Viralsweep has partnered with JewelScent to help them hit their 2014 revenue and marketing goals utilizing giveaways.
JewelScent’s second promotion began on Monday March 10th, and ended on Sunday March 16th. The goal with this promotion was to see how much further we could go from the previous baseline we established with the Valentine's giveaway. We went a step further by promoting the giveaway to people outside of JewelScent’s current network.
With St. Patricks Day falling on Monday March 17th, JewelScent wanted to create a "luck of the Irish" theme based on the holiday.
The giveaway was promoted by JewelScent on their website, sent out to their email list, and posted on their Facebook page. Unlike the last giveaway (only promoted within JewelScent’s network), we personally promoted the giveaway through sweepstakes sites; many of which can be found on this comprehensive list of sweepstakes directories.
Much like in economics, it's very difficult to measure the impact (or "shift") of more than one "shock" to a system when testing new marketing strategies. Since we wanted to measure how marketing the giveaway to a new audience would impact results, we kept the giveaway very similar to the original in as many ways as possible.
This meant we kept the prizes the exact same as in the Valentine's giveaway.
For the giveaway, 4 winners had the chance to win any JewelScent candle of their choice, and the winners were also able to select the size of the ring that came in the candle.
To stick to the St. Patrick’s Day theme and to duplicate exactly what was done in the first promotion, we mimicked the glowing background and product images with a rich green color scheme.
We also implemented the Pop Up giveaway widget directly onto JewelScent's website as a means to potentially funnel casual shoppers who likely wouldn't have otherwise joined JewelScent's mailing list or followed them on social media.
Because JewelScent excels with their product visuals, we wanted to keep the title timely and simple to place the viewer's attention on the imagery.
We also couldn't be too fancy or clever with the title because the goal was to approach potential customers outside of JewelScent's established following—a straightforward title articulates the value of the prize better than something clever.
We duplicated the email templates that were used in the Valentine’s Day promotion and applied a St. Patrick’s Day theme to them. Since they use Mailchimp to send emails to their customers, the giveaway leveraged Viralsweep’s Mailchimp integration to send each entrant’s email address right into their Mailchimp account.
Launch Email
Here is the email that JewelScent sent out to their email list, which announces the giveaway. As you can see, it’s an extremely simple graphic that plays into the St. Patrick’s Day theme, and directs people to enter the sweepstakes.
Consolation Email
After the giveaway came to a close, JewelScent sent an email out to everyone who entered, but did not end up winning. As a consolation prize, they offered everyone 15% off.
Winner Email
The winners of the giveaway received a separate email, congratulating them on winning, and providing them with the additional steps they needed to take in order to claim their prize.
One aspect that we overlooked in the past two promotions was the double opt-in confirmation email that Mailchimp sends out every time someone enters the giveaway. This email contains a link or button that people must click in order for them to get added to JewelScent’s email list. Here is what it looks like:
While Mailchimp provides you with minimal capabilities for customizing the look and feel of this template, you can still make some big changes that can increase opt-ins.
The first thing you’ll notice about JewelScent's default template (above) is the big JewelScent’s Candlesweeps title. This is the name of the email list people are being added to. It definitely can be confusing, but JewelScent can change the title to anything they want, or they can remove it all together, so that people focus more on the subscribe button.
The second thing that can be changed is the text on the subscribe button. People may sit on the fence about subscribing to a list so they may never click the button, which means they will never receive any of JewelScent’s email notifications. This text should be changed to say something like "Click here to confirm your entry".
The third thing is the text below the subscribe button. This can be modified to include a sentence that says “If you do not confirm your entry, you will be unable to receive notifications from us related to the giveaway." Below is the modified email template that JewelScent can use moving forward to help increase their opt-ins.
With the first promotion we wanted to accurately determine the reach of JewelScent’s network by having them promote the giveaway only to their current audience. For this giveaway, JewelScent promoted it to their own audience, and we also promoted it through a few email newsletters and websites related to sweepstakes and giveaways. To collect more leads, JewelScent used our Pop Up giveaway style on their homepage to collect more entries.
They sent it to their 107,141 subscribers through email, and also posted it to their 195,000+ fans via Facebook. JewelScent began utilizing their Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram profiles to promote this campaign as well.
Their Facebook post announcing the promotion on March 10th received 1088 likes, 774 shares, and 159 comments.
They posted again on March 14, reminding people to enter the giveaway before it ended and this post received 1,477 likes, 959 shares, and 254 comments.
Their Instagram post received 122 likes, which is great considering at the start of the first promotion they only had 98 followers.
Enter our #stpatricksday #giveaway for a chance to win 1 of 4 #jewelscent candles.
https://t.co/FhqluyKVhu. https://t.co/f2mqT2vXlk
— JewelScent (@jewelscent) March 10, 2014
They haven't focused much on networks outside of Facebook, so their Twitter post didn’t receive much attention, only a few retweets.
The first promotion cost JewelScent $249, which included Viralsweep’s $49/month plan, 4 candles for the prizes at $25 each, and $100 to send emails out to their list.
For this promotion, the costs were almost identical: $49 for the Viralsweep business plan, $100 for 4 candles, and $150 to send emails out to their list.
JewelScent continues to wow us with the results that they are able to generate from these short-term, low-cost promotions. While JewelScent was able to generate some amazing results for their very first giveaway, this one performed even better in the same amount of time.
The promotion went live on March 10th and ended on March 16th.
This time around, JewelScent also used our popup style to collect entries directly on their homepage. Because the popup is on the homepage and receives a lot of views, the conversion rate is much lower than the full page style.
In total, the entire promotion had 27,555 entries. We recently added a new statistic to Viralsweep, which allows you to see the total amount of entries (unique entries, plus bonus entries) on a promotion. The total number of entries earned on this promotion was 144,800, which means on average each person received about 5 bonus entries by completing social actions. In comparison, the previous promotion only did 64,633 total entries.
Of the 27,555 people that entered the giveaway, 3,085 people clicked through to JewelScent’s website, for a 11% click-through rate.
We encourage you to follow along and build your giveaway using Viralsweep as you read this series. It takes just minutes to set up your first promotion!
Of the 27,555 people that entered the giveaway, 7,246 were new people that JewelScent did not yet have on their email list. This means that about 26% of people that entered the giveaway were entirely new people that were brought in by promoting the giveaway outside of JewelScent’s network.
JewelScent had 107,141 email subscribers at the beginning of the giveaway. At the end of the giveaway they had 117,900. The giveaway directly contributed 7,246 of these emails to their list, while the rest came organically.
JewelScent’s goal was to get to $2 million in revenue before the end of Quarter 1 (March 31, 2014). As of our last post on February 26th, they were 54% of the way there at $1,088,350.12 in revenue. As of March 31, 2014 they surpassed their goal in Q1 by reaching an astonishing $2,138,597.20.
In order to track revenue that came directly from the promotion, we used a tracking link on the button that people would click to go to JewelScent's website after they entered the giveaway. In addition, above the button JewelScent added some text that provided everyone with a 10% off coupon to use on their purchase.
Again, this revenue came directly from people entering the giveaway, then clicking a button that would take them to JewelScent's website. The campaign only ran for 7 days, so that is an average of $1472.89 in revenue per day!
JewelScent communicated with the entrants throughout the duration of the promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and email. After the giveaway ended, everyone that didn’t win was sent an email with a 10% off coupon. Through this additional communication, $5,129.12 was generated.
Total revenue generated from this promotion was $15,439.37. JewelScent once again knocked it out of the park, not only producing a large amount of revenue, but also seeing massive growth in their social profiles.
JewelScent expects to generate $5,500 in new revenue from the new customers that they acquired from this promotion.
While keeping all of JewelScent’s additional expenses (hard things to measure directly such as salaries, operational costs, etc.) out of this promotion and working specifically with the costs and revenues generated from this giveaway, we can determine the ROI.
The total cost to run the promotion was $299. Total revenue generated from the promotion was $15,439.37. This means that overall, the promotion had an ROI of 5063.67%.
If we just take the revenue that was generated directly from the giveaway ($10,310.25), the ROI would be 3348.24%.
With just 2 promotions that lasted 7 days each, JewelScent has generated an astounding $34,215.86 in additional revenue. If we exclude indirect revenue, then they have generated $21,969.58 directly from their giveaway pages.
Each promotion that we run can always be improved in one way or another, so we encourage JewelScent to give us their feedback when each campaign is wrapped up. For this particular promotion, they were really happy with the 75% increase in the amount of entries, and the massive amount social sharing that took place in comparison to the first campaign.
They were also excited that these promotions are continuing to produce a significant amount of revenue at a very low cost. With a couple different promotions on the horizon, they are eager to see if they can continue to produce astounding results.
Revenue for this promotion was lower than the first promotion by about $3,337. JewelScent said that the campaign launched right after they came off of their best week. Inventories were seriously depleted and most of their products in the most popular sizes were sold out. This undoubtedly lead to lower than expected immediate revenue from the campaign.
Lesson learned: Run sweepstakes at a relatively “normal” time for your business. While JeweScent couldn’t have forecasted that they would have the best week yet prior to launching the promotion, they did have some aggressive promotions which kicked things into very high gear, leading to the shortage of inventory.
Time certainly flies, and Q1 has already come and gone. The idea for this series was to help JewelScent reach certain goals in Q1 with several different campaigns and document it every step of the way, however, we were only able to get 2 campaigns launched in this quarter.
We have so many cool ideas that we want to run with JewelScent, so this series will undoubtedly be extended beyond the 90 days that we were forecasting it to run for. Now that we have a handle on how much time and communication goes into coordinating with JewelScent (they're busy people), we can plan for at least 1 or 2 promotions per month.
The next promotion that we will launch will be based around a spring theme, and there will be different prizes and marketing tactics involved. Moving forward, we’ll be doing some collaborations with other brands, as well as diving into working with bloggers and YouTube channels. We may even dig into paid advertising to see what kind of results we can generate for the campaigns. Of course, we’ll show you what we do and how we do it every step of the way.
You should join us on this journey by signing up for the newsletter below. You’ll receive an email when a new post is published so you can follow along.
Social Media Growth
JewelScent is a young consumer brand so they wanted to focus on the big social media channels that perform best in their space: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. They awarded users with bonus entries for completing social actions related to each of these networks. Off to the right, you can see a screenshot of the bonus entries page that users saw once they entered the giveaway.
This means that once someone entered, they would be presented with several actions that they could perform in order to gain additional entries into the giveaway. All the stats below have been compiled using the analytics available within Viralsweep, as well as combining a few services that show any sharing that occurred outside of the giveaway.
Facebook Growth