GIVEAWAYS
Giveaway, Sweepstakes, Contest… whatever name you choose to use, it’s an old school lead gen that may not feel super innovative but always seems to work.
At Chicago Athletic Clubs, our goal was to giveaway something that our potential members would want, but also to include a fitness element with the intention that our leads might also be interested in fitness. We viewed giveaways as part of a bigger picture sales cycle. Bryan Tracy once said that it takes 5 encounters with a brand for a customer to buy. Our sales teams have embraced this idea. Those 5 touch points could be anything from a billboard, guest pass, direct mailer, display ad, club visit, email, or a GIVEAWAY. Once we had them in a workflow then we would offer a 3 day pass.
With our social advertising we would focus on a “join now” promotion and a transitional promotion. The transitional promo was often a guest pass but to shake up our message we would change that out with premium inbound content or a giveaway.
We ran ads on Facebook and Instagram and sent emails to our members and prospects in our MQL workflow for each giveaway we launched.
Here are a few of our results:
Website views: 5,194
Submissions: 4,540
New Contacts: 69
New Members that joined with a giveaway as a key part of their sales cycle: 490
Website views: 6,781
Submissions: 5,003
New Contacts: 574
New Members that joined with a giveaway as a key part of their sales cycle: 236
Website views: 6,235
Submissions: 4,814
New Contacts: 300
New Members that joined with a giveaway as a key part of their sales cycle: 486
All the above were part of our social media ad budget. One of my favorite giveaways started in frustration as we had a partnership with the Cubs. The challenge was that as part of the rules and regulations with the Cubs organization, any tickets or experiences they gave us had to be used by our staff or simply given away. We couldn’t do a promotional giveaway ourselves or promote it with an email.
To work around this dilemma, we partnered with the team’s biggest fan Instagram account @chicagocubnation and had them run the giveaway as part of a trade for membership. Our numbers were much smaller, but our investment was basically 0!
Results:
Website views: 792
Submissions: 291
New Contacts: 112
New Members joined with a giveaway as a key part of their sales cycle: 8
Giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests are fun and a good way to shake up your paid ads and email workflows. There are so many things that you can do in this arena to generate leads and build your email lists.
