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