish they caught. Something like that.

This bonus strategy is totally optional.

You could do this with each of your social media platforms if you wanted to so that each one had a unique runner up prize. We opted to stick just with Facebook to keep things simple.

When people engage with your post, Facebook tends to increase your reach.

Our runner up prize was simply 1 of our items valued at $50. Not a bad prize and it’s enough of an incentive for people to post a picture!

5. End the Contest & Next Steps

This step should be obvious but you need to pick a winner.?

With Viral Sweep, you set the start and end date so you don’t need to manually end the contest. It is done automatically for you.

The contest widget will also display a message to anyone who visits after it ends saying that the contest is over so it won’t allow any more entries.

Inside of Viral Sweep, you can pick a winner with one click. Reach out to them and ask for their shipping information so you can send them their prize (you can also follow up with them and get a review or pictures of it in action – useful for promoting your products on your site or on social media).

Now the contest is officially over and your responsibilities as a giveaway host have been fulfilled.

But we’re not done yet.?

At this point, you should have collected a bunch of email addresses of people who are at least slightly interested in your brand (I say slightly because there will always be some people who simply want to win free stuff regardless of what it is).

Reach Out To Them!

What I would recommend doing is sending everyone an email thanking them for participating in the contest. Not only that, I would include a small coupon code (10% is fine) valid on your store for the next couple of days (I’d recommend keeping it short and no longer than 1 week).

We’re seeing AMAZING results with this strategy. They’re also very appreciative of the code since they see it as a nice gesture!

And do you remember how I recommended using Facebook Videos? Now, you can run a paid campaign reaching people on Facebook who watched your video and offer them that same 10% coupon code.

You can’t do this with static image ads.

So now you’re reaching anyone who watched your video (3 seconds of it at least) with a Facebook ad promoting the 10% thank you coupon code PLUS sending an email to everyone who entered the contest.

And if you want to run another contest, you can create a lookalike audience based on the people who watched your video as well as another lookalike audience based on the emails you collected to reach even more people and collect even more emails!

You can make these contests a regular thing and it’s only going to get better and better with time. Remember, this is what GoPro did for 2 years!

The last time I ran a contest, I targeted people who watched the video with another ad containing the 10% coupon code. I kept it open for 6 days.

The campaign cost us $82 and generated just over $1,500 in revenue from 17 sales. That’s a Return on Ad Spend of 18X!!

?CHA-CHING!?

So not only did we collect a whole bunch of emails and managed to generate $1,500 in sales, we also grew our Instagram following, Facebook following and Pinterest following since they were all bonus entries. We also made some easy ones like visiting our website and since we have the FB Pixel Installed, that means we can retarget them dynamically based on products or pages they visited.

Here is a little explanation of the data from this giveaway.

We collected 2,914 emails in total and 1,661 came from paid FB ads. What makes up the difference?

Remember the social actions I spoke about? One of them was to share this contest with your friends to gain additional bonus entries.

And remember how I mentioned that you can assign more points to specific ones? That’s exactly what I did with this particular social action.

I gave them enough of an incentive to share the link to increase their chances of winning and even though it was the most involving one, people still did it! We actually generated just over 400 emails just from recorded referrals alone (I’m sure some people shared the contest without using their unique link as well).

So that means 1,253 emails came from a combination of contest referrals by entrants OR people who saw our Facebook post organically. There was no direct cost associated with acquiring these emails. Not bad I’d say!

The social actions built into Viral Sweep are a GAME CHANGER and I hope you can see the value in using a tool like this.

Pretty amazing, right? Now all that’s left is for you to get started & try your own Giveaway!

So what do you think about this tactic? Is this something you’re going to try? Have you already tried it?

I’d love to hear your experience and results with this strategy!

If you want to give Viral Sweep a try, click the logo below to start a 7 Day Trial which is long enough to run a quick giveaway and see if this tool is right for you. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and it’s something I will continue to use regularly!

If you have any questions, please post them up. I’d be happy to answer them.

– Andrew