At Loyal Tribe we heard giveaways can grow your email list FAST.

What we didn’t know is if we could run one profitably.

So we invested in KingSumo and created a strategy to test the profitability of giveaways.

In the end, KingSumo allowed us to create massive results:

1. Grow the Little Secrets email list by 56% in 7 days
2. Reach over 80% open rates by the end of the giveaway
3. Generate $777.29 in revenue (+$1.23 for every new subscriber)
4. Increasing the email conversion rate from 2.47% to 2.7%

To do that, we could not just add subscribers to the list — we also needed to add buyers!

So when we ran a giveaway for Little Secrets fair-trade candies we designed the giveaway to drive subscribers AND sales.

Table of Contents

Here are the steps we took to test if we could run a profitable giveaway:

How to Setup a Profitable Giveaway

1. Set a clear goal that will determine if the giveaway is successful
2. Choose an outrageous prize that attracts only the people who will likely buy
3. Maximize your giveaway page conversion rate by telling contestants exactly what to do
4. Focus on your #1 BEST social media account for maximum results
5. Give people multiple reasons to refer, not just the grand prize
6. Send a giveaway instructions email immediately after someone confirms their entry
7. Limit the giveaway to fewer than 7 days to keep the brand and giveaway top of mind

How to Run a Profitable Giveaway

1. Feature the giveaway on every page of your site using Sumo List Builder
2. Send an announcement email to you existing email list if you have one
3. Posting on reddit r/giveaways
4. Push your giveaway out to your social media channels
5. Send everyone a personalized deadline email based on their confirmation status

How to end a giveaway profitably

1. Deliver the prizes and make sure everyone’s a winner!
2. End the giveaway with a thank you and transition to your future offers
3. How to turn a profit with an offer after the giveaway
4. Our Final Breakthrough Giveaway Results
5. It’s easier than you think to run your own giveaway
6. Got any burning questions about this guide?

How to Setup a Profitable Giveaway

We love to go big with our promotional campaigns and that means some prep work.

First, you’ll need to make sure you have these three tools to run a profitable giveaway:

1. Giveaway software. We used KingSumo for WordPress. The New KingSumo works too.
2. An Email Service Provider (ESP). We used ConvertKit, but anyone will work.
3. Spreadsheet software. We used Excel, but you can also use Google Sheets.

Second, the next seven steps need to be completed at least one day before the start of your giveaway.

Let’s get into it!

1. Set a clear goal that will determine if the giveaway is successful

How do you know if something is successful? Set a goal and see if you hit it!

We wanted our goal to be a stretch but still possible, so we choose a 50% increase in email subscribers as our goal.

A 50% increase would add the same number of subscribers we had generate organically for Little Secrets in the past 6 months using Sumo on their brand website.

To make the giveaway profitable we only needed 19 sales.

We calculated this by dividing the total estimated cost of the giveaway ($460) by the average order value ($25).

For your own giveaway we recommend choosing one metric that will drive your results, in our case new email subscribers drive sales.

2. Choose an outrageous prize that attracts only the people who will likely buy

iPads are a terrible giveaway prize.

Everyone wants a free iPad, but not everyone is interested in your product, so your giveaway prize needs to do the opposite: attract potential customers and repel freeloaders.

Freeloaders hurt open rates, sales, and email deliverability because they have no interest in you or your company after the giveaway is over.

Little Secrets doesn’t make generic chocolates, they make all-natural, fair-trade chocolates and sells them at a premium.

So it was logical to make the grand prize a selection of Little Secrets candies, but to make it outrageous, we decided to go overboard and give away a display with 60 bags of candy!

And to attract the right kind of people, we over communicated that the candies were premium all-natural, fair-trade chocolates in every email and social media post.

For your giveaway, take 10 minutes to brainstorm what products or services your ideal customers would want, but everyone else would ignore.

Some examples of prizes that only interest their ideal audience are: Adobe Creative Suite for designers, a roll up sleeping pad for backpackers, or an automatic litter box for cat owners.

3. Maximize your giveaway page conversion rate by telling contestants exactly what to do

Anytime someone clicks a link on the internet they need to know immediately if they’ve landed in the right place.

To make sure visitors knew they’d landed in the right place we created a headline that we could easily repeat in all of the giveaway promotions.

We recommend using a headline that clearly states exactly what you’ll win.

A great template to follow is:

“Win X during Y time period”

In this case:

• X = 60 bags of Little Secrets Candy
• Y = Easter, which was 2 weeks away

So the final headline was: “Win 60 Bags of Little Secrets Candies for Easter”

Now, once people know they’re in the right place they need to know what to do and why they’re doing it.

So for the body text we briefly described why Little Secrets is giving away 60 bags of their candy for Easter and then give clear instructions on what to do next.

Assume nothing. The more clear you are in your instructions the more successful your giveaway will be and the less support emails you will have to answer.

Here is what the giveaway page looked like when finished:

Easter is a time for family, friends, and hiding candy…

NOT corn syrup and artificial colors or flavors in your food.

That’s why we are giving away 60 bags of our Little Secrets candies that don’t contain any of that gnarly stuff.

You can hide some bags for your friends & family to find, or hide them all for yourself 😉

Just answer the qualifying question below and enter your best email address to join the contest.

After you’ve joined, you’ll receive an email with instructions on how you can earn even more contest entries to increase your odds of winning.

For your own giveaway page: tell them why you’re running the giveaway and then tell them exactly what to do, that’s it!

4. Focus on your #1 BEST social media account for maximum results

Little Secrets has always had the most traction on Facebook, so we focused on growing their Facebook followers by making it easy for contestants to share the giveaway on Facebook.

What we didn’t do was try to also grow their Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest audience.

We’ve found that asking people to do too many things negatively affects the likelihood of them doing anything.

Plus, by dominating one social media platform we get the benefit of potential contestants seeing the giveaway multiple times in one week, leading to more opt-ins.

To maximize the giveaway’s exposure on Facebook we used KingSumo’s built-in “Share Options” and “Extra Entry Actions.”

The Sharing Options allow contestants to share the giveaway on Facebook with one click. All we had to do to enable this feature was check a box on the KingSumo settings page.

And the Extra Entry Actions gave contestants one giveaway entry for following Little Secrets on Facebook. To enable this, we added Facebook as a “social media follow” action and KingSumo took care of the rest.

This feature took 30 seconds to setup and resulted in an additional 161 Facebook followers over the course of the giveaway. 

Here is an example of what these options looked like on the giveaway page.

If you have more than one successful social media account, by all means, test adding them to your giveaway and see if your results improve.

The one thing we don’t recommend is including any of your underperforming social accounts or you’ll dilute your giveaways effectiveness.

5. Give people multiple reasons to refer, not just the grand prize

In referral giveaways, most people sign up to win the grand prize and never refer anyone.

We wanted to change that by offering guaranteed prizes if contestants referred a certain number of people to the giveaway.

For this giveaway we offered the following:

• 1 referral = Coupon for 15% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy
• 3 referrals = Bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter
• 5 referrals = Coupon for 32% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy
• 10 referrals = A Secret Swag box full of Little Secrets candy and schwag

Notice how we don’t “giveaway” anything until they refer at least 10 people?

In fact, two of the first three guaranteed prizes are offers to purchase Little Secrets candies.

People cannot buy what you don’t offer them and these prizes are one of the many offers we included throughout this giveaway.

These “guaranteed” prizes also gave us an excuse to follow up with contestants at the end of the giveaway to refer more people. We’ll show you how we did that later in this post.

In the end, we had 12 contestants refer more than ten people and over 109 people refer at least one person. 20% of contestants referred somebody, which we felt was an impressive result.

The prizes were chosen based on the promotional materials Little Secrets had handy. For your own giveaway the prizes can be offers, swag, charity donations, or anything else you know your ideal subscriber would be excited to win.

6. Send a giveaway instructions email immediately after someone confirms their entry

After someone had confirmed, we needed to immediately resell them on the benefits of participating in the giveaway and exactly how they can participate in a follow up email.

This step may seem like too much work, but trust us, explaining all of this up front will save you hundreds of support emails about questions you could have answered in the instructions email.

The most important aspect of this email is making sure people know where to find their “Secret URL” so they can refer more contestants. To make this easy we included a direct link back to the giveaway page.

Revisiting the giveaway page on the same device will take contestants to their own personal page with their secret URL. If they are on a different device they simply have to put their email in again to gain access.

Next, we explained how referring more contestants would win them additional guaranteed prizes.

Finally, we shared the quickest tactic to refer another person: text or email their secret URL to one person they know who loves chocolate.

We expand on this in the PS section of the email for the more competitive folks who are willing to go all out and refer more people.

You want your contestants to take action without having to coming up with their own referral strategy, so spell it out and make it easy for them to accomplish.

Here is the email we automatically sent once someone entered the giveaway:

Here is the word-for-word script if you’d like to rewrite it for your own business.

PPS You can track your total number of entries from the giveaway pageSubject Line: How to win 60 bags of Little Secrets and other secret prizes

Hi Chocolate Lover,

The Little Secrets Easter giveaway is afoot, and 60 bags of delicious candy go to the winner!

And if you’d like to be that winner, this email is for you.

Here is how it works…

For confirming your participation in the giveaway you now have one entry in the giveaway.

You will earn three more entries for each new person you refer to the giveaway, which increases your chances of winning!

To get credit for your referrals make sure you are giving people your Secret URL link to visit the giveaway page. You can find your Secret URL link in the confirmation email we sent you or on the giveaway page.

You will also receive one entry for following us on Facebook and Twitter from the giveaway page.

So, what do all these entries and referrals do for you?

Each entry puts you in the drawing for the grand prize of 60 bags of delicious Little Secrets candies. The more entries you have, the higher your odds of winning!

Each person you refer to the giveaway earns you three more entries into the giveaway AND…

1 referral = Coupon for 15% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy

3 referrals = 1 bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter

5 referrals = Coupon for 32% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy

10 referrals = A Secret Swag box:
• 1 – 20 oz. Bag of Little Secrets Peppermint Candies
• 1 – 5 oz. Bag of our Brand New Little Secrets Flavor: Sea Salted Almond
• 1 – VIP coupon good for a free bag of Little Secrets in your local store
• Little Secrets stickers for you to share

And yes, these referral prizes stack. So for example, if you get five referrals, you will receive the first three prizes.

We’re sure you know at least a one person who loves chocolate almost as much as you do, right?

Send them a text or email right now with your secret URL link and invite them to join.

The giveaway ends today at 7pm EST, so hustle up!

Referral prizes and the Grand Prize will be sent on March 23rd.

Good luck!

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

PS Here are a few of the ways we’ve seen folks earn extra entries:
• Text or email an invitation to their closest friends and family with their secret URL link
• Post their secret URL link on all of their social media accounts
• Share their secret URL link with coworkers if appropriate
• Follow us on Facebook and Twitter from the giveaway page

PPS You can track your total number of entries from the giveaway page

To make sure this email goes out immediately after confirmation we integrated the email service provider (ESP), in the KingSumo services tab and chose the “Push contestants after they confirm their entry” option.

This setting causes KingSumo to send the contestant’s email address to the ESP once the contestant has confirmed their entry to the giveaway.

Once they are in the ESP we want two things happen:

1. They’re “tagged” as a contestant
2. They’re added to the automatic email sequence

First, the tag allows us to identify everyone in the ESP who has confirmed their entry into the contest. This is crucial to the follow up strategy which we’ll share later in this post.

If your ESP does not support tags, you can add your contestants into a seperate email list, which will accomplish the same thing.

Second, adding the contestant to the automated email sequence immediately sends the giveaway instructions email so we don’t have to do it manually.

Setting up tags and email automation is a little different in every ESP, so we recommend taking a look at your ESP’s instructions to accomplish this step.

7. Limit the giveaway to fewer than 7 days to keep the brand and giveaway top of mind

We live and breathe our marketing messages every day, but customers don’t, so it’s important to have tight promotional deadlines to keep them top of mind.

In our experience, the conversion rate of a promotional campaign drops off after a week, so we ran the giveaway for 7 days. In the future we plan to cut Little Secrets giveaways down to 4 days based on the results we got.

The first and last two days of the giveaway accounted for 90% of new subscribers, so the extra three days just gives contestants more time to forget about the giveaway.

You can set the start and end time when setting up your giveaway with KingSumo.

We recommend running your first giveaway for 7 days and then looking at the results to see where you can adjust in the future.

How to Run a Profitable Giveaway

The success of this giveaway was going to rely on two things:

1. Get as many contestants into the giveaway as possible
2. Help those contestants refer as many new contestants as possible

To kick off the giveaway we leveraged Little Secrets existing audience and a few giveaway communities we found on the internet.

Then we made sure to remind all of the contestants to keep referring people right up until the end of the giveaway.

While these steps do not need to be completed before the start of the giveaway, we highly recommend completing as much of the work upfront as possible.

Let’s get to it!

8. Feature the giveaway on every page of your site using Sumo List Builder

We were already using the Sumo List Builder App to grow the Little Secrets email list, so it was the perfect tool to promote the giveaway on every page of sharelittlesecrets.com.

We saved weeks of custom coding every page of the Little Secrets website by using List Builder to promote the giveaway. In all it took about 5 minutes to setup.

• 

• 

It took us less than 5 minutes to transform Sumo List Builder into a giveaway promo on every page

Since KingSumo was going to be collecting the contestant’s email address we removed the “Enter your Email” form and linked the “Enter Now!” button to the giveaway page.

To change the “Enter Now!” button into a link:

1. Click on the button in the List Builder Design Tab
2. Switched its Click Action from “Submit Form” to “Redirect To”
3. Added the KingSumo giveaway page URL
4. That’s it!

If you have never used List Builder before you can use the “Just Starting” plan to promote your KingSumo giveaway for FREE!

And if you have any questions about how to set it up, Sumo has you covered with their in-depth guides on their support page.

9. Send an announcement email to you existing email list if you have one

People tend to know other people just like themselves, so announcing your giveaway to your existing audience will be your best source of quality referrals.

In step 3 we wanted to keep the giveaway offer as consistent as possible, so we used a similar subject line for the announcement email.

Get 60 bags of Little Secrets Candies for free

In the body of the email, we wanted to give a fun reason for running this giveaway and positioning it as a benefit to subscribers.

To do that we focused on having people consider Easter as the perfect time to eliminate artificial food from their family gatherings.

We also asked them to imagine how many smiles they could create with 60 bags of candy to hide for Easter as another possible benefit of winning the giveaway.

Finally, we wanted the skeptical folks to consider participating as well by including an offer to win the guaranteed prizes for referring people.

Here is the announcement email we sent, can you pick out everything we did in this email to entice the reader to click the link.

Hey Chocolate Lover,

Easter is around the corner…

Chock full of family, friends and hiding candy.

Do you know what’s not invited on Easter weekend?

High-fructose corn syrup or artificial color and flavors. Yuck!

And to make sure everyone in your life has a safe and tasty holiday, we’re doing something new and different for Little Secrets Society members.

As a member, you get a chance to win 60 bags of Little Secrets Candies ($125 value).

Just imagine how many smiles you could create with that many bags!

Register for the free giveaway by click here

To sweeten the deal, you’ll get three additional giveaway entries for each new member you refer to the Little Secrets Society.

So the more you share this BIG secret, the more likely you are to win the grand prize.

Click Here to register and learn all the ways you can earn more free entries.

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

P.S. – We’re giving out secondary prizes to everyone who refers new members to The Society

Click Here and register to learn about the four additional prizes you are guaranteed to win when you refer new members. The first prize requires only one referral!

10. Posting on reddit r/giveaways

There are multiple subreddits on reddit.com that are dedicated to giveaways and sweepstakes.

At the time we ran this giveaway we only knew of one: http://reddit.com/r/giveaways.

There were over 34,207 subscribers to that subreddit, and according to their rules, we were able to post the giveaway once every 48 hours.

To attract the right kind of people we were very intentional in crafting the headline of the post:

Win 60 Bags of Little Secrets All-Natural Fair Trade Gourmet Chocolates

This headline did three things:

1. Shared the unique benefits of Little Secrets candies
2. Only attracted people who were interested in All-Natural, Fair-Trade Chocolate
3. Stuck close to the original headline we came up with in step 3

We recommend you work to position your giveaway so that it only attracts the types of people who are interested in your product and repels everyone else. It can be tricky, but if you look through the rest of the posts in this subreddit you may find a few good ideas you can use.

Posting in this subreddit attracted the highest referring contestant who referred 41 people to the giveaway.

After the giveaway, we found one more great subreddit that you can try too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sweepstakes/

Also, when posting on reddit make sure you follow the rules for each subreddit on the right hand side of the page. If you don’t follow these rules your post could be removed or blocked from from the subreddit.

Finally, for you advanced redditors. If you would like to maximize the time your giveaway is on the front page of the subreddit, reach out to your reddit friend and ask them to upvote your post. 

The additional upvotes will help your post stay on the front page longer than the posts that only have 1 default upvote.

11. Push your giveaway out to your social media channels

Little Secrets did a social push to their Facebook audience the day after we sent out the announcement email.

During the excitement of the giveaway we did not have tracking in place to see how many contestants came from the social push, but we did see an unexpected increase in their Facebook followers from KingSumo’s extra entry actions feature covered in step 4.

The increase was fast enough to surprise their social media manager: 161 new followers or a 4% increase in 7 days.

To keep in line with step 3 above, we used the same copy as the giveaway page.

We recommend reusing copy whenever you can to save time and keep your messaging consistent.

Here is the copy we used for their Facebook announcement post:

Easter is a time for family, friends, and hiding candy…

NOT corn syrup and artificial colors or flavors in your food.

That’s why we are giving away 60 bags of our Little Secrets candies that don’t contain any of that gnarly stuff.

You can hide some bags for your friends & family to find, or hide them all for yourself 😉

Just answer the qualifying question below and enter your best email address to join the contest.

After you’ve joined, you’ll receive an email with instructions on how you can earn even more contest entries to increase your odds of winning.

12. Send everyone a personalized deadline email based on their confirmation status

The giveaway ran from Thursday at 5pm EST until the following Wednesday at midnight.

If we only sent one email to promote the giveaway we would have missed out on half of the potential new contestants.

After years of running limited-time promotions, we knew the final day of the giveaway was the best day to use the ultimate scarcity tactic: A DEADLINE.

Now, at this point in the giveaway we could not send a single deadline email because we have two segments of people.

1. Past subscribers who had not entered the contest
2. Contestants who had confirmed their entry

In order to create these two segments in the ESP we needed an easy way to identify who was who.

KingSumo lets you do this by creating a CSV file of all your current contestants from the “View Contestants” option under the “All Giveaways” menu.

Once we had the CSV of the contestants we used Microsoft Excel to sort them by their entry status.

Once we had the list sorted, we imported only the confirmed email addresses back into our ESP and tagged them as “confirmed.”

By adding this tag we could email the right people by including or excluding the “confirmed” contestants.

Here is how we created the segments in the ESP:

1. Subscribers/Contestants who have not confirmed their entry
   1. Email everyone and exclude anyone tagged “confirmed”
2. Contestants who had confirmed their entry
   1. Email only the contestants tagged “confirmed”

For unconfirmed contestants we resent the original announcement email and added the deadline to catch anyone who missed the first email or forgot to confirm their original entry.

Here is the word-for-word script if you’d like to rewrite it for your own business

Hey Chocolate Lover,

This email is a friendly reminder that the Little Secrets 60 Bag Giveaway ends today at 7pm EST.

That means you have a few hours left to enter the contest for your chance to win.

Just imagine how many smiles you could create with 60 bags of Little Secrets Chocolate to share!

Register for the free contest by click here

To sweeten the deal, you’ll get three additional contest entries for each new member you refer to the Little Secrets Society by the end of the contest.

So the more you share this BIG secret, the more likely you are to win the grand prize.

Click Here to register and learn all the ways you can earn more free entries.

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

PS – We are giving out secondary prizes to everyone who refers new members to The Society by 7pm EST today.

Click Here and register to learn about the four additional prizes you are guaranteed to win when you refer new members. The first prize requires only one referral!

For the confirmed contestants we modified the original version of the instructions email from step 6 and added the deadline and extra links back to the giveaway page to remind them where to find their “Secret URL.”

Here is the email text so you can rewrite it for your business:

Hey Chocolate Lover,

This email is a friendly reminder that the Little Secrets 60 Bag Giveaway ends today at 7pm EST.

That means you have a few hours left to refer as many people as possible to increase your chances of winning!

Imagine all the smiles you can create sharing 60 bags of Little Secrets candies.

OR…

The one big smile on your face if you keep them all for yourself 😉

Remember: You get three additional entries into the contest for every person you refer with your Secret URL link. The more entries you have, the higher your odds of winning!

You can find your secret URL link on the contest page or in the registration email we sent when you signed up for the contest.

NOTE: If you don’t see your secret URL link on the contest page just enter the contest again with the same email and your secret URL link will appear.

Also, don’t forget: Referring people to the contest earns you guaranteed prizes, starting at just one referral:

1 referral = Coupon for 15% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy
3 referrals = 1 bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter
5 referrals = Coupon for 32% off your next full order of Little Secrets Candy
10 referrals = A Secret Swag box:

• 1 – 20 oz. Bag of Little Secrets Peppermint Candies
• 1 – 5 oz. Bag of our Brand New Little Secrets Flavor: Sea Salted Almond
• 1 – VIP coupon good for a free bag of Little Secrets in your local store
• Little Secrets stickers for you to share

And yes, these referral prizes stack. So for example, if you get five referrals, you will receive the first three prizes.

We’re sure you know at least a one person who loves chocolate almost as much as you do, right?

Send them a text or email right now with your secret URL link and invite them to join.

The contest ends today at 7 pm EST, better hustle!

Referral prizes and the Grand Prize will be sent on March 23rd.

Good luck!

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

PS If you cannot find your secret URL link go to the contest page and re-enter the contest with the same email and it will appear.

These two emails ended up doubling the final number of new subscribers to the Little Secrets email list.

You read that right, we DOUBLED the number of subscribers on the last day of the giveaway with two deadline emails!

In our experience, a strong deadline account for 40% or more of a promotion’s results, so make sure you send deadline emails when running your own giveaway.

How to end a giveaway profitably

Now it is time to turn new subscribers into raving fans who want to buy from you over and over.

First we have to make sure everyone’s a winner, then set expectations, and finally transition to an offer that will help you turn a profit.

Let’s dive in.

13. Deliver the prizes and make sure everyone’s a winner!

No one likes to find out they lost a giveaway, so we made sure everyone who participated was a winner at the end of the giveaway.

To make everyone a winner we started by creating 5 segments:

1. Contestants who referred 0 people
2. Contestants who referred 1 person
3. Contestants who referred 3 people
4. Contestants who referred 5 people
5. Contestants who referred 10 people

As we mentioned earlier in step 12, we were able to tag contestants in the ESP by exporting a CSV from KingSumo.

After the giveaway was over we exported a new CSV, but this time we sorted contestants by how many entries they received.

Since people received 1 entry for confirming and 3 entries for referring a friend, they needed at least 4 entries to win Prize #1.

Here is how all the segments broke down:

1. 1-3 entries = no prizes
2. 4+ entries = Prize #1
3. 10+ entries = Prize #2
4. 16+ entries = Prize #3
5. 31+ entries = Prize #4

We imported the five separate segments into the ESP and tagged them accordingly.

No Prizes: We skipped sending a prize email to any contestants that did not refer at least one person.

Prizes 1-4: We wrote one email that we could easily edit to create a unique email for each segment. The only change we made for each segment was which of the 4 prizes they won based on their number of referrals.

Here is the word-for-word script if you’d like to rewrite it for your own business.

Subject Line: [Little Secrets Giveaway] Your Prizes!

Hey Chocolate Lover,

Good news!

Because you referred 10 or more people during the Little Secrets 60-Bag Easter Giveaway you earned the following prizes:

15% off one full order of Little Secrets all-natural Candy

A bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter

32% off one full order of Little Secrets all-natural Candy

A Secret Swag Bag full of Little Secrets Goodies

The 15% OFF coupon code is: XXXXXXX

The 32% OFF coupon code is: XXXXXXX

To receive your discount enter one of your codes at checkout on Amazon by April 15th, 2018.

Click Here now to order your favorite all-natural flavors and have them arrive in time for Easter.

We will be reaching out in a separate email to get your name and mailing address for the donation and Secret Swag Bag prizes.

If you haven’t already, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the formal announcement of the winner once we receive permission to publish their name.

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

P.S. – Because of everyone’s referrals we are donating over 30 bags of candy to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter. Thank you for your participation!

Again, each ESP handles tags and segments a little differently. Please consult your ESP’s support documents on how to create tags and segments for your giveaway.

And if your ESP does not support takes you can create a separate list instead.

14. End the giveaway with a thank you and transition to your future offers

Ending your giveaways with gratitude is always classy.

And you also want to set the right expectations with your new subscribers by letting them know they will continue to hear from you now that the giveaway is over.

So after the giveaway was over we had two new segments:

1. New subscribers who joined the list during the giveaway
2. Existing subscribers who were on the email list before the giveaway

The new subscribers who joined the email list during the giveaway need to know they will be receiving future email and how often to expect those emails.

We take this one step further and even tell them how to unsubscribe from the email list.

This is the final pass to make sure we’re only growing the list with people who are interested in Little Secrets and not just free stuff.

We sent this email to everyone tagged as a giveaway contestant from step 6 and then excluded anyone who was on the list before the start of the giveaway.

Here is the email we sent to everyone new to the email list.

Here is the email copy for you to rewrite to fit your own giveaway:

Subject Line: [Little Secrets Giveaway] The results!

Hey Chocolate Lover,

Good news!

Because of everyone’s referrals in the Little Secrets 60-Bag Easter Giveaway we are donating over 30 bags of candy to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter.

Thank you for your participation in the giveaway!

If you haven’t already, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the formal announcement of the winner once we receive permission from them to publish their name.

Also…

Shhhhh…Don’t tell anyone this, but you are now a member of The Little Secrets Society. Welcome!

This Secret Society was made for people who loooooove chocolate, but are also conscious of what goes into their food. No Corn Syrup or artificial dyes here.

As a member, you’ll receive secret email communications about two times a month, which are filled with recipes, exclusive email offers, and other little secrets we’re not sharing with anyone else outside “The Society.”

At any-time, if the Little Secrets Society is too delicious for you, please unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of all our secret email communications.

Now, your first membership benefit is getting in on a BIG secret!

Starting next week Tuesday, we will be running a massive two-day Easter sale on Little Secrets All-Natural chocolate candies exclusively for our Secret Society Members.

You can Click Here now to find your favorite flavors.

Stay tuned to your email inbox for details on Tuesday.

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

Next we sent an email to all the contestants that were already a subscriber before the start of the giveaway.

To do this we sent the email to everyone tagged as a contestant and then excluded anyone who’s email subscription date was after the start of the contest in the ESP.

We sent the same email as before, but removed the section that explained the email list since they were already subscribers.

Here is the email copy for you to rewrite for your business:

Hey Chocolate Lover,

Good news!

Because of everyone’s referrals in the Little Secrets 60-Bag Easter Giveaway we are donating over 30 bags of candy to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter.

Thank you for your participation in the contest!

If you haven’t already, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the formal announcement of the winner once we receive permission from them to publish their name.

Also…

Shhhhh…Don’t tell anyone.

Starting next week Tuesday, we will be running a massive two-day Easter sale on Little Secrets candies exclusively for Secret Society members.

Stay tuned to your email inbox for details on Tuesday.

Happy Chocolating,
Little Secrets HQ

This email had an open rate of 84.4%. Easily the highest open rate of the entire giveaway.

The subject line totally crushed it for two reasons:

1. Everyone was already an email subscriber before the giveaway
2. Everyone wants to know if they won the grand prize

These open rates are proof that maintaining an engaged list is crucial and if you do it right your open rates, click rates, and sales will continue to increase.

15. How to turn a profit with an offer after the giveaway

The following week we fulfilled the promise made in the previous email and offered a simple 24% off one full order of Little Secrets candies to everyone on the email list.

This email was designed to do one thing, convert subscribers into buyers.

And even with 56% more subscriber than a week before, the open rate of this email (38.7%) was a little higher than the list average of 37%.

Even better, the conversion rate for this type of offer increased from 2.47% to 2.74%.

That means we increased the list size while improving conversions.

We’ll take those results any day of the week!

Here is the offer we sent:

Here is the word-for-word script if you’d like to rewrite it for your own business.

Hey Chocolate Lover,

Easter is on Sunday.

Do you have all your secret hiding spots picked out?

When you do, we recommend stuffing them with delicious all-natural chocolate candies that don’t contain any of that artificial stuff.

Now hopefully your loved ones don’t find ALL your candies, you need some chocolate too!

To help you stock up, we’re giving members of The Society 24% off one entire order of Little Secrets Candies sold by us on Amazon.

Just use LSDARK24 at checkout on Amazon before midnight tomorrow, March 28th.

Oh, and make sure it says, “Sold by Little Secrets and Fulfilled by Amazon” to qualify.

Click here to stock up now

Happy Easter,
Little Secrets HQ

P.S. – Wednesday is also the last day to order Little Secrets from Amazon and guarantee delivery by Easter with Prime 2-day shipping. Get your hop on!

We also sent a deadline email two days later to anyone who did not open the first email.

This was the lowest performing email in the entire series.

We only sent this to the people who did not open the first email; we were afraid that we had sent TOO many emails over the previous week.

Next time we’ll definitely send the deadline email to everyone.

Here is the word-for-word script if you’d like to rewrite it for your own business.

Easter is four days away, No Joke!

Today is the perfect day to do your last minute shopping to stock up on all-natural candy to hide from your friends and family this Easter Sunday.

Oh, and it’s also the last day you can order Little Secrets candies from Amazon and have them arrive in time with 2-day Prime shipping, tick tock.

To sweeten the deal, we’re giving members of The Little Secrets Society 24% off one entire order of Little Secrets Candies sold by us on Amazon.

Just use LSDARK24 at checkout before tonight at midnight.

Oh, and make sure it says, “Sold by Little Secrets and Fulfilled by Amazon” to qualify.

Click here to stock up now

Happy Easter,
Little Secrets HQ

P.S. – Remember, you need some love too, so order a few extra bags for yourself. Hop on it!

16. Our Final Breakthrough Giveaway Results

Starting list size: 1,132

Total new subscribers: 634

Percent list increase: 56%

Total number of contestants: 1016

Net revenue from coupons given as prizes: $193.27

Cost of the giveaway: $160 for KingSumo + $300 prizes = ($460)

Total cost = ($266.73)

Sales from Easter promotion the following week: 50

Total list sales conversion rate: 2.7%

Net revenue from Easter promotion = $1,044.02

Net from giveaway + Follow up Easter promotion = $777.29

So the giveaway increased Little Secrets list by 56% with 634 new subs, and they netted $777.29.

Another way of looking at this is Little Secrets got paid $1.23 for every email they collected during the giveaway!

And from the previous 6 months of managing the list we knew each email address was worth $20 a year, so over the next 12 months this giveaway will net close to $12,680 in sales.

Because of the booming success of this giveaway Little Secrets will be running one every three months.

17. It’s easier than you think to run your own giveaway

Thanks to KingSumo handling all of the technical hurdles, running a profitable giveaway is now easier than ever.

And combined with the right strategy you can breakeven or turn a profit on every giveaway you run.

The trick is taking the time to plan out a successful giveaway that attracts the right people and positions buying your product as the next logical step.

But like most business owners, you’re crazy busy, and while you know you should be running a quarterly giveaway and a robust email marketing program, you don’t have the time.

So if you own an ecommerce business looking for help running profitable giveaways or email marketing program, please request a free consultation at yourloyaltribe.com and we’ll have a friendly chat.

18. Got any burning questions about this guide?

This guide took over 30 hours to write and I’m grateful for all the people who reviewed it multiple times, but no matter how well written it is, something will always be missed so…

I’ll personally be answering every single question in the comments for the next seven days. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I’ll reply.

Daniel Reifenberger is the Founder and Chief Marketing Strategist at Loyal Tribe, a marketing agency that helps ecommerce companies add 10-30% more revenue through strategic email campaigns.