Hey Gabrielle, great questions. I can share what I know based on seeing 7,000 giveaways and 3 years of data, which went into building the POPSMASH Shopify app, that leverages Instagram giveaways to incentivize email opt-ins.

Platform

You didn’t specify what platform you intend to use (website, social network, etc.), but social networks tend to work well, with Instagram being the best because it has the highest engagement and organic interactions well suited to giveaways (comments, likes, follows, etc.).

These rules tend to work well to drive email opt-ins, engagement and some virality through tagging friends:

1. Follow us (and soandso if it’s a collab)
2. Tag 2 friends in the comments
3. Subscribe to our newsletter in the biolink for 10 bonus entries

These rules works well because it starts with low-effort, on-platform actions (follow, comment), then once committed, ask for the higher-commitment off-platform action (opt-in to an email list).

The real power behind a social platform like Instagram is discovery: It has billions of users that would never have visited your site.

That’s why this is so much more powerful than on-site pop-ups, where those people are already on your site--you’ve already done the hard work getting them there. So you might as well use your giveaways to drive net new.

Since giveaways work on Instagram posts and reels, it’s also a good way to maximize ROAS: you’re also getting new followers, engagement, email subscribers AND creating brand equity with memorable, fun ways for people to engage with your brand because people are on social to be entertained.

Your questions

What was the optin reward offered?

Just about any reward can work, but you get the best results from rewards specific to your target customer. E.g. if you’re in the beauty industry, give away a lip kit. On the other hand, giving away generic prizes like an Amazon gift card tends to attract lower quality traffic.

A gift card to the store is a decent alternative if there aren’t other good options. If you want local customers (e.g. a brick and mortar retail location), require the prize to be claimed in person.

For prize value, start small and go bigger if it makes sense. E.g., if your budget is $500, you’re better off spending $100 on the prize and using the other $400 to boost the post. Then keep experimenting with the mix and different values to see what drives the most opt-ins.

See the screenshot from a recent giveaway below for an example of giveaway stats.

Another cool hack is to do a collab. E.g. run a giveaway campaign with another business or an influencer. That way you get access to even more people for the same prize.

Over time you’ll find the sweet spot on the right mix, but generally you want to budget so you can run at least 2 a month and keep doing collabs to reach new subscribers.

Did every new subscriber get a reward, or just one monthly/weekly winner?

The way to maximize ROI is one prize per giveaway (every subscriber has a chance to win) with 2-4 giveaways a month. How many you should do a month depends on your audience and how you do it. If you do collabs to keep it fun, then weekly is fine. If not, then biweekly. But experiment to see what works best.

How did you fulfill that? Did they have to place an order with a secret discount code to “redeem” the reward?

We typically recommend you just reach out to the winner by email or Instagram DM. There are multiple to fulfill the prize with Shopify, like giving them a one-time use code for the product prize or just create a draft order and send them the checkout link to enter shipping info, etc. There’s no specific way, just whatever is easier for you.

I’ve seen optin rates around 3% when everyone was offered a free sticker. Then optin rates of 9-11% when we offer a downloadable asset like a pet safety checklist, or packing list.

Using the approach above the average email opt-in rate in 43% of those who enter (leave an Instagram comment). In this recent case study it was 54.9%.

Tracking & Email validation

This part depends on what tool you use, so I can only comment on how we do it with POPSMASH.

Once you get hundreds of thousands of entries, it gets hard to track everything: Who commented? Who tagged 2 friends? Etc. So you’ll want an app to do that for you.

But the point of the campaign is getting email subscribers, and only people who gave valid email addresses should count. So, for example with POPSMASH we use double opt-in validation. This means people only get credit once they validate their email address. The same thing will happen with phone numbers once we add SMS support.

But regardless of how you do it, you’ll want to validate the entries you receive and sync the valid ones to Klaviyo, Shopify or wherever.

Resources with more data

Here are a few links with extra context and data in case you’re interested:

• Instagram giveaway case study: An example of a recent giveaway with a small brand to show that it works for brands of any size.
• A Shopify calculator showing how merchants can estimate new sales from Instagram by capturing emails with giveaways (3 yrs of data)
• An analysis of the learnings from the calculator above.
• Instagram giveaway guide: More than you ever wanted to know about running Instagram giveaways.

Hey @popsmash,

Thanks for sharing your insights here. More specifically what I’m looking into is optin forms on a company’s ecommerce store.

So we’re not focused on social media followers that aren’t already on the site. We’re focused on converting site traffic to email subscribers.

1. Do you have any data on giveaways as email optin incentives in that context? Or is POPSMASH exclusively focused on social media?
2. One of my clients has several existing influencer/ brand partnership relationships. Maybe it’s worth doing an IG giveaway to grow email optins that aren’t dependent on site traffic?

Hey, thanks for the additional context:

Do you have any data on giveaways as email optin incentives in that context? Or is POPSMASH exclusively focused on social media?

Nope, we exclusively focus on social media (Instagram) since growing email subscribers from social is a newer trend and underutilized by most brands, especially as ROAS has fallen in the last couple years.

For on site there are a lot of pop-up products that can do this. For example, if you’re on Shopify there’s Privy and other pop-up apps.

One of my clients has several existing influencer/ brand partnership relationships. Maybe it’s worth doing an IG giveaway to grow email optins that aren’t dependent on site traffic?

Yeah, it’s worth trying since if it works it could be a game changer for them if they drive a lot of revenue through email.

The main thing to keep in mind is that because of how the IG collabs feature works, the account IG account connected in the app (in Shopify) must create the post and tag others as collaborators in order to be able to get all stats through the Instagram API.

If you use our app POPSMASH I recommend just installing the app when you’re ready so you can take advantage of the 7-day free trial to run a 2 or 3-day giveaway, then just uninstall it if you’re not happy with the results.

But as long as you set it up right and get decent engagement from followers (e.g. they aren’t fake followers with zero engagement) you should get great results. If you try it out and have any questions feel free to email me at gabe (at) popsmash . com.

Thanks for the feedback @popsmash 

@Spark Bridge Digital LLC Peyton, I wonder if you’ve seen any interesting email optin offers with a free gift/ giveaway incentive?