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Viral Giveaways - Local Advertising Idea

Idea threads

QDF

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So I ran my first viral giveaway this past week for my ecommerce business with somewhat low expectations.

But I was surprised by the results and how many people signed up. With only $320 in ad spend, I was able to get roughly 4,000 email sign ups with a surprising level of engagement (so far).

With a cost of only $0.08 per email signup, this gave me an idea.

The idea: First off, this idea isn't completely original, but how to execute on it is more unique. We've all received those thick envelopes in the mail stuffed with coupons from local businesses before.

The idea is basically just a digital version of this: use viral giveaways to build an email list in a certain city for fairly cheap. You can probably build an email list of 10,000 people fairly quickly and easily with this method for less than $2,000.

Once you've built the email list, send out a weekly email with coupons from local businesses in that city and charge them a fee for each email. The people receiving the emails get coupons every week and the businesses advertising with you get more eyeballs and potential customers. Hell, you could even offer to do it for free for the first few businesses when starting up to use them as a case study.

To grow, you can increase your email list, expand your list to other mediums, upsell other services to the businesses, and expand to other cities.

Like I said, the concept itself is not unique at all, but I feel like there's huge room to improve on how others are doing it and plenty of upsell/growth potential that these companies don't focus on.

Just an idea I had while doing this giveaway for my ecommerce business - anyone else have any success with giveaways, for any type of business?
 
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QDF

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I've also ran some giveaways on FB and had (what I thought were) great results. However, after seeing how cheaply you acquired emails I'm curious as to how you set up your giveaway.

My leads cost me closer to $0.80 an email and I was using FB messenger ads to collect the emails. I was considering using an external piece of giveaway software like Gleam in the future.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I used ViralSweep and I'd definitely recommend them. It's easy to set up and the support is top notch.

They incentivize people to share your giveaway with extra entries.

I just used a $100 gift card giveaway for a popular brick and mortar store in my market as it's super relevant to my audience.

One thing I did was front-load all my ad spend at the beginning of the giveaway and then shut the ads off to let the momentum carry it the rest of the way. Before I did this, my cost per email was hovering around $0.25 per email.

I could've definitely had tons more sign up with a higher cost per email, but I limited the budget on this one until I can test my ROI with it.

Did you have a decent long-term ROI from your giveaway?

EDIT: I should note that I sent people to a landing page on my own website to enter their email and I also targeted people on Facebook who were both potential customers for me AND liked this brick and mortar chain's page.

My goal was to cut my ads off at the right time so the # of entries trailed off just as the contest ended so I could maximize my ad spend. The goal was to get this graph to look almost exactly like it does, with the peak in the middle.
Screen Shot 2018-06-18 at 2.31.24 PM.png

Screen Shot 2018-06-18 at 2.31.46 PM.png
 
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CDNY

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I used ViralSweep and I'd definitely recommend them. It's easy to set up and the support is top notch.

They incentivize people to share your giveaway with extra entries.

I just used a $100 gift card giveaway for a popular brick and mortar store in my market as it's super relevant to my audience.

One thing I did was front-load all my ad spend at the beginning of the giveaway and then shut the ads off to let the momentum carry it the rest of the way. Before I did this, my cost per email was hovering around $0.25 per email.

I could've definitely had tons more sign up with a higher cost per email, but I limited the budget on this one until I can test my ROI with it.

Did you have a decent long-term ROI from your giveaway?

EDIT: I should note that I sent people to a landing page on my own website to enter their email and I also targeted people on Facebook who were both potential customers for me AND liked this brick and mortar chain's page.

Ah okay, that makes sense! I appreciate the suggestion and your detailed response.

I'm definitely going to test with an outside service, but I'm thinking the higher CPL could definitely be due to my targeting and prize. My targeting is relatively broad and the prize is a group of my products (I figured if they wanted to win them, they'd probably be open to buying them later on).

I do incentivize them by offering additional entries if they share the post, but honestly I don't have a solid way of tracking how many people are actually doing it. At this point, if I turned off the ads I'm convinced my entries would stop rolling in... not good.

This is my first of only a handful of giveaways I'm running to bring in leads so I can't accurately answer about long-term ROI. I thought the traditional ebook was pretty played out, so I decided to try giveaways, concise guides, quizzes and free samples to bring in leads. So far, giveaways and quizzes are working out the best in regards to CPL.

As soon as I have some data, I'll report back with my new and improved lead generation costs/stats and also ROI.
 
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CDNY

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I've also ran some giveaways on FB and had (what I thought were) great results. However, after seeing how cheaply you acquired emails I'm curious as to how you set up your giveaway.

My leads cost me closer to $0.80 an email and I was using FB messenger ads to collect the emails. I was considering using an external piece of giveaway software like Gleam in the future.

Would love to hear your thoughts!
 

QDF

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Ah okay, that makes sense! I appreciate the suggestion and your detailed response.

I'm definitely going to test with an outside service, but I'm thinking the higher CPL could definitely be due to my targeting and prize. My targeting is relatively broad and the prize is a group of my products (I figured if they wanted to win them, they'd probably be open to buying them later on).

I do incentivize them by offering additional entries if they share the post, but honestly I don't have a solid way of tracking how many people are actually doing it. At this point, if I turned off the ads I'm convinced my entries would stop rolling in... not good.

This is my first of only a handful of giveaways I'm running to bring in leads so I can't accurately answer about long-term ROI. I thought the traditional ebook was pretty played out, so I decided to try giveaways, concise guides, quizzes and free samples to bring in leads. So far, giveaways and quizzes are working out the best in regards to CPL.

As soon as I have some data, I'll report back with my new and improved lead generation costs/stats and also ROI.

Awesome. Definitely post an update then, I'll do the same.

I agree with the ebook being played out. I plan on offering a decent discount on my main product as a "consolation prize" to turn as many people into customers as possible and then focus on sending out great content for a while before offering a similar discount in a few months.

To date, I have a good percentage of repeat buyers so getting them to make that first purchase should be the biggest challenge.
 

Readerly

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Hey @Valor,

Those are incredible results! 8 cents an email is ridiculously cheap. You're definitely on to something.

I've been giveaways on Facebook with much less success. My sigup rate is more like $1.50. I've recently begun experimenting with using a Messenger bot and ManyChat to collect subscribers. From what I hear, follow-up engagement rates with Messenger messages are significantly higher than with emails. We'll see.

I like that you targeted the overlap between your product/service's prospective audience and those who've liked the brick & mortar you got the gift card from. That's a great way to drill down on a relevant audience.

I'll check ViralSweep. I'm hesitant to prompt ad viewers or Messenger subscribers to share to get more entries to a giveaway because, as I understand it, that's against Facebook's TOS. I'm assuming ViralSweep has found a way around this--I guess by having you direct Facebook traffic to another website, where the TOS doesn't apply.
 

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