Social Media Engagement

Another more cost-effective way to get your email subscribers onto your email list is to use a giveaway as an incentive, e.g., an Instagram giveaway.

This is cheaper and more effective for a few reasons:

• Instagram users love giveaways. They drive 4X more engagement and 60X more comments than regular posts.
• The incentive helps drive the email opt-in because users have the incentive to confirm their email.
• It’s more cost-effective because you’re just giving one prize (e.g., a $50-$100 prize) instead of giving many people a discount.
• You can drive up ROAS. If you’re already spending on social ads, you get a higher return by boosting your giveaway posts since you also capture email addresses.

There are multiple ways to do it across all social networks, but here’s an example for an Instagram giveaway: Imagine giving away a $50 prize and wanting to give people who join your email list a better chance to win. You might use rules like these:

1. Follow me
2. Tag 2 friends in the comments
3. Subscribe to my email list at my link in bio for 10 bonus entries

You’ll find that, on average, over 40% of the people who enter will ALSO opt-in to your email list.

For example, the results from one customer campaign they shared publicly are below. TL;DR they only had 3,000 Instagram followers, but got 70 new email subscribers from a single 2-3 day campaign. You could imagine a brand with 10X or 1,000X the followers using the same prize and getting many more subscribers since this approach scales well.

The main thing is to get creative in growing your email list. But converting your social followers into email subscribers works especially well because they are already interested in your content. And once they’re on your email list, it’s much easier to track, nurture and convert them.

Lastly, a couple tips: If you start using giveaways to drive opt-ins, automate as much as possible (e.g. our app does it for Shopify, but there are others) and DO NOT use an expensive prize. For example, Hydroflask drives TONS of engagement just giving away $30 water bottles. So rather than do one giveaway with a huge prize, do a couple a month with smaller prizes -- you’ll see much better returns.