Today we wanted to share a story on how we combined a marketing strategy in the form of a giveaway/sweepstake with popular selling products in the jewelry niche. We tested this out some time back with a client’s online store. With it being quarter four at the time, we wanted to ride the wave of the “shopping buzz” that happens throughout this time of year.
If you own a successful ecom store, you know that acquiring an engaged email list is very important to the longevity of your business.
As an ecom store owner, you pay good money to run ads on the likes of Facebook to generate leads & sales for your store. In order to turn a profit on your lead and customer acquisition costs, we have to use the likes of email marketing to generate more sales for your store and go from losing a little money upfront (or breakeven) to profiting from your customers over time using email marketing.
With that said…
If there is one way to explode the growth of your ecom email list, its doing it through a good targeted giveaway marketing campaign.
BUT!
You need to make sure you do this correctly… otherwise you are going to end up with a lot of email addresses on your list from the wrong target audience. We’ve made that mistake in the past… wasting time and money.
Because of our mistakes, we wanted to share our experience with other ecom store owners so that they don’t fall into the same bad situation we did.
Let’s talk about what we did to create this campaign and make it a success.
First things first!
We had to…
Define a Goal For Our Giveaway Campaign
When you’re putting time and money into a marketing campaign, you want to have a clear end goal in mind. For this giveaway, we had a couple of goals in mind.
They were as follows –
- Acquire approximately 2,000+ new leads that are interested in winning our giveaway and product offering
- Generate sales to cover the cost of the campaign expenses (Ad costs)
The aim was to get more targeted leads into our email system so that we could communicate effectively over time. The goal is to provide value in the form of good content along with presenting offers throughout the duration of the lead/customer lifecycle.
Acquiring sales from these new leads would primarily cover the costs of running the campaign. We hypothesized a low conversion rate of new leads would in fact purchase offers from our store for the duration of the giveaway campaign. We were ok with that as we didn’t expect a high percentage of new leads to convert into customers right out of the gate. This is something we had to measure over the course of 3-6 months after the sweepstake ended.
Usually there is a little branding and multiple touch points that need to happen between a brand and new lead before a sale is generated. This helps to get over the trust hump from a lead before a sales transaction takes place.
Next up….
Define the Marketing Strategy
Now that we had our goals set, we had to define our marketing strategy. Questions we needed to ask were things like…
“How are we going to acquire leads?”, “What traffic source were we going to use to advertise the giveaway?” or “What product should we use as the giveaway prize”
To answer the first couple of questions…
Facebook was the traffic source we decided to use. More specifically, using lead form ads was the campaign objective we used with a sweepstakes angle. Acquiring a few thousand leads and making sales on both the frontend and backend of the campaign was our goal. This way we could gain a positive return on ad spend.
Our plan was to –
- Acquire leads from cold audiences
- Present an offer to the new lead on the thank you page to drive purchases
- Follow up with leads via email marketing, conveying value and pitching related offers to convert into sales. Over time we hoped to see an increase in sales and a higher return on ad spend.
As for figuring out the prize for the giveaway? We went with a popular Jewelry bundle to attract our target audience. From our testing in previous campaigns, we knew this bundle was popular with our target audience, so we decided to use that as our prize.
To give you an example of the type ad copy, creative and targeting involved in the campaign. It looked a little something like this –
Ad Example
Creative: Attractive high quality video/image of the jewelry bundle
Ad Copy: ATTENTION Ladies: Enter below for a chance to win this amazing hand made Jewelry set! It only takes 10 seconds to enter.
Headline: Enter to Win This FREE Hand Made Jewelry Bundle (Note: You can add a value to the prize if you so wish to attract more attention)
Interest Targeting: Hand made jewelry
For the lead form ad fields, we just wanted to acquire the email ID & name of our entrants. It’s important to keep things simple in order to gain as many leads as possible for a campaign like this. Adding two many fields in the optin form will create more friction and that’s something you want to avoid.
More friction on the optin form = less optins
For this campaign to achieve the desired goals, we set aside a budget of $1,000 for Facebook ads. If we could acquire a lead for $0.50 cent and receive 2,000 new leads, we maxed out the budget. That was our hypothesis and we ran with that.
For us to maximize the revenue generated from this campaign, these new subscribers get funneled into an email marketing sequence that offers free value and other related jewelry products. They’ll be notified when new products are released, as well as receive a regular weekly newsletter, and all of the sale/holiday emails that follow throughout the year.
Now that we had our marketing strategy in place, we began mapping out all the parts to the lead generation funnel. This is what it looked like below –
In order to encourage sales from fresh leads, we decided to have a call to action on the thank you page that would drive new leads to a custom category page on our store. This custom page displayed other jewelry offers.
When a new lead entered the giveaway, they were brought to the lead form thank you page.
The copy went something like this –
“You’re in! You’ve been entered to win this Jewelry Bundle! Check out more of our popular jewelry products below. We’ve got some exclusive pricing for you on some beautiful jewelry. Just click the red button below. Use coupon code Jewelry10 to save 10% on all offers when you visit the category page below”
The red CTA button links to the custom jewelry category page. This page reiterates the use of the coupon code on the offers presented in this category page. This gave opportunity for people to browse the site and buy things while the giveaway was still active.
Setup an Email Sequence For Campaign Reminder
Acquiring more of our target audience via their email address was the main goal, along with generating sales. But to keep these new contestants engaged in the sweepstake and encourage sales, it was important to keep the giveaway top of mind.
To achieve this we emailed these new entrants throughout the duration of the giveaway. The content of these emails did two things –
- Encourage more actions to take on the giveaway such as following our social media etc (incentivize by saying winner will be announced on Social Media)
- Motivate purchasing on the store with an exclusive 10% off coupon code to entrants for the duration of the giveaway.
If anyone purchased from the store, they would be added to our purchase list. We created tags for new entrants of this giveaway that allowed us to know who was entered into the giveaway from our prospecting list, as well as those entrants that made a purchase.
What Results Did This Campaign Return?
We acquired some interesting results from this giveaway campaign. We managed to get leads for less than our $0.50 target and we didn’t spend all of the ad budget. The campaign also resulted in sales from the coupon code.
Let’s take a look at how the results panned out –
A – 2132 leads generated from the campaign
B – $0.37 average cost per lead
C – $45,518 in sales generated from entrants of this campaign (During giveaway along with tracking months of purchasing behavior after this giveaway campaign ended)
D – $788.84 total ad spend on this sweepstake campaign using Facebook ads
Over the months that followed, we observed the email ID’s that were collected throughout the duration of the campaign and saw a steady rise in purchasing behavior from this audience.
This was a real win for us because we knew our marketing was paying off, helping to increase our return on investment from our original ad spend on the giveaway campaign.
What Could We Do Better Next Time?
This is an interesting question to ask ourselves after we acquire results for any campaign we work to deliver results on. In many cases, there is always room for improvement. This campaign was no exception.
There are a few things we’d do differently if we were to run a similar campaign. They are as follows –
- Next time we’d retarget those visitors that landed on our giveaway sign up form, but didn’t sign up to the giveaway. Encouraging them to come back and engage with the giveaway.
- Remarket to entrants that signed up for the giveaway, but didn’t make a purchase if they added an item to their cart
- Add runner up prizes in order to make the sweepstake more appealing
- Use a software that helps to organize and promote the giveaway
We believe the reason why this campaign did so well is because of a few factors working simultaneously.
- We launched in Q4, which is a notoriously crazy time for shopping and gift purchasing in particular
- We had a great offer and fun sweepstake to participate in
- We did an efficient job of staying top of mind with giveaway entrants using primarily email marketing
That’s pretty much it! From this experience of running a sweepstake… will we run more giveaways in future?
Yes!
They definitely help to develop and grow your ecom store. You just need to plan it out correctly. Getting the right target audience to participate along with a strong offer is crucial to success.
