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This giveaway campaign is one of 18 complete email plays we teach you in our brand new email marketing mentorship, Train My Email Specialist.
In this live, 12-week program Smart Marketer will show you (or your employees) how to copy the Smart Email Marketing System we use across our three brands, including:
- How to generate & nurture leads
- How to convert new buyers
- How to increase repeat purchases
This mentorship starts soon and you can get $1,000 off tuition for a limited time:
No matter what type of business you’re in, you can run free giveaways like this every quarter to grow your email list and monetize your social media followers.
We ran it three times in 2021, and for very little investment this campaign generated $213,892! But more importantly, it motivated thousands of new leads to join our email list who only followed us on social before.
Now we can afford to spend months or even years converting them into paying customers for a fraction of what it costs to run ads or promote content.
The 4-part email campaign we share in this post comes from a free giveaway we ran in July of 2021.
This giveaway only cost us $500 in store credit — plus a few thousand dollars to advertise the contest to our warm audiences on social — and in return we made over $61,000.
In this article, you get all the templates you need to copy this free social giveaway, plus the email marketing strategy we used to convert the non-winners into paying customers:
- Video Script to Launch the Giveaway
- Email #1: The Confirmation Email
- Email #2: The Discount Reminder Email
- Email #3: The Discount Is Expiring Email
- Email #4: Announcing the Winners
Why Do Free Giveaways Work?
Free giveaways work because email is the most profitable sales channel a business can use to monetize an audience.
The secret to this strategy is that it gives your social media fans a reason to join your email list also. That way, you can communicate with them more effectively than you can with organic social, and for way less money than with paid ads.
And while the sales you can make running this play are a great bonus, the real value comes from the revenue you can generate over the lifetime of your new email leads.
Ok, so how do you do it?
Step 1) Launch with Video
Here’s the 49-second video we made to announce the giveaway on Facebook and Instagram:
You don’t have to use video — plenty of brands use a simple graphic instead — but we get more engagement with video so that’s what we recommend.
And this video is super simple. Here’s the script we use:
Then we post the video on Facebook and Instagram and advertise the post to our fans, followers and page post engagers.
This post links to this simple opt-in page we built with Zipify Pages:
Giveaways are an email play we use to monetize warm audiences only. This offer is not often profitable for cold traffic who don’t know your brand.
Advanced email marketers may be able to use giveaways to attract and convert cold email leads, but we don’t recommend it. We teach you more profitable ways to do this in Train My Email Specialist.
Step 2) The 4-part Email Flow
When someone opts into the giveaway, we trigger the following 4-part automated email flow that confirms their entry and uses a simple discount strategy to convert the non-winners into paying customers.
You can copy the templates for all four emails below.
Email #1: The Confirmation Email
The first goal of this confirmation email is to incentivize people to enter again by subscribing to your other channels:
- Enter on Facebook – 1 entry
- Enter on Instagram – 1 entry
- Enter on YouTube – 1 entry
- Sign Up for Text Messages – 5 entries
Text messaging (i.e., SMS marketing) has the highest engagement rates of any other sales channel. That’s why we offer the most entries for signing up for texts.
The second goal is to incentivize the entrants to shop our products with a simple 10% off coupon.
And for anyone who wants to wait and see if they win the giveaway first, we assure them we’ll refund $100 from their order if they do.
Email #2: The Discount Reminder Email
The goal of the second email is to remind them to use their 10% discount and educate them about our brand and products.
And even though this email won’t increase their odds of winning, it’s still a high-grossing email that generated over $14,000.
It’s also super simple to copy:
Choose 3 of your best-selling products and include a photo, headline, brief testimonial and a product description that highlights the main ownership benefits, like so:
Email #3: The “Discount Is Expiring” Email
The goal of the third email is to create urgency around the offer by reminding them that their 10% discount is about to expire.
Deadlines are one of your most powerful tools as a marketer and — even though the coupon will be available for some time after the winners are announced — you can still use the end of the giveaway to motivate your audience.
And by reminding them that we’ll happily refund their order if they win, we also remove the biggest obstacle preventing them from buying.
Email #4: Announcing the Winners
The goal of the final email is to close the giveaway and give everyone who entered one last chance to claim their 10% discount.
Since many of these people are joining our email list for the first time — and this is the first email campaign they’re seeing from us — we don’t want to be too aggressive with our marketing…
So by celebrating the winners first and only mentioning the deadline near the end we keep the tone light and (we hope) a little more fun.
But deadlines are still powerful even if you say them gently, and the urgency this final email creates is why it was the highest-grossing email of the entire campaign.
“Great! Now What Should I Do?”
Remember when we said that sales were just a bonus? Well, now that you’ve got a ton of new email leads, you need to start warming them up and getting them excited about your products.
But if you’re only sending a few scattered emails each month…
Or if you’re struggling to create enough content to keep your list engaged for weeks (or even years) to convert them into repeat buyers…
Then you’re always going to lose out on the biggest revenue generator you have in your business.
To help you overcome these hurdles, we’re launching a brand new email marketing mentorship.
About Train My Email Specialist (TMES)
TMES combines 12 weeks of strategy sessions and feedback calls with a 100+ fill-in-the-blank email templates that you can copy and paste into your business.
The mentorship is led by Smart Marketer’s CMO and resident email expert, John Grimshaw…
Who successfully doubled our email revenue in just 12 months.
John understands the changing landscape of email in 2022, and how you can best adapt your strategy for iOS 15…
And to make sure you get the individual attention you need, you also get a team of expert coaches who can answer your questions and give feedback on your work.
There’s never been a more comprehensive training on how to become a master email specialist for any digital brand.
For more information, including the course schedule and a breakdown of your $4,891 in bonuses…
Go to the Train My Email Specialist Mentorship page now:
