5 Killer Case Studies: Attract 1000s of Email Subscribers with Giveaways, Contests and Challenges

• Last updated September 2, 2019
• lead generation

Using giveaways, contests and challenges is certainly an off-the-beaten-track approach to attracting new email subscribers and leads for your business—but the results can be astounding.

Before thinking "I won't be able to use it in my business", rest assured this works across a wide range of different types and sizes of business, whether you’re a sole freelancer or a larger brand.

I'll give you 5 killer case studies that prove it.

For one, can you imagine growing your list by nearly 200,000 new subscribers within just a couple of weeks? Our first case study is of a freelancer who had a list of just 5,500, and did just that.

Sure, those results are extraordinary. But even if you don’t achieve quite that level of success, you’re still talking potentially thousands of new subscribers by using a similar strategy.

That's just one of our case studies. I'll show you four more that show how giveaways, contests and challenges can quickly generate anything from several hundred subscribers within a short time frame, to tens of thousands a month:

• A drone site that attracted 3,200 subscribers in just 7 days.
• An author who attracts tens of thousands of subscribers a month through giveaways.
• An e-commerce store selling scented products that added 3,431 email subscribers.
• An training site for entrepreneurs that added 13,603 new subscribers in 10 days.

You even get a couple of bonus ideas right at the end.

Use these case studies for inspiration and to model your own list-building giveaways, contests or challenges.

Josh Earl is a freelance writer and programmer, who runs a newsletter with tips and tricks about a text editor called Sublime Text.

Source

He decided to run a giveaway to attract new subscribers—at the time he had 5,500 people on this list.

Of course, what you choose to give away determines who you're going to attract. Josh only wanted to attract those who would have a genuine interest in his newsletter, so he was giving away a license for the Sublime Text software, worth around $70.

The important point here is that the value of what you're giving away doesn't necessary determine the scale of results you may achieve.

In fact, what made the biggest difference for Josh was the viral nature of his campaign.

To make a giveaway work, you need other people who are entering the contest to help spread the word, right? But for them to do that, they'd be reducing their own chances of winning. Every person they referred who entered the contest would be additional competition for the prize.

So doesn't make sense for them to do so. Instead, you need something extra to incentivize them. Josh used a plugin that instead meant every person they referred increased their chances of winning.

Here's how that worked. Each person who entered received a follow-up confirmation email that:

• Requested them to confirm their entry into the contest.
• Included a simple P.S. that gave them a way to increase their chances of winning. By sharing a special link, they’d get three extra chances to win for each additional person who entered.

The results speak for themselves.

Within just 14 hours of launching the contest:

• 44,463 people had visited his website—that's more than two and a half times the traffic levels he was used to for a whole month.
• 15,753 people had entered the contest.
• He’d already more than doubled his email list.

By the time the contest had run its course over 11 days, he’d had:

• 398,896 unique visitors.
• Nearly 20,000 additional Twitter followers.
• Collected 364,104 email addresses!

However, not all of those emails were valid. After removing the invalid ones including from people trying to cheat the system, he was left with 187,991 email addresses he could add to his list. 66,320 of these had already confirmed via the initial contest email.

Of course, not all of his new subscribers were particularly interested in his newsletter—they just wanted to win.

But he still had tens of thousands of subscribers who would be. And he knew they had a definite interest in Sublime Text.

Whichever way you look at it, the result he achieved was extraordinary, and not one that he had expected himself.

Lots of things even went wrong, including:

• His website going offline for some time because of the extra load.
• Mistakes in the initial emails he sent out to launch the contest to his existing list.

Even so, thanks to the viral element of the content, it worked anyway.

This relates to a coaching website called UAV Coach that focuses on recreational and commercial drones.

With the help of Michael Karp (@_michaelkarp) of Copytactics, they ran a viral giveaway, similar to Josh's approach above. The prize they offered was a valuable drone worth around $800. So again, the prize was targeted perfectly towards the audience they wanted to attract.

Image Source

To help their viral giveaway campaign fly, they employed a number of smart tactics to spread the word:

• Built up anticipation ahead of the giveaway with a couple of pre-launch emails.
• Optimized their website to capture emails via popups, content upgrades and other opt-in creatives. This was to help capture people who didn't necessarily signup for the giveaway, but checked out the rest of the website.
• Announced the giveaway itself to their existing list and via a blog post (which then got syndicated elsewhere, including via RSS).
• Promoted the giveaway on social media via all their accounts across various platforms, as well as in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook Groups.
• Funnelled their current traffic to the giveaway, including via a header bar with a button that linked through to the page.
• Posted link to the giveaway on Reddit via relevant subreddits (they found text posts worked a lot better).
• Promoted the giveaway on relevant forums.
• Ran Facebook ads—with the promise of the giveaway, they got new subscribers for as low as 32 cents.
• Finished with a final email to their list as the giveaway was drawing to a close.

The results? Over the course of just one week, they grew their email list by 3,200 new subscribers—an increase of 73%.

Fiction author Derek Murphy uses a range of different giveaways to attract subscribers to his email lists.

I got about 20,000 new subscribers this month running giveaways. I also got about 10,000 new likes and followers on social media... they are soooo powerful. Now I'm using giveaways to drive book launches and get more book reviews.
Derek Murphy, fiction writer and editor

In fact, he used giveaways to get over 8,500 on his email list before even publishing his first book.

His giveaways have included the following:

• A free stay in a castle to write a book—this attracted 4,000 new subscribers in just a couple of days, using just $100 of Facebook advertising (along with the cost of the castle stay). If the whole campaign cost around $1,000 to run, that's just $0.25 per new subscriber.
• 10 signed young adult books—he grew a new email list from zero to over 6,500 in a week.

Derek advises to run contests for at least 10 days, because "every few days you can email the growing list and remind them to share and win". Smart. The growing social proof also helps you run more effective ads for the campaign.

JewelScent sells scented products, including products containing a hidden jewel worth between $15 and $7500.

To help create awareness of one of their most popular products, a jewelry candle, they ran a giveaway of the product in the lead up to Valentine's Day.

To enter the giveaway, someone just had to submit their email address. As soon as they did so, the thank you page gave them various options to share the contest on social media. Each share earned them additional entries, increasing their chances of winning.

Within 8 days, they had received:

• 15,675 entries.
• 3,431 new subscribers on their email list.
• $18,776.49 in sales revenue as a result of the contest.

During the course of the giveaway campaign, JewelScent kept in touch with entrants via Facebook and email. Once the campaign had finished and someone had won, they sent everyone else an email with a 10% discount offer. This brought in over seven thousand dollars worth of revenue, part of the sales revenue referred to above.

Foundr, a website that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses, was aiming to add 10,000 new subscribers to their list prior to a new e-commerce course they were launching.

They were launching their course in just three weeks' time, so the heat was on. They decided an online competition with a giveaway was the way to do it.

As first prize in their contest, they decided to give away an e-commerce bundle worth $10k, giving the winner effectively everything they needed to succeed in e-commerce.

Although valuable, it didn't need any cash input from them as the bundle was all digital, such as downloads of products, and lifetime membership of an online community.

Image source

They also set up a couple more prizes:

• Just for entering, people won a business blueprint guide.
• By referring 10 or more friends, people won an annual subscription to Foundr magazine.

They used Vyper.io to set the competition up.

On the thank you page, entrants were provided with a link they were then asked to share, which would track their referrals. It also had social media icons they could just click to generate pre-populated posts.

They then added gamification, an important addition that really made the competition fly.

Firstly, they decided to use a leaderboard to increase sharing.

Competition is a hardwired part of human nature... Leaderboards are an excellent way to leverage competitive drive, gain insights into user behavior and keep engagement levels at their peak.
Steve Sims, Behavior Labs

In addition, entrants could gain additional points by:

• Following Foundr on different social media channels. On YouTube alone, they gained an additional 1,000 subscribers.
• Commenting on a blog post—this attracted over 500 comments.
• Signing up to their Facebook messenger bot, which they could then use as an additional marketing channel.

All these additional actions were valuable in themselves, but also further engaged entrants in the competition, keeping participation and engagement levels high.

Once all set up, they kicked off the competition with social media posts, including an Instagram Live session.

Far exceeding their initial aim, within 10 days they had attracted 13,603 subscribers with a high level of interest in the product they were about to launch.

Competitions work well and will continue to work, especially if you use gamification and rewards for each level of participation. It’s hard to beat the level of desire that it builds for your product, because they have already committed to their desire for having your product. By competing to win your product, that desire is further increased. If they don’t win, the only way to satisfy that craving is to purchase it.
David M Hobson, Foundr

Run a podcast or live-streaming video? Regular contests and giveaways work really well to convert your audience into email subscribers.

Rob Walch runs the Today in iOS podcast. He'll regularly give away promotional codes for apps, attracting dozens of new subscribers in the process.

Additionally, he runs contests where he gives away something physical related to his show, such as a bluetooth speaker or an iPhone case. Listeners can enter by filling in a short demographic survey, including their email address.

Here's another idea, similar in nature to using a free email course as a Lead Magnet.

Business coach and speaker, Jaime Masters, has ran a 7 days to $1k challenge for years. After entering your email to join the challenge, she sends you a daily email for 7 days with “high-impact and profit producing strategies”.

Finally...

Remember, even if people visit your giveaway, contest or challenge page and don't sign up, you can still follow up with them anyway via retargeted advertising and hopefully get the opt-in later.

Be sure to pixel visitors with Facebook's tracking pixel, and do the same for Google Ads.

To Conclude

As these five killer case studies have shown, the results of running giveaways, contests and challenges list growth can be extraordinary. When set up in the right way, it's relatively painless to attract thousands of targeted subscribers. It's also a great way to run low cost ads on Facebook to generate new leads.

steve shaw

Steve Shaw is the CEO of optinopoli™, next-generation lead capture and sales conversion technology—click here for more info.