#107 - In this week's episode of Subscription Box Basics, we are talking about how to grow your email list with a giveaway. An email list is a non-negotiable element of running your subscription box business. You may be frustrated with slow growth for your email list (especially during pre-launch), but have you tried a giveaway? If not, put that on your list this week.
One of the most effective way to grow your business effectively is to build an email list. This is a great way to nurture leads into loyal paying customers and running a giveaway can definitely be a quick way to increase your list as well as provide you with other awesome benefits for your business.
SUMMARY:
LINKS AND RESOURCES
#107 - In this week's episode of Subscription Box Basics, we are talking about how to grow your email list with a giveaway. An email list is a non-negotiable element of running your subscription box business. You may be frustrated with slow growth for your email list (especially during pre-launch), but have you tried a giveaway? If not, put that on your list this week.
One of the most effective way to grow your business effectively is to build an email list. This is a great way to nurture leads into loyal paying customers and running a giveaway can definitely be a quick way to increase your list as well as provide you with other awesome benefits for your business.
SUMMARY:
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Julie (00:01):
So you wanna launch a subscription box and don't know where to start. Girl, you are in the right place. I'm Julie Ball, a subscription box coach, and your host here at subscription box basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs that want to avoid overwhelm, grab a coffee, some pen and paper, and let's have some fun. Hey everybody, I'm Julie Ball, the host of subscription box basics. Welcome to the podcast and happy new year. I'm so pumped to be back. I hope you had a great holiday season and that you're excited for 2022. I'm really excited this year. We have a lot of big goals. I hope you've been setting some goals and breaking them down into milestones that you can celebrate all the small wins and the big wins today. We're talking about growing your email list with a giveaway. This is one of those things that should always be on your to-do list is to grow your email list.
Julie (00:59):
I cannot stress the importance of having an email list. And so if you're new to marketing, you might be like, what is an email list? And why do I need one? Well, an email list is a way for you to gather email addresses of people that are interested in your product, right? So you wanna be able to talk to them. So you ask them for their email address and there's the different ways that you can do that. And we're gonna talk a little bit about some of those today, specifically the giveaway, but why it's important is that's the top of your sales funnel and think of your sales funnel as literally a funnel like where it's wider at the top, smaller at the bottom, the top of the funnel is where you're going to reach new potential customers and call them leads or prospects. Those are people that are maybe meeting you for the first time.
Julie (01:48):
The middle of the funnel is where you're going to nurture them. You're gonna tell them your story. You're gonna, um, share what's in it for them. And then the bottom of the funnel is where you convert them. So you can imagine if you're visualizing that funnel, how your group of people is going to get smaller and smaller or, and smaller because you are weeding out the people who aren't interested in your offer and your offer is the bottom of the funnel. That's where you say, buy my product or here's a coupon code, or go to my website and subscribe. So, and just try to like really, really simplify it. So the big part that feels so hard as an new business owner is growing that email list at the top of the funnel, like where do we even find the right people? And so that's why I wanted to talk today about giveaways.
Julie (02:34):
Giveaways are a tactic, a marketing channel that we have used in the past to really help grow our list. And so grab your pen and paper. I'm going walk you through kind of my thought process as I create a new giveaway. The first thing you wanna do is decide your goal. In this case today, we're talking about growing your email list. So that goal is to find and collect email addresses of targeted buyers, of people who fall in your ideal target audience. And your goal is to collect their email address. There might be other goals in other cases, but right now that's what we're deciding on as our goal. The next thing you wanna do is to decide you your timeframe. I like to run our giveaways for seven to 10 days. That way they have a sense of urgency. We can promote them as such.
Julie (03:28):
They do have that end point where it's like, okay, you have to take action by this day, or you're not eligible to win this giveaway. We have run giveaways as long as 30 days. And in that case, it was during our anniversary month. So that's just a, really a way for us to create some hype to, um, celebrate that anniversary month. But typically we are going to run our giveaways anywhere from seven to 10 days. The next thing you wanna do is decide your prize. And this is where so many people go wrong. You want to choose a prize that your ideal target audience will just go nuts over. So you don't want to just get like a target gift card. Yeah. They might like that, but so will everybody. And that if you choose an Amazon gift card or a target gift card, something like that, you are gonna have a lot of entrance that really have no interest in your subscription box at all.
Julie (04:27):
So there's a couple different things you could do here. One, you could give a box, you know, your subscription box, give away a month or give away three months. When I launched my business back in 2016, I gave away an, an annual subscription. Now in hindsight, I realized I probably didn't need to do that. I probably could have done three months or six months, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And I wanted to create a bang. So I gave away an annual subscription. Now, typically when we give away subscriptions, we will stick with a three month subscription. And so that could be your prize. Ultimately, you could pay for a prize or reach out to one of your vendors and say, we want to do this giveaway and would love to include you as part of the prize. And so maybe you can get a prize donated or maybe you have to purchase it, but if you're gonna purchase it, you have that opportunity to buy it at a wholesale price.
Julie (05:20):
So that's good. The other thing is you could reach out to a vendor or you could reach out to a charity, or you could reach out to some other brand that your ideal target audience would absolutely love and propose a collaboration. So maybe it's a three month subscription to your box and a prize pack from X, Y, Z vendor. In that case, when you do that proposal, you want to make sure that they've agreed to not only provide their part of the prize, but also to promote it on their social media and to share it with their followers. That way you, your reach can be that much larger outside of your own network. You can promote to your followers. You can promote to and ask your friends, family, and colleagues to share. But when you have another platform, another brand that is already recognizable or that your ideal target audience really loves, then your a able to reach their target audience through them as well, which can only grow the impact of your giveaway and grow your email list.
Julie (06:25):
So far, we've decided our goal, which is to grow our email list. We've decided our timeframe seven to 10 days, and we've decided on our prize. The next thing you need to do is set it up. So there's some technology stuff involved here. You have to be really careful if you are doing this on say Facebook or Instagram, make sure you understand their guidelines when it comes to promotions like this, like a giveaway. Instead, I highly encourage you to use a software that is built for this. And yes, there are some free versions. And yet ask, there are some versions that you might have to pay, but you get what you pay for. I really highly suggest king Sumo. That's the one that we have used year after year after year. There's other ones like kickoff labs and plenty of other ones to choose from, but up good.
Julie (07:12):
And go ahead and let you know that we love and use king Sumo. One of the reasons that we love it so much is that it has this viral capability built into it. And what I mean by that is when somebody enters, they get prompted to do some other actions. So they get prompted to share it. And they have a quick link to share it. You can prompt them to take other actions, like follow you on Instagram or subscribe to your YouTube YouTube channel, or watch a video. There's all these things that they can do to earn extra entries. So that's why I love this stuff because it's viral. It helps you grow your email list. It's going to help you grow your social media following, and you're driving traffic to your website or to your Instagram or all these other things that you get to choose.
Julie (07:57):
And you get to say, how many extra entries they get. Another thing I love about king Sumo is entrance can come back every day during your giveaway and enter and earn more entries. And so that just gives, gets them in the habit of participating, of trying to earn extra entries of sharing. Even more they can share via email. They can, they can tweet it, can share it on social media, all these things. And so by getting them in the habit of this, that's just helping you get in front of their network. It's just this beautiful thing. So I highly recommend king Sumo. It's pretty easy to set up. They have a wizard where you're going to set up your account first. And then of course, you're gonna set up your promotion. You can add picture, you can add a description, add the dates and the value, all that good stuff.
Julie (08:45):
So you want to make sure that you carve out a little bit of time to set up the technology side of it and think about this too. You wanna have a game plan too, of how you're going to use those email addresses. So with king Sumo, they have this database of all those email addresses and you can download it. Yes, but take it a step further. If your email marketing service provider has an integration for it, or you can use a zap and zap here to help integrate it. You can, of those email addresses directly imported into your email marketing service provider and have a automated email to nurture them. And, but what I mean by nurture them is to send them some emails along the way, introduce yourself, introduce your subscription box, encourage them to share. And I'm gonna talk about that. Follow up in just a minute here.
Julie (09:34):
But first I wanna say that after you set it up, you need to promote it. And this is where a lot of people go wrong. Like they think that they're gonna set up this giveaway and it's just gonna run itself. And it's just going to blow up and everybody's going to enter and share. And that's not necessarily case you need to start. You need to get that snowball rolling and get that momentum. And you can do that by promoting it and sharing it, ask people to share it, ask subscribers, to share it, ask your vendors, ask anyone to get it out there and to share it. You can even promote it with Facebook ads or Instagram ads, or even some ads on Pinterest. You need to start by getting that ball rolling. Once you get that momentum, it will probably continue to pick up more and more momentum because of that viral sharing capability that king Sumo or kickoff labs has.
Julie (10:33):
So make sure that you promote it and it's, it's okay to share it every single day during your promotion. If you are running a giveaway for seven days, then make sure you promote it every day. During those seven days, there's so many different ways you can do it. You can do a Facebook live. You can do a story. You can do a Instagram post. You can do a YouTube video. There's so many ways you, you can promote it, but repeat yourself, say it over and over and over again, during that promotion so that you can continue to get eyeballs on it. Maybe they, maybe you launched it on a Monday and somebody missed it on Monday. And if you don't post it again till Thursday, that's four days that have gone by. You don't wanna miss out on that opportunity because it's only a set and day promotion.
Julie (11:18):
So hope you hear me out loud and clear here. You need to promote it. You need to share it over and over and over again. And then the last step that I want you to make sure that you do is follow up. So you want to not only continue to make sure your technology is working, but you can do that integration. Like I talked about, does king Sumo connect with your email marketing service provider, whether that's MailChimp flow desk, convert, kit, whatever it is, see if there's a way to integrate it. Um, if king Sumo doesn't integrate it directly, there's probably a zap in zapier.com that you can connect it and automatically import those email addresses from king Sumo into your email marketing service provider, and then just start emailing them. You wanna make sure that you're nurturing them. Like I said, you can set up in advance.
Julie (12:09):
If you carve out that tech time set an automation workflow, which is just an email that's automatically going to send on your behalf to start and nurture them. You can encourage them during the giveaway to share and go back every day, earn extra entries. But you can also take this as an opportunity to introduce yourself, share a little bit about the box and the transformation someone will experience when they subscribe to their box, you can keep them updated on your journey. Your whole subscription box journey is such an interesting thing and people love to see behind the scenes. So during this time you can share behind the scenes, you can kind of just warm them up to eventually be a buyer and heck at the end of the giveaway, when you announce your winner, you can give them an offer right then and there and say, I'm sorry.
Julie (12:58):
If you didn't win, we still have something fun for you. Here is a coupon code for 10% off your first box or $10 off your first box, whatever makes sense for your profit margin and to convert them to become a buyer. So let's recap send know we talked a about a lot today with growing your list, but there's, it's really a very linear set of steps. First, decide your goal. Second, decide your timeframe next, decide your prize and be specific. Make sure it is something your ideal target audience would absolutely love. And this again is one of those times where you might want to collaborate with a vendor or somebody else, another subscription box. Even next, you want to carve out some tech time to set it up. We recommend king Sumo. Once it's set up and it is day one of your giveaway, make sure you promote it.
Julie (13:51):
You can even drop some hints in advance if you wanna PR around it. And then lastly, you want to follow up, make sure you're communicating with those people, those new people that are on your email list, warm them up, nurture them, and then give them an offer. After the giveaway is over growing, your list is super important and you can do it in a really fun way. Like a give in 2022, we have decided at sparkle hustle grow to run one giveaway a quarter that makes it really easy for us to plan, to measure, to promote. And just to make sure that it's a regular part of our promotional calendar, because we know it works. So we're gonna use it four times a year. So I challenge you right now to start planning out your first giveaway to grow that email list. And it's so important, not only to always have people coming through your sales funnel and to grow that email list, but especially if you are in prelaunch or if you, uh, haven't launched your box yet and you need to start growing that audience, guys, this is it.
Julie (14:58):
This is the way to do it with a giveaway and you don't have to already have a subscription box ready to start this. You can start growing that email list before you even have a box to sell before you even have, um, all the things ready. You can start that email list with a giveaway in advance. And I really highly recommend that you do it. I hope this was really helpful for you. I hope that you consider using a giveaway. The links will be in the show notes as always. If you want to check out king Sumo, and guys do it, trust me a giveaway is a way to grow that email list and then you nurture them and then you convert them into your new subscribers. I'd love to hear about your giveaway. If you're running one, tag us at subscription box bootcamp on Instagram so that we can share, and we can help you reach new of people and grow your email list. Thanks for listening today, guys. And I'll see you in the next episode.