How We Added 4000+ New Emails with a Giveaway Contest

Quincy Smith is part of the marketing team at Mira, a device that tracks cycles, predicts ovulation, monitors fetal health, measures ovarian reserve and detects menopause at home with 99% accuracy. Today, she is a full-time blogger and is stopping by to share some great tips that could lead to more affiliate income from your blog.

At Mira, we’ve never made a secret of the fact that we care about fertility. So this year, to mark both a date in the calendar that’s important to us – World Fertility Day – as well as the release of our new Mira Fertility Plus product, we decided to run a giveaway contest.

The goal: to build our email list.

The result: not only did we manage to collect over 4,000 emails, but we also dramatically grew our audience on our social accounts. Our YouTube subscribers shot up by 253%, and we landed thousands of new followers on Instagram. 

But even more importantly, we saw a huge increase in visits to our webpage and a big boost in sales.

Needless to say, the campaign was a roaring success for us. 

In this post, we’re going to break down exactly how we did it so that you can follow the same process and (hopefully) see similar results. 

We’ll be sharing how we set things up, which tools we used, and how we managed the contest and tracked the results – as well as some important lessons we learned along the way. 

Ready? Let’s get started

Overview & objectives

One of our main marketing objectives this year was to grow our mailing list and so far we’ve utilized classic tools like popups and blog opt-ins with varied success. Running a contest was a way to try another marketing ‘lever’ while also promoting our new product, Mira Fertility Plus.

It’s important to think carefully about the timeline of your giveaway, and World Fertility Day was a natural choice for us. It’s a day all about raising awareness for the millions of couples living with fertility issues around the world and seemed like the perfect opportunity to dip our toes into the giveaway pool. 

From a branding perspective, we wanted to do something to show our support and contribute to the conversation. From a marketing perspective, we hoped that the hype around World Fertility Day would help generate buzz around our campaign and get things moving.

The general idea was to host a giveaway on a dedicated landing page on the Mira site and provide our visitors with something they want for free (i.e. a ‘lead magnet’) in exchange for their email addresses.

Setting things up

All good campaigns start with careful planning and preparation. Here’s how we went about setting things up.

The process

You can’t run a giveaway without an incentive. Choosing a desirable product that your customers want is essential to a successful campaign.

If you’re running a blog or service-based business and you don’t have any products of your own, you’ll need to reach out to a partner company that does. Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem for us – we already had a brand new product we knew our customers would love.

We decided to offer 3 lucky contestants a chance to win our new Mira Fertility Plus Starter Kits ($199 value) as the main prize. We also decided to give away 3 bundles of 20x Mira Fertility Plus Wands ($59), as well as a $100 Gift card from our partner EU Natural.

The next step is to do a little research. After exploring some case studies of other successful giveaways, we decided we wanted to include a viral refer-a-friend entry option to encourage contestants to share the giveaway with their friends in the hopes it would boost traffic (spoiler: it did).

Choosing the right tools

Next, you’ll need to choose the tools you’ll use to create your lead magnet. There are a bunch of list building tools and plugins out there to choose from, but we specifically needed something that would let us build a landing page and include a refer-a-friend entry option.

After looking around, we settled on RafflePress as we liked their viral sharing automation feature and distraction-free landing page templates. 

We used RafflePages to create our landing page and filled it out with a killer description and visuals (check it out here). We also created giveaways visuals and copy for our social media channels.

There’s no right or wrong way to design your landing page – just do what works for you. The most important thing is to make sure everything is totally transparent and legally compliant. For us, that meant spending some time looking into the legal aspects of organizing a giveaway and setting appropriate entry rules. In the end, only US, UK, and Australia citizens over the age of 18 were eligible to enter.

For promotion, we relied on OptinMonster to handle the popups and forms as well as social media scheduler to drip announcements across our channels with links back to our landing page.  Both of these tools are in heavy rotation at Mira so the learning curve was small and they played nicely with Rafflepress!

Assigning roles

There are a lot of moving parts to running a successful giveaway – too much for one person to handle alone – and it’s important to assign specific roles to your marketing team members.

We settled on the following: 

• Content manager: served as the project manager and oversaw all parts of the campaign
• Web developer: supported the technical side of things including setting up the Rafflepress plugin on WordPress and creating the landing page
• Social media manager: wrote all the copy and promoted the contest on our website and social media

We also anticipated questions from participants, so we made sure to brief our customer support team on how to answer them.

Managing the contest

Collecting entries

Now you’ve got your incentive + tools, it’s time to start building that mailing list. The opt-in forms on your lead magnet landing page will collect your entrant’s email addresses and add them to your list for you – but you need to make sure you’re managing your list correctly.  

Depending on the list building plugin you’re using, you may need to integrate it with your email marketing software and set up tags to keep things organized so you can sort and segment your contacts after the contest is over. Collecting and syncing entries was easy for us thanks to the RafflePress plugin’s automated processes.

Contacting entrants/winners

After the giveaway is over, make sure you follow up with all your entrants and announce the winner publicly. 

If you don’t announce the winner publicly, you leave yourself open to accusations that the whole giveaway was just an email-grabbing sham.

But first, you need to connect with the winner directly. We picked out 7 winners and notified all of them via email. In the emails, we asked them to respond to claim their prize and confirm that they were eligible, then follow up with their shipping address so that we could send them their prize.

Quick note: sometimes, your winners might not respond to your emails. You can’t wait around forever, so if you don’t hear back in a day or so, send follow-ups to inform them that if they don’t respond within a certain time frame you’ll have to pick someone else. If you still don’t get a response, do just that. 

Once you’ve contacted your winners, let entrants know via a congratulatory email to your giveaway mailing list. You might also want to announce the results on your social pages. 

What happens when the contest is done?

After the contest is over, it’s time to measure the results. We analyzed our results and found that we had:

• Collected 4000+ new email addresses
• Increased our YouTube subscriber count from around 200 to over 700
• Increased our Instagram follower count to 9,500+ 
• Generated a significant number of new visits following the launch
• Boosted sales for the giveaway period compared to previous periods.

Dig down deep into your analytics and see what insights you can draw. You can look at metrics like drop off points and unsubscribe rates to see how your giveaway landing pages, opt-in forms, and email copy performed, then use this to inform your future campaigns.

Tips and takeaways 

As this was our first giveaway, one of the biggest takeaways for us was how useful contests could be as a marketing strategy for our other marketing goals beyond list building. They didn’t just help us to collect emails but also had a measurable impact on our social following, unique page visits, and sales. 

We believe the biggest driver of these successes was the refer-a-friend entrance option, which helped us to reach lots of new potential customers.

All that being said, there were things we didn’t get right too. One regret we have is not setting up an email drip campaign before launch. Next time, we’ll integrate our list with Drip to set up automated welcome emails and follow-up emails to nurture giveaway entrants and turn them into buyers.