Summary – Dan is the owner of Digital Growth Agency and has had huge success using VYPER to run contest for his clients (14k emails & 8k new social followers).

Dan shared that VYPER has been one of most effective ways for him to build and push users through the social followers -> email subscriber -> paying customer funnel.

Why did you decide to run a contest?

We love running contests and viral launch campaigns for our clients as a way of turning social media followers into email subscribers and eventually into paying customers.

What were the growth challenges in your business?

We’d tried and tested running social traffic to landing pages, which were converting fine, but we wanted to amplify the social audiences, and found that viral competitions are a very effective way to do this.

What expectations and goals did you have/set for your contest?

Clients would come to us asking us to grow their email lists by thousands of subscribers, and they wanted to achieve this at the lowest possible cost. This is quite a daunting task when there is little momentum or acquisition infrastructure in place.

We are generally aiming to get 3,000+ email subscribers from a viral contest of this nature and to send the subscribers and offer which will convert them into customers.

What other marketing campaigns have you tried but didn’t work?

We have tried using Gleam.io & Matire App which are great tools in their own right, but found that conversion and virality were higher when using VYPER.

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Contest example results

Justin Bieber Tickets Contest

• Emails: 8,178+
• Social followers: 5,000+
• Customers: 100+ app downloads
• Social media mentions increased exponentially.

Evil Energy Contest

• Emails: 6,594+
• Social followers: 3,000+
• Traffic increase: 1,000+ website clicks during contest period

What are the top 5 things you learned from running a contest?

We’ve setup and promoted a lot of these contests. Some work better than others.

1. Viral contests are a great way to turn social media followers into email subscribers.
2. Seeding contests with an existing email list can help a lot get you started.
3. Not every contest you setup is going to be a sure-fire success.
4. The more entries you get, the more viral the contest seems to go.
5. Sending email blasts mid-competition is a great way to boost the viral effect and bump up entry numbers. The more entries you have, the bigger the effect of a follow up email will be.

What would you do next time you ran a contest?

• Send big email blasts to pre-existing lists as soon as the contest launches.
• Drive traffic through mass tweeting at relevant people.
• Get as much PR and influencer shoutouts to the campaign as possible. PR has been a great way to get high quality leads.
• Ask for feedback on the contest page from customers & others before launching.
• Use the new custom entries tools to get more information from entrants.

How did you promote your contest and what worked the best for you?

We’ve promoted and cross-promoted contests on lots of different channels. We try to promote through as many channels as possible simultaneously to get the contest going.

Once you get momentum the contest really starts to accelerate!

What has worked the best

1. Email a solid pre-subscribed list (+Get others to email it out for you) – We’ve found email to be a really good source of signups, especially if they’re already on your list. Cold email generally gets much lower conversion rates than emailing a subscribed list.
2. Twitter – We build networks of 10+ Twitter accounts, build nice followers and send tweets and DM’s to the followers telling them about the contest.
3. Instagram – We’ve built niche accounts and DM the followers to tell them about the contest. It works ok, but if you start sending too much traffic from too many accounts via DM’s the accounts can get shut down or suspended.
4. LinkedIn – Building up networks of connections and telling them about the contest via direct message and published pulse blog posts.
5. Paid traffic via Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc. – We see an opportunity with viral contests to reduce CPA by sending ads to VYPER’s contest landing pages, collecting Facebook pixels for retargeting all the people who land on the page (and those who sign up), and also trying to convert them with an opt-in bribe as soon as they sign up for the contest.
6. Facebook Groups – We’ve tried a lot of stuff with Facebook groups. Where we’ve had most success is building relationships with the people who own the groups and getting them to post the link into the group as they already have authority there.
7. PR – We’ve also found that high quality PR can boost the number of high quality relevant signups.
8. Competition directories – Quality of entrants drops from this source but it’s a good way to get the word out to a lot of people quickly.

About the Agency
Digital Growth are an international Growth Agency focused on building social media audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Instagram. They turn social media audiences into email subscribers & customers by creating and promoting viral contests and launch campaigns.

[email protected]
http://www.digitalgrowthhackers.com