We ran a giveaway and this is what I learnt

Lucy Bloomfield
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read
Giving away the end goal — 12 months of me-time.

Competitions are fantastic for growth and even better, they apply to most businesses which means regardless of who you are or what you do, your business can benefit from running a competition. In June, we decided to run a competition to give away a 12 month subscription to Trefiel’s subscription service, The Pamper Club to celebrate our new customisation options for the service.

We ran the competition using a software called Gleam.io, which made it easy to store the terms and conditions, the prizes and the entries in one place. The other perk of Gleam is that it’s easy to validate the entries within the software and pick the winners. I personally really liked Gleam and the reporting that they offered as well as the in-depth documentation on running, promoting and managing a competition. 10/10, would use again.

One of the foundations of Trefiel is to ask our customers a lot of questions — it’s how we’ve gotten to where we are today. This competition was another great opportunity to talk to our customers and throughout the entire competition, we asked them three questions about topics that we knew they were interested in and we could provide value on. I found the information from this content to be some of the best answers we’ve ever received from questions (most likely because of the incentive of the prize), and coming out of this I feel that I know my customers on a whole new level.

We used the usual methods of entry as well:

  • Sign up to our newsletter
  • Follow us on Snapchat
  • Like us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Share a competition on Facebook
  • Review us on Facebook
  • Purchase a product
  • Refer friends for entries

We also decided to include a few new items to test:

  • Message our Facebook page to answer a question
  • Show a Trefiel before & after

Our main goal for the competition was to grow our list and have people subscribe to our Facebook Messenger Chat Bot, which was ultimately the most successful part of the campaign.

At the beginning of the campaign, we had:

  • 7471 Followers on FB
  • 22.1k Followers on IG
  • 6100 Emails on our list
  • 6050 Snapchat score (446 & 916)
  • 42 reviews on FB
  • 0 before & after images

We used our existing email list, snapchat, Instagram and Facebook to drive traffic organically. We have a fairly active community, so this had decent ROI for us before we jumped into advertising. As far as advertising goes, we used Facebook Ads and Influencers to help us promote the campaign but the offering of the prize had effects on this. What I mean by this is that we have to explain what the offering is to someone before they can enter the competition. There aren’t a lot of pamper subscription boxes on the market, so running these ads to cold traffic had moderate success but I think would have had a higher ROI if the offering was immediately recognisable (like a getaway or something similar). We also leveraged multiple brand partners that we had worked with in the past who supported us, which I am hugely grateful for.

The competition did relatively well in the first couple of weeks so we upped the prize pool to include a 12-month, 6-month and 3-month subscription to The Pamper Club as well as 10 single Pamper Club boxes for lucky people to win as well.

Now, let’s get the results

We ended the competition with 16,994 entries and 2300 unique visitors. We had a conversion rate that sat at 50% for most of the competition but dropped down to 48% towards the end. We gained 2300 emails, although not all of those were new because some of our existing list participated in the competition and we already had those emails. Checking in Mailchimp, I can see within the email group we created that we gained 2000 emails. For me, this was a successful competition on that alone.

As far as social media goes, we:

  • Gained 1164 followers on Facebook
  • Gained 1200 followers on Instagram
  • Our snapchat score went to 6525, but our Snapchat views went from 250 to 500.
  • Gained 104 reviews on Facebook

Because we didn’t make the gateway to entry a purchase and most of our calls to action for the month were centered around entering the competition, we did see a slight downturn in sales in comparison to the previous month. I do think that running another competition with a larger prize and the gateway being a purchased product will be a better way to structure the next one — better incentive and better return for our time and effort to throw the competition.

Facebook Ads were moderately successful for the campaign and I think it’s because we didn’t shoot a lot of assets for it and again, the offering and true value of it can be difficult to describe in two sentences. We spent $2700 on Facebook Ads and we made $900 in sales from those ads. We also had a larger influencer go during this period, which cost us $2000 which added to the entries although she wasn’t specifically a part of the campaign for the competition, so we aren’t including the cost of her as a contributing expense to competition.

Finally, we had an automation workflow set up that took our new subscribers through a funnel with an introduction email to the brand, provided value in the form of a Face Mask Cheat Sheet and a discount. This netted us $400 over the period of the campaign. I feel like this was a wasted opportunity and we could have worked harder to have a better conversion rate on this sequence — many people entered without buying a product to get an additional 20 entires for the competition. A key lesson for next time.

My key lessons for this competition

  • Giveaway an offering that is clearly communicated with 2 sentences
  • Put more effort into conversion on your automation sequence
  • Make sure you set the Chat Bot on Facebook Messenger up before you run the competition so you’re collecting subscribers from the start
  • Update the competition subscription regularly
  • Sell more — we just aren’t doing this enough and we need to

Onwards and upwards!

)
Lucy Bloomfield

Written by

I co-founded a skin care company (Trefiel) that awoke a passion for self-respect and business. Now I talk about that more than I do skin care.

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