This group doesn’t seem very active but I figured I’d give this a shot anyhow and share my growth experiment from this past week.
I just soft-launched my Shopify store last week and did a friends and family giveaway. I used the app ViralSweep for my giveaway and it was great. The support was also great. One of the founders, GianCarlo, personally responded to all of my questions.
In hindsight, I wish I had done more research on giveaways or talked to GianCarlo more before launching my giveaway. ViralSweep allows you to give people extra entries for sharing to Twitter and also for referrals that come through social shares. When I set up my giveaway, I gave people 1 entry for everything…1 entry for sharing to Twitter, one entry for any referrals that come through social shares, one entry for visiting me on Facebook, etc.
Only a small percentage of my entrants were motivated to socially share. In hindsight, I should have offered people 15 entries for sharing on Twitter and 10 entries for every referral they gave me. This would have perhaps given me more social shares and more email addresses for my mailing list.
I am going to apply what I learned last week to my new giveaway this week and will keep you posted.
Sounds like a fantastic approach to building an audience organically prelaunch. Any chance you’d be writing up a longer blog post to share your learnings with the community here? A few questions that I’m curious about:
which social channels worked best for your brand re: social share?
how did you go about planning the giveaway that’d help maximize reach without incurring too much upfront cost?
what are some of the aspects you experimented with, and how did it translate to referral results?
I could write something longer. You mean to post here or post somewhere else?
So for the first giveaway, Facebook worked best because that’s where I posted the link and most people were friends and shared with their friends.
I just started a 2nd giveaway today and gave more incentive to refer friends and to tweet. So Twitter is getting more traction so far this time around. However, my giveaway has also been picked up by some sort of giveaway network. That’s good in that I’m getting a lot of entries and I have to presume people wouldn’t enter a giveaway for a $88 nightgown they don’t want! But these are all total strangers and I’m not sure if they are my target market? Time will tell once I start marketing directly to them via email.
My costs so far are my time and three – possibly four – garments. So not too expensive.
Here’s the link to the giveaway if it helps you with a visual and how I set it up. Link will only be active til Saturday May 28th at 12 noon ET though!
Note: I sell travel-inspired sleepwear that gives back. Every year, I’ll donate 10% of profits from my sleepwear to charities that help first generation and low-income college students study abroad.
Welcome to the Growth Lab Community Group. We are stoked you chose this group as the place to share your growth experiments.
@tomorrowsleep Congratulations on your soft launch! A friends and family giveaway is a great way to encourage your first sales and gain feedback on your store and product. Love that you switched things up to drive up referrals through Twitter shares and that you’re starting to see a difference. Also interesting that your giveaway has been picked up somewhere. Nice work, and thanks for sharing!
Good call on moving these folks over to email marketing! Keep us posted on your open rate and unsubscribe rate on those first couple of emails. I’d be curious to hear! Have you thought about the types of email campaigns you plan to send? Considering you have a lot of new folks, a Welcome email might be a good choice. We have a blog post that shares some best practices. I recommend peeking at the Persona email that introduces a small discount code to encourage purchases; you could feature the fab nightgown!
All great Qs! Firstly, finding the balance between where your current target customers engage and where new audiences exist is good to consider when choosing the right channel. Viralsweep has an epic guide on all things giveaways, but the section on choosing a channel and target audience will be especially helpful. One key takeaway I took away from that guide is that it can be tempting to target a HUGE audience to gain as many leads as possible, but that might lead to an untargeted list that won’t engage further. For @tomorrowsleep , it sounds like Facebook was a good choice since this is where their network already was. If you decide to run a giveaway, start with where you know your audience is and calculate the cost per lead afterwards. Then, keep an eye on that unsubscribe rate from any emails to that new list. This will inform your strategy going forward. Have you tried one before?
I am looking forward to hearing more about the referral results as well!
I’ll also share my favourite Shopify blog post on giveaways for a little more information on the use of giveaways to drive growth. The best tip for me is to set a goal for each giveaway and let it inform the success and strategy going forward.
OK, here are some more updates. I’ve now done two giveaways. I don’t mind sharing numbers.
First giveaway…just to my friends and family mailing list and my Facebook friends: 75 entries. BUT this was the giveaway where I didn’t give extra entries for social media shares. I wish I had done that. (Keep reading for more.) Sent two emails after the giveaway closed:
Immediately after giveaway closed; Email announcing the winner and letting them know about my brand. Offered 10% off and free shipping. 68.66% open rate. 1 sale. No unsubscribes, 1 bounce.
One week later: Just sent this one today so it’s still early days but so far I have 45.2% open rate, 2 bounces. No unsubscribes.
2nd Giveaway: To my Twitter “friends” and Instagram “friends.” 126 unique email addresses registered. Definitely got more shares here but still not as many as I would have hoped. (I gave people more chances to win for referring friends but still…I guess people don’t really like to share.) Also, this one DEFINITELY got picked up by a giveaway ring which I guess is okay but I don’t know…it feels sketchy.
Immediately after giveaway closed: Sent email with winner, introducing my brand and offering 10% off and free shipping. 53.1% open rate. 8 unsubscribes!!! And 2 reported me as SPAM! That made me mad!!! No sales just yet.
Will send a “Last chance for 10% off, free shipping” email next weekend.
So…all in all…it was a learning experience. I might be done with giveaways for a while. Viralsweep is a great app though! And Giancarlo is SUPER helpful.