Instagram Marketing

How To Run An Instagram Giveaway For Email Signups: Case Study

September 08, 2022

How To Run An Instagram Giveaway For Email Signups

Having an email database full of hundreds of potential customers’ emails is every social media marketer’s dream, but how do you achieve this and get people to sign up to be marketed to—willingly?

The answer is simple. Entice prospects with something they actually want.  

In this blog, we’ll take a look at how to run an instagram giveaway and explore how Tao Digital Marketing generated over 700 email newsletter signups for Hirst Footwear in only six posts on Instagram.

The Campaign

Earlier this June, just before Season 4 of Stranger Things dropped, the savvy agency noticed caught a glimpse of low-hanging fruit in the form of a sharp spike in searches for 80s-inspired footwear.

The design, content, and PR team worked together to jump on the trend while it was still trending. The team selected various products from Hirst’s site that matched an 80s aesthetic and paired them with individual characters from the series. These pairings were featured as a blog on the website, full of product links to make it easy for people to buy.

how to run an instagram give

This guide received a lot of engagement from their other social media platforms (Instagram was the least followed platform at the time), so they decided to see how a Stranger Things-themed giveaway would perform. They asked entrants to follow and comment on the post to enter.

The competition did incredibly well and generated 209 entries on the above Instagram post alone. In fact, there was such a massive spike in engagement the post made it onto the explore page for Stranger Things.

Between 27th June and 30th June, they reached 895 new accounts, a 1,400% increase from the previous week, had 152 profile visits, and gained 166 new followers amassing a mammoth 4,000% increase overall. 

This approach was great for brand awareness for Hirst. The competition succeeded in boosting their following. However, the next round needed to attract entrants further down the sales funnel. Toa Digital was on the hunt for qualified leads, matching the profile of individuals likely to buy from Hirst in the future. 

stranger thing

In this round, Toa targeted email sign-ups by requiring those wishing to participate in the competition to offer up their contact. By adding the extra step of scrolling to the bottom of a page and signing up for marketing emails, they were able to attract more intentional entrants rather than those who enter giveaways just to roll the dice on snagging some free swag. 

The Social Strategy

The back to school season starts in July, so, predicting an opportunity, the agency arranged to do two school shoe giveaways, one in July and one in August. They posted about the competition once a week with additional content in between the giveaway posts. 

This time they used Klaviyo’s Sign Up Forms feature to create an entry form, which they conveniently placed at the bottom of the Back to School Guide. The idea was that parents would scroll to the bottom and have to go past our roundup of top school shoe suggestions so that their product picks were in the back of their minds when they were potentially ready to convert in a few weeks.

This time they let the winner choose between a boy’s or girl’s shoe, meaning they weren’t limited by gender, like in the previous Stranger Things competition.

Although tagging a friend wasn’t necessary to enter the competition, they did encourage people to tag another parent/carer who would love the competition, which helped the account to reach more people. Again the competition received enormous engagement.

shoe giveaway

Something interesting that they noticed on their entrant’s profiles is that the giveaway was mentioned on a lot of competition entry websites, which was the referral source for many entrants. The assumption is that this was picked up through the hashtags they used on the posts, such as:

  • #competition 
  • #giveaway 
  • #ukcompetition
  • #backtoschoolgiveaway
  • #win.

Never underestimate the power of a thoughtfully selected hashtag.

Results

As a result of the six competition posts across July and August, Hirst attracted 724 email signups, 247 profile visits, 113 new followers and reached 1,742 accounts.

Not only was this additional exposure for the brand, but it also meant some backlinks for the Back to School Guide too, which of course, helps towards domain rating/authority.

When the entrants sign up for the newsletter, regardless of whether it was for the competition or the general newsletter, all receive a follow-up ‘flow’ which sends a 10% off code to them. This alone has resulted in over £1,000 in sales over the month, even from competition entrants who signed up simply to be in with a chance of winning a free pair.

With a hearty email list of entrants, it was time to leverage the connections made through the contests. Hirst now sends weekly emails featuring guides, the latest products, and advice for customers looking to get ahead of the back-to-school rush. Of course, they’ve cross-marketed this on Instagram to fully maximize the potential of their blog posts and guides.

How To Use Instagram For Email Sign Ups

For the cost of £100/$117.82 worth of school shoes and the time spent designing and scheduling the social media posts, this is a huge return on investment. 

If you think planning and deploying an Instagram giveaway will help your brand get the awareness and engagement it deserves, you’re probably right. Before you start scheduling your posts, keep these key points in mind: 

  • Know your audience FIRST. Find a way to target your most qualified lead. 
  • Understand the exchange. Offer something valuable to the audience in exchange for their emails. 
  • Strategize your posting times and placement. Be sure to post giveaways at prime time alongside your regularly scheduled content. 
  • Test and Check. If your first giveaway doesn’t get the desired result, tweak the visual, switch the caption and hashtags or try a different posting time. 
  • Leverage email gains. Once your email list is full of entrants, don’t waste it. Use the contacts in preceding marketing initiatives.

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