We’d already built SendFox and KingSumo into seven-figure products. They were doing well with customers and the features were stable.

But we thought we could do more.

So we asked ourselves, “What if our team became like the Amazon Basics of AppSumo?”

This would allow us to create more simple, affordable tools that people would love, which would in turn help grow AppSumo.

To test the idea, we set our first deliverable deadline: launch a new product in January.

Setting a time limit of 20 working days, or only 160 working hours, we knew we had to nail down the product idea, strategy, and approach.

The product we built became TidyCal.

And the end result with TidyCal blew away even our most optimistic expectations:

• 1,800+ total user signups
• 1,200+ paid customers (64% free-to-paid conversion rate)
• $30,000+ in revenue in four weeks ($36,024 at the time of writing!)

In this blog post, we’ll show you exactly how we did it.

You’ll learn how we built and launched TidyCal—a super successful SaaS product—in just 20 days.

Making a $30,000 product in 20 days

My name is David, and I’m the General Manager of AppSumo Originals. Over the past three years, my responsibilities have included building and growing multiple six-figure products—KingSumo, SendFox, and now TidyCal.

Having seen firsthand what it takes to grow six-figure products, we took everything we learned and put it into our new product, TidyCal, and recorded our process.

Now we’re sharing the three steps we used to launch the product, so you can use our playbook to your benefit.

Step 1: Prepare for greatness

To build a product within a set timeframe, a lot has to happen behind the scenes.

As the famous saying goes: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”.

In December, before we even started putting together our first product, we started preparing.

There are a lot of opinions in business… and it’s important to have objectivity and clarity before you create anything. If you don’t know what you’re creating—and why—you’ll have a bunch of team members doing things for different reasons, instead of uniting toward a common goal.

Our first step of preparation was to come up with a list of products we could create and a ranking system.

The team got to brainstorming.

Ranking potential ideas

With all the awesome ideas being bounced around, we had to establish criteria. (Trust us, not everything was a winner.)

We used a variation of the “RICE” product-ranking framework to objectively rank a few qualities about product ideas.

The traditional RICE framework is:

• Reach
• Impact
• Confidence
• Ease

So, we set to work to come up with a similar framework that fit within our goals…

The elements of our custom ranking system:

• Goal Impact. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most impactful, how much would this propel us towards our goal of growing AppSumo?
• Ease. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the easiest, how easy would the product be to develop with our small team?
• Virality. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most likely, how likely would this product be to go viral? This is especially important because our Originals group is a small team without a marketing budget.
• Hype. For every team member who was excited about this product, we gave it 1 vote. That’s right, it’s not just about the numbers. It’s important to ensure that your team is actually excited about building a product.

Once we had the values defined, it was easy to pick a product by just combining the scores and looking at the top 2 to 3 products.

We narrowed down our list to three products:

• A creator social community
• A chatbot
• A calendar app

We decided to go with a calendar app—which we called TidyCal.

This was the product that had the highest combined score of Goal Impact, Ease, Virality, and Hype from our team.

The concept of TidyCal was to create something simpler and more affordable than alternatives out there like Calendly, Book Like a Boss, or Doodle.

With the product selected, it was time to define the requirements and specs.

Finding the best features

To prepare for development, we first needed to clarify what our calendar product would become.

What features would it have? Just as importantly, what features would it not have?

There’s an art and a science behind defining the features of your product. Here’s what we made sure to do:

• Look at reviews of similar products and see what people both liked and disliked
• Think about what we ourselves would want as users in a calendar app
• Figure out why people purchased calendar apps in general

With all the potential features we could include, we narrowed down the most critical features to a single page in Google Docs.

It’s important to set the right expectations when it comes to feature scope. In 20 days, we weren’t going to be able to duplicate every feature from every other calendar app that’s been around for 10+ years with 500+ employees. Our pared down list kept our goals realistic, helping us prioritize and focus.

Nailing the product design

With the requirements established, we started simple mockups and designs.

We needed the designs first, so our backend development team could get a sense of what they were building visually. The product requirements and spec details help… but only to a certain extent.

Seeing the requirements and specs brought to life with a design makes it easier to know what our development team needs to build. It’s a critical step before development.

We know when the design is finalized when it feels right. It checks off the main requirements we want, and has a general flow and layout that makes us want to use it ourselves.

After the designs were complete, we got to work on the backend infrastructure and scaffolding.

We were lucky to have a designer who could manage the frontend HTML markup while our two other epic developers worked on the backend setup.

When the markup and backend started moving along, the team was ready to begin connecting the pieces.

Once the app was tweaked, fine-tuned, and tested, we were ready to launch…

Step 2: Optimize your launch

Products need a bit of a push.

Too many entrepreneurs and businesses release something to the world and wait for success to come to them.

As Chief Sumo Noah says, you should spend 50% of your time creating something and the other 50% of your time on marketing what you’ve created.

While we were finalizing the product and making sure everything was as bug-free as possible, I was also working on the marketing plan:

• Picking the marketing channels that, from our past experiences, had promising results
• Writing the marketing copy
• Making sure all appropriate team members were involved for cross-promotion

This was a HUGE project. There were 12+ people involved across 16+ marketing channels:

With the marketing plan defined ahead of time, we moved onto “day of” launch preparation.

The ENTIRE team was ready at a moment’s notice to fix bugs, answer questions, and triage responsibilities.

The general flow worked like this:

1. I was answering Q&A on the AppSumo deal page
2. The support team was answering any bugs and questions via email support
3. All bugs were being triaged into GitHub by me, so Garrett, Marnie, and Henrique (the awesome developers) could solve quickly
4. The support team was recording any feature requests for future improvements

Having central points of responsibility helps prevent too many cooks in the kitchen, with one clear person being the point of contact.

Because of this strategy, bugs were quickly fixed and features were quickly recorded.

Step 3: Post-launch

The product doesn’t end at the launch.

With any product, it’s critical to conduct a post-mortem: what went right, and what went wrong?

As we think about building more products in 2021, we especially wanted to make sure we learned from what happened.

Most companies make a mistake of “done with this, onto the next…” without understanding that their results come with lessons built in.

Assessing the results

To keep track how TidyCal performed, we looked at four data points:

1. Total number of signups
2. Total number of customers (which related to our goal)
3. Results from the marketing channels we pushed
4. Overall rating of the product, as given by the customers

Each of these metrics helped us understand the successes—and opportunities to improve—with TidyCal.

We could take the learnings from what we expected to happen with marketing channels that we used for TidyCal and compare them to what actually happened.

This data is helpful as we keep growing TidyCal—and think about building and marketing new products.

Post-launch support

The support we provided was also a critical cog for post-launch analysis.

With more queries, feature requests, and bug reports, we were able to piece together the puzzle and start to think about what the future of TidyCal would look like.

To further support our users, we also made sure to show them that we were continually updating the app based on their feedback. For three weeks, we sent emails to all users showcasing the key free features and improvements that we made every step of the way.

Instead of a launch and run, it was critical for our customers to know that we care and we hear them.

Key takeaways

When people see a new product like TidyCal launch, they don’t see the behind-the-scenes work that goes behind it.

To launch a new product in 20 working days, we had to be intentional with how we built it. Here’s a summary of our process:

1. Creation and pre-launch. It all starts with picking the right product based on a framework that lines up to the goal. From there, list out your core requirements, create your designs, and build the product knowing exactly what you’re building.
2. Optimize the launch. We put a lot of effort into creating our product, and we didn’t want it to fall flat. Like Chief Sumo Noah says, 50% of the time you spend on a product should go towards making sure you have a great marketing plan to help it succeed.
3. Don’t forget about the post-launch. Continue to show your users that you’re planning to improve. Then keep track of which marketing channels went well and which failed as learnings for the future.

There’s a lot we learned in building this product, and we can’t wait to keep making TidyCal and our AppSumo Originals even better for you. For a limited time, get TidyCal for an ultra-low one-time fee—no more paying monthly bills for your calendar and booking apps!

Personally, I know that changing just ONE word on my website has driven tens of thousands of dollars in extra sales. 

And the same can happen for you.

It’s important to take ACTION — and see what helps you get results for your business.

Enter the simple skill of email A/B testing…

How to Run Quick Email A/B Testing with SendFox

I first heard about A/B testing from the book In The Plex about the early days of Google.

Google execs would debate what color to make the links and thousands of other small changes that could have HUGE impacts.

To test objectively, they would test changes on a fraction of their traffic and compare it to the unchanged version.

Now you may be thinking, “sure it’s easy for Google to do tests when they have school busses full of PhDs and billions of searches per month.”

I once thought the same thing — but now I realize that that’s a dangerous limiting belief.

No matter your size, not testing can be costing your business in lost sales every time you send an email with SendFox.

And testing isn’t hard.

There are a ton of free A/B testing tools out there, and you don’t need a massive list to get valid results.

Now, SendFox doesn’t have a built-in A/B testing feature. But it’s easy to split your list and use it as your email testing platform.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download your list from SendFox [SendFox help article]
2. Use Excel to randomly split it into two sub-lists [Screencast video]
3. Upload them back into SendFox as two separate lists [SendFox help article]

Three Little Tests

Now that you can test, what should you test?

Once you get into persuasion and copywriting it’s easy to keep reading book after book.

And pretty soon you end up with a bookshelf that looks like this:

But one thing I’ve found is that a lot of persuasion tips are not universal.

So I went back to my stack of books and made a list of every tip I could find and started testing them, one by one.

I want to share three results I’ve gotten so far.

These were all run using my SendFox testing lists to a small ecommerce store selling parts for mechanical keyboards.

I learned this trick from copywriter Ian Stanley. The idea is, when making your offer, it’s more persuasive to use the word “when” instead of “if”. For example:

• Less Persuasion: “Get 15% off if you spend $50″
• More Persuasion: “Get 15% off when you spend $50

So, using my test lists in SendFox, I ran a limited time sale offer using the two headlines above.

Results:

This one surprised me. Using “when” got twice the number of sales and pulled over twice the sales volume as the “if” email.

Ian was right — use “when” instead of “if” for better results!

Test 2. Personalized “From” Field

Here’s a peek at my Gmail “Promo” tab this morning:

There are some brands emailing me.

There’s the finance site Seeking Alpha, and the industrial equipment site IronPlanet (where I go to live out my childhood dreams of owning a tractor).

But you’ll also see some personalized senders, with a [name] from [brand] formula. Like my buds “Ben from Flippa” and “Lizzie from Khan Academy.”

I’ve read the advice in several places that a “real name” email persona works better, but I was curious to test it myself.

I sent a standard ‘product back in stock’ email to my list. Half got the email from “switchTop Keyboards” (our brand) and the other half got the email from “Will @ switchTop.” That was the only change.

Results:

The personalized version saw a 5% lift in open rates.

If you’re regularly emailing your list, this is one of those “base hit” tweaks. It costs you nothing but lets you eke out a steady gain that will keep compounding in future emails.

There are not a lot of areas in life where you can get a “free lunch” 5 percent, but email is one of them.

Test 3. Does Free Stuff Sell?

Influence by Robert Cialdini is a classic book on persuasion.

One of his principles is the norm of reciprocity.

Simply put, the idea is that giving out free stuff can help you sell because it triggers a powerful social norm to repay an act of kindness.

Now, this sounds great in a perfect world…

But if you’ve ever given out free stuff, you know there are a TON of freebie seekers who are happy to take the sample but never buy.

So I was curious to see if a free bonus would drive more sales.

When I bought the business a few years ago, one of the most requested things was stickers.

So I had a bunch of stickers with our logo printed up and I sent a “Can I mail you a free sticker?” email to half my list.

Results:

The sticker offer email got a 56% open rate, which is way above the list average.

I then mailed the stickers, followed by one of our normal product restock alert emails.

So, did the sticker-offer-getters buy more stuff?

The short answer is no. They bought almost exactly the same amount of stuff.

Now, before I pump my fist in the air and shout “myth busted” on this test, a few notes:

1. I got a ton of emails saying they loved the stickers.
2. There’s probably some brand value to having a few dozen of our stickers on people’s laptops out there.
3. Who’s to say that these customers won’t be higher value in the long-term?

Once you get beyond very black and white tests like “which subject line got opened more,” things can get murky real fast.

Testing is not a license to turn off your big picture judgement.

A Warning (and Invite)

Now I want to be really clear about something.

The goal of my testing project is not to arrive at “The 30 Persuasion Hacks that REALLY Work” or some B.S. like that.

Trying to apply a bunch of persuasion “hacks” from some book to your marketing project is a great way to sound inauthentic and scammy.

The real goal is to get better at the meta skill of testing.

Learning how to run a bunch of experiments fast and cheap so that you can find out what types of offers and appeals work for your situation.

If you’d like to read more about marketing and persuasion testing, you can join my new email list that I’m calling the “Underground Persuasion Lab.”

I run one test (sometimes on my own businesses, sometimes affiliate products, sometimes other lists) and write up the results in a weekly email.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, join me here. (And yup, this uses a SendFox form).

Once you’re on the list, I’ll send you my full list of persuasion “hacks” that I’m testing (42 so far).

And you’ll also get email updates about each new test when it runs — so you can take the same lessons into your emails on SendFox. Happy testing!

In 2020, COVID-19 changed everything.

Businesses once thought to be safe struggled. Entrepreneurs panicked. And sadly, millions of people lost their jobs.

Now in 2022, we’re facing economic uncertainty again, with major factors like war, continued supply chain issues, and the ripple effects of the pandemic.

My name is David Kelly, and I’m the General Manager of the bestselling AppSumo Originals, which include SendFox, TidyCal, and more.

I originally wrote this post during the height of the pandemic in 2020. While many aspects of COVID-19 were—all together now—unprecedented, the fact is that economic downturns and even recessions come and go.

The advice I provided then will apply today, along with new learnings I’ve gained since in 2022. While some things may feel scary, there’s also hope: some of the most successful businesses have been built during uncertain times.

Let’s talk about how you can build a recession-proof business to weather any storm.

This is exactly what we did at SendFox, a high-value, low-cost email marketing platform, in 2020.

It’s helped us have one of our best periods of sales EVER back then. And the growth is still ongoing. In a recent month, SendFox generated $37,000+ in top-line revenue. Despite current circumstances in the world, you can see similar growth in your business, too.

Now let’s dive in.

6 tips to build a recession-proof business

Tip #1: Create a marketing plan—and keep it organized

Businesses are scrambling right now.

A lot is going on, and it can be easy to lose track of everything that’s being done.

However, even in the chaos, it’s essential to list all your marketing efforts in one centralized place.

But it doesn’t have to be complicated. As you can see here, we’ve centralized all our marketing ideas in one main Google Sheet.

Keeping everything organized helps in two ways—especially if you have a team. Here’s why:

• Everyone knows what they need to do. When team members panic, they pull in different directions. And when people pull in different directions, nothing gets done. You want to avoid this happening to you and your business. Listing out what everyone is doing helps the team move in the same direction.
• We can see what’s missing. When it comes to your marketing ideas, stop asking the question “Did we do this yet?” Once you have everything in a document, you’ll see exactly what was done… and then come up with more ideas of things to do. You don’t have to track down a bunch of different people and ask if something was completed – you’ll know at a glance.

You can check out AppSumo’s Chief Sumo Noah Kagan’s Marketing Plan when he was the CMO for Mint for free.

To further organize, inside our main Google Sheet, we link to different marketing copy and other documents. Above all, this helps keep everything clean and still gives us the documentation we need.

For example, here’s the linked Google Doc for one of our marketing projects, Email segmented Sumo customers.

We sent this email to thousands of customers who were using more expensive email tools, encouraging them to switch to our affordable solution SendFox to save money.

Key Lesson: Create a centralized Google Sheet for all your marketing strategies right now. You can link to any additional copy, resources, etc. in the Google Sheet—but keep one Google Sheet centralized for anyone. In moments of confusion, this makes everything easy to find.

Tip #2: Look for opportunities outside the noise

Every marketer in the world right now is doing a virtual webinar.

Don’t compete where it’s crowded… go where you have MORE opportunity and LESS competition.

Right now, all of us REALLY want two things:

• A way to save money. It’s scary and unpredictable out there. Most of us are tightening our wallets because we don’t know what’s going to happen.
• More cash. Lots of people are getting laid off. People need money because their main streams of income are gone.

1-on-1 Outreach

To find and help these two groups, our team at SendFox has done a lot of 1-on-1 outreach to two main groups: potential influencers and customers.

1-on-1 outreach is something the marketing community tends to hate. It’s hard to scale, it’s not sexy, and it doesn’t get a lot of attention…

But it works.

We’re targeting potential influencers and customers 1-on-1 for two reasons:

• Influencers can promote SendFox to their audience. With the AppSumo affiliate program, influencers who promote SendFox on AppSumo keep 100% of revenue for new customers they refer to buy. That’s a really helpful source of income for people who have lost their jobs or need money right now.
• Potential customers can move to SendFox to save money. There are a lot of entrepreneurs, content creators, and small businesses paying high monthly costs for their email marketing bills. SendFox’s one-time cost (for small senders) or 50% off monthly cost (for large senders) can help people save a TON of money during this chaotic period.

Reaching out to these potential influencers and customers 1-on-1 doesn’t mean we’re blasting hundreds of cold leads per day non-stop (we all get enough spammy cold outreach every day).

We’re looking at highly-targeted relevant people who we think could really benefit from SendFox right now. Consistency is key—even if we email just 5–10 highly targeted potential customers or affiliates per day, the numbers add up.

Outreach Scripts

Here are the exact scripts we used for each type of outreach:

Influencer outreach. We picked our FAVORITE and BEST current SendFox customers, and then messaged them to be a part of the AppSumo affiliate program promoting SendFox. We heavily emphasized one of the key things people want right now—to make more money. Because our message matched what people wanted right now, the response rate was super high (40%).

Prospective customer outreach. We want our favorite people to use SendFox. So whenever we get an email from a newsletter we’re subscribed to in our inbox, we tell them about SendFox. Don’t make marketing more complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes, it’s just about leveraging your network and keeping it simple.

When we reach out to an influencer or potential customer, we make note of them inside a second Google Sheet (linked in our main Google Sheet to keep everything organized).

Key Lesson: Think about what your customers want right now. During tough times, it’s usually to save money or make more money. Then think about the marketing channels you can reach them, and what you can offer them.

Tip #3: Make sure the ENTIRE team is involved

Even though it’s a crazy time, it’s important to slow down enough to keep the team focused.

If you’re leading your team, and you’re frazzled, stressed, and all-over-the-place… the entire team will match that energy.

With SendFox, I’ve kept my team in the loop daily, and shown them all the people I’m outreaching (including the results).

Leaders lead by action. When we tell our team something is important, we as leaders should shift our priorities there, too.

And when a team member does something great towards our goal, it’s vital to provide positive reinforcement. Every action makes a difference!

Stepping back and not losing sight of the forest for the trees, I remind our team daily that two things are critical:

1. Finding potential customers who we can help save money by switching to SendFox
2. Finding potential influencers we can help make money by sharing SendFox with their audience

Setting clear high-level instructions—“let’s help new customers save money, and influencers make money”—gives large boundaries for the team to be creative.

One of our team members, Samantha, decided to take the idea of “more customers” and promote our product on Reddit. It was totally her idea, and it was AWESOME to see the initiative.

Key Lesson: Lead your team with action. Model what they should do by taking action on the right things yourself, and then encourage them to be creative to accomplish the goals you’ve set.

Tip #4: Explore other low-cost product ideas that help customers

What else do your other customers want? It’s a big question, but it helps to think of it as layers of an onion.

For example, if they do email marketing, they’re also highly likely to do marketing on social media.

So we created SleekBio, a product to help people cut their monthly Linktree costs on social.

From email marketing also came the idea of helping customers with SMS marketing, and we built ShortySMS.

All of these solutions offer a high value to our customers at a low cost and fulfill different needs. Peel back the layers of your initial offering and you’ll find potential gold.

Once you have other ideas on how you can help your customers, validate your business idea. I recommend reading the full post, but here’s the TL;DR:

1. Make sure that you are solving a problem
2. Spend minimal money while validating
3. Do the manual work necessary—move quickly and get real feedback from folks in your network
4. Continue to collect feedback from your audience to improve the product to suit their needs.

Key Lesson: Think of your business offerings like an onion. On the inner layer, you have your first business. But you can keep offering more layers to help your customers with more related needs.

Tip #5: Cut costs internally

It goes without saying that low costs help your team as well.

We use SendGrid to power the backend of SendFox and Twilio to power the backend of our sending for ShortySMS.

When we audited the payments for both accounts, we realized we could save 40%+ by making some adjustments.

For example, we increased tiers to reduce overages on SendGrid and cut down on abusive, high-volume accounts on ShortySMS. Check your bills and move to low-cost alternatives like those offered on AppSumo.

Key Lesson: There are two ways to “fix” finances: Make more money, or cut costs. Revisiting your costs is often the quickest way to stop the bleeding as you put a strategy in place to generate more revenue from your business.

Tip #6: Measure results and KPIs

Chief Sumo Noah always talks about doubling down on what works and doing less of what doesn’t.

A philosophy I like to use is trying one new marketing test a week, measuring results, doing more of what works, and stopping what doesn’t.

We often use the “start, stop, keep” methodology at the end of the month to review the stats of where we go next.

At the end of the month, we revisit our marketing experiments and their results to understand next steps.

This methodology helps our team be intentional with our projects and priorities.

Instead of scatterbrained efforts in a lot of different places, we can systematically and methodologically start doing new activities that have potential, stop doing activities that don’t work, and keep doing activities that are showing promise.

In a recent month, we ran a handful of experiments:

• Four experiments were kept because of solid results
• One experiment was stopped because the ROI wasn’t there
• One new experiment was ideated for the following month

Key Lesson: As Chief Sumo Noah says, surprises should be saved for birthday parties—not businesses. Use a framework to understand how your activities performed for the week or month, and then “start, stop, keep” for the following month.

Final Thoughts

It’s a tumultuous time in business, but these times also mean OPPORTUNITY.

You have the opportunity to organize experimental marketing channels.

You have the opportunity to lead your team better than ever.

And you have the opportunity to get creative.

Remember these six tips steps to build a recession-proof business:

1. Create a marketing plan — and keep it organized
2. Look for opportunities outside the noise
3. Make sure the ENTIRE team is involved
4. Explore other low-cost product ideas that help customers
5. Cut costs internally
6. Measure results and KPIs

If you want to cut your email marketing costs by literally 5-10x, check out SendFox, an exclusive deal on AppSumo starting at a one-time cost of $49.

Viral giveaways can grow your email list FAST.

But do those new email subscribers actually turn into new customers?

We wanted to know if the email leads from giveaways were quality or just quantity. If these leads turned into paying customers… or if they were all duds.

To test the theory, we used the KingSumo giveaway tool for our client Little Secrets.

The results beat our craziest expectations. 

Giveaways helped Little Secrets generate email subscribers FAR faster than other marketing methods like Facebook Ads, SEO, Instagram, and influencers.

The giveaway captured more leads in 7 days than we organically generated in the previous 6 months.

And it wasn’t just about the leads: Revenue for Little Secrets increased, too.

One week after the giveaway, the ROI on the giveaway spend was 2.26x.

And our estimated annualized ROI was 27x. Awww yeah!

In this blog post we’re going to show you how to have the same success with your giveaway.

We’ll share step-by-step how we created a giveaway that…

• Grew the email list of our client Little Secrets by 56% in 7 days 
• Got email open rates over 80% by the end of the giveaway — 6x the industry average! 
• Generated $777.29 in revenue (that’s $1.23 for every new subscriber) 

Let’s get started.

1. How to Setup a Profitable Giveaway That Generates 27x ROI

Pick the right prize to double your audience

When picking a grand prize, we wanted to make sure it resonated with Little Secrets’ ideal customer.

Everyone loves iPads, or Amazon gift cards… but those products don’t have anything to do with Little Secrets’ business of all natural fair-trade chocolate.

A generic prize would attract low-quality leads. So instead, we wanted to do an eye-catching prize that fit the Little Secrets brand, attracted the right customers… and got tons of attention.

We decided to make our grand prize an entire store display with 60 bags of Little Secrets candy.

Imagine setting that up in your house!

This grand prize only cost $125. This is less than most businesses spend on Facebook advertising in one week!

A common misconception about giveaways is the prize has to be expensive. Instead, it’s more valuable to focus on a prize that attracts your ideal customer. For Little Secrets, we wanted to focus on a simple prize that got the right kind of attention.

How to 3x your giveaway page conversion rate

To make sure visitors knew they had landed in the right place, we created a headline that we could repeat in all of the giveaway promotions.

Our headline formula = prize + time period.

“Win X during Y”

For our Little Secrets giveaway, here’s how we broke down the formula:

• X = 60 bags of Little Secrets Candy
• Y = Easter, which was 2 weeks away

So the final headline was: “Win 60 Bags of Little Secrets Candies for Easter”

This headline was designed to entice readers to click to learn more about the giveaway. It’s easy to get distracted online, so we wanted a headline that stood out.

Once users were on the giveaway page, we needed to sell them on why they should enter.

To make the page convert, here’s the body copy formula we followed:

• Hook – Short and compelling sentence fragment that’s easy to read
• Why – Reason why this giveaway is relevant to them personally
• Desire – Paint a positive picture of them winning the contest
• Action – Tell them exactly what to do with no ambiguity

And here’s what the KingSumo giveaway page looked like when finished:

KingSumo provides a great FAQ and videos if you need help setting up your giveaway.

Remember that users are distracted when reading your giveaway page — with social media, YouTube, kittens, and other giveaways — so you have to grab their attention.

Think like a user, and ask yourself: Why should I care about signing up for this giveaway right now?

Write copy with your ideal user’s experience in mind.

Key strategies to leverage social media for maximum results

Little Secrets uses Facebook as its social media channel of choice.

To leverage their existing Facebook audience, we focused on making it easy for contestants to share the giveaway on Facebook.

We could have focused on trying to grow the Little Secrets Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube followings as well — but asking people to do too many things leads to analysis paralysis, and they’ll end up doing nothing.

Through experimentation, we’ve found that focusing on one social media channel maximizes the final results.

To maximize the giveaway’s exposure on Facebook, we used KingSumo’s built-in “Sharing Options” and “Extra Entry Actions.”

The Sharing Options allow contestants to share the giveaway on Facebook with one click.

Seriously, one click leads to tons of free promotion on Facebook!

And the Extra Entry Actions gives contestants an additional giveaway entry for following Little Secrets on Facebook. To enable this additional entry, we added Facebook as a “social media follow” action.

This feature took 30 seconds to set up, and resulted in an additional 161 Facebook followers over the course of the giveaway!

Here’s an example of what these options looked like on the giveaway page after someone had entered.

The hidden power of referrals: Our secret to making EVERYONE a winner

In giveaways, there’s usually only one winner.

This can be defeating for would-be entrants.

People come to your giveaway page, think they have no chance, and decide not to even bother entering.

They exit the giveaway… and cost your business another lead and potential customer.

To increase our number of entrants, we tested offering guaranteed prizes to people that referred others to the giveaway.

Here’s what we offered:

• If you referred 1 person = Coupon for 15% off your next full order of Little Secrets candy
• 3 referrals = Bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter
• 5 referrals = Coupon for 32% off your next full order of Little Secrets candy
• 10 referrals = A Secret Swag box full of Little Secrets candy and swag

Notice how we don’t give away a product until they refer at least 10 people!

In other words, 1 referral and 5 referrals require the entrant to purchase something… which means we generate revenue (even if it’s at a discount).

The best way to encourage people to refer their friends, get guaranteed prizes, and help grow our giveaway was through a confirmation email.

As soon as someone entered the giveaway, the below email was immediately sent from our email provider:

We included a link back to the contest page four times in the copy to make sure everyone knew where to go if they wanted to refer someone and earn the guaranteed prizes.

This email had excellent results — a 62.7% open rate and 13% click rate. That’s 3x the results of a normal email.

To make sure this email went out immediately after confirmation, we integrated our email provider with the KingSumo services tab and chose the “Push contestants after they confirm their entry” option.

Using this setting, KingSumo sends the contestant’s email address to the email provider only after they confirmed their entry into the giveaway.

This way any non-confirmed, potentially fake entrants, were not sent to the email provider.

Once the confirmed entrants are in the email provider, that’s when the magic happened:

1. Confirmed entrants are tagged as a “2018 Spring Contestant”
2. They’re sent the automatic confirmation email with details on how to refer
3. They take action from the confirmation email without our team lifting a finger

Here’s how a tag looks like in our ESP when someone enters the contest:

Starting the process with a tag allowed us to identify entrants in our email provider so we could track and segment them later in the giveaway.

At the end of the giveaway, we had some great results from referrals and guaranteed prizes:

• 109 people referred at least one person
• 12 contestants referred more than 10 people
• One contestant referred 41 people!!!
• 10% of all contestants referred someone

This confirmation email worked to help us increase our giveaway leads by more than 10%.

Set the ideal length to skyrocket your giveaway (without it losing popularity)

The engagement for a giveaway will drop off in less than a week without constant promotion.

If you look at our overall subscriber numbers below, you’ll see a spike on day one, a dip for the next five days, and a spike again on day seven.

The first and last days of the giveaway accounted for 90% of new subscribers. If you want to really grow your subscriber list, it’s important to send reminders on the first and last day.

Notice how the majority of subscribers came from the first and last two days of the giveaway.

We used the following promotion schedule to work around our most popular days:

• Thursday, March 15th: Sent the announcement email & switched our Sumo popup to promote the giveaway
• Friday, March 16th: Promoted the giveaway on social media
• Wednesday, March 21st: Sent a deadline reminder email on the morning of the last day to maximize the number of leads and referrals
• Friday, March 23rd: Sent the prize and results emails
• Tuesday, March 27th: Sent the Easter 2-day sales promotion email to the entire list
• Wednesday, March 28th: Sent the Easter sales deadline email

2. Strategies to Promote Your Giveaway And Get HUNDREDS of New Customers

We could set up the prize, landing page, and backend functionality perfectly…

But if no one entered, it didn’t matter.

With our giveaway set up, it was critical we promoted the giveaway effectively to get more leads and new customers.

Here are the exact steps we used to promote our giveaway for massive success.

GET OUR BONUS GIVEAWAY SWIPE FILE

Popups: How to 2x your entrants by leveraging your website traffic

To grow the Little Secrets email list organically, we used KingSumo’s sister company Sumo and their free list growth tools.

Using the free Sumo tools, we put popups on every page of the Little Secrets website promoting the giveaway.

The Sumo tools allowed us to create effective popups in minutes, instead of the hours it would take to manually code.

Here’s the popup we created with a simple image, title, and copy. You’ll notice, for ease and consistency, we reused a lot of the same copy and style as our giveaway page.

It took us less than 5 minutes to transform a Sumo popup into a giveaway promo on every page

When a user clicked the “Enter Now!” button, it redirected them to the giveaway page we had set up in KingSumo.

Here’s how to set up your first giveaway popup using Sumo:

1. Sign up for Sumo for free
2. Add the Sumo code to your website
3. After the code is added, go to your Sumo Dashboard and click “Forms” then “List Builder” and then “Create New Form”
4. Change the goal from “Collect Emails” to “Call to Action”
5. Click the button on your form, and redirect to your giveaway page URL

Launch email: The key strategy to kickstart your giveaway for growth

The Sumo popup worked great for new or returning visitors to our site…

But what about all the customers who had bought from us in the past?

Or signed up for our email list?

Most existing fans aren’t checking our site every day, and they won’t see the popup. Instead, they’re waiting for us to reach out to them again.

To help the giveaway go viral, we sent an email promoting the giveaway to the Little Secrets email list.

We broke down the email into two parts:

• Subject line
• Body

Here’s how we optimized both:

Subject line:

We wanted to keep the giveaway offer as consistent as possible.

To keep it simple and effective, we matched our email subject line to our giveaway headline…

Get 60 bags of Little Secrets Candies for free

Body:

In the body of the email, we wanted to give a compelling reason for subscribers to enter the giveaway.

We positioned the giveaway around Easter and eliminating artificial, unnatural candy from their family celebration.

We also used the “frame the dream” approach in the body copy.

In other words, we asked them to imagine how many smiles they could create with 60 bags of hidden candy for friends and loved ones.

Finally, we made a last-ditch effort for the people who still weren’t convinced.

We mentioned the guaranteed prizes in the PS of the email to help skeptics see the value and take action.

Here’s the exact announcement email we sent to our existing email list.

The email was VERY effective.

The end results were 5x higher than industry average:

• 58% open rate
• 25.6% click rate

External promotion: How to leverage our favorite subreddit to propel your giveaway

There are multiple subreddits on reddit that are dedicated to giveaways and sweepstakes.

Most people avoid these subreddits because they think they will only result in terrible leads.

But we thought about reddit differently.

It takes 5 minutes to post on reddit, so if we generated at least one customer from reddit, we would make about $25 in revenue or $300 per hour worked (not too shabby).

For the experiment, we posted the giveaway on the subreddit r/giveaways to reach the largest number of potential new customers.

To attract the right kind of people, we crafted a specific headline that:

• Shared the unique benefits of Little Secrets candies
• Only attracted people who were interested in all-natural, fair trade chocolate
• Stuck close to the original headline we used for our giveaway and email

It was also important for us to get upvotes to our reddit post. This would help it stay on the r/giveaways homepage longer.

Plus, the more a post is upvoted, the more reddit’s algorithm features it across their site. Free advertising!

To get more upvotes, we had all our team members sign up for accounts and upvote. Then, we texted the link to a few friends, too.

Social media: Our exact step-by-step system to make your giveaway viral

Before we promoted our giveaway on social media, our three major marketing channels were generating a steady number of entrants:

• Popups were converting new and returning site visitors into entrants
• Our email was turning our biggest fans and readers into entrants
• Reddit’s r/giveaways subreddit helped get new entrants in the door

Social media would give us the chance to turn even more fans and followers into entrants. Some followers were already on the email list, but a good number of them were not. Also, not everyone is going to open the announcement email, so it always pays to communicate on multiple channels.

We decided to start our social media push by leveraging Facebook — the biggest social media platform for Little Secrets to get the most eyeballs.

Similar to the email, we positioned Little Secrets as a way to remove artificial flavors from your family’s Easter celebration.

Here’s how we set up our ultimate Facebook post:

• We kept the copy short, so people who scan their Newsfeed could catch it at a glance
• We used a bright visual image to catch their attention — and used Easter colors to tie in the holiday theme of the giveaway
• We linked directly to the giveaway page on the Little Secrets website

The post started to spread:

• Total comments = 5
• Total Likes = 43
• Shares = 3

We didn’t spend any money to promote this post, so this was all organic engagement.

A nice surprise was that followers grew 4% over 7 days. It wasn’t our primary goal to grow the Little Secrets Facebook fan page, but it was a nice bonus.

Deadline strategies: Last-minute tips to convert more customers

Every day of the giveaway, Little Secrets was getting between 25 to 250 new email subscribers.

However, not all of the entrants were confirming their email address and entry into the giveaway.

And because they didn’t confirm their entry, they weren’t going to see the confirmation email with instruction on how to refer their friends and win guaranteed prizes.

In our experience, the last day of any promotion generates 40% or more of the results when you send a deadline reminder email.

To make sure Little Secrets did not miss out on a ton of additional leads, we needed to send two different reminders.

To accomplish this we separated our entrants into two groups:

1. Entrants who had not confirmed their entry
2. Entrants who had confirmed their entry (and were already pushed to our email provider)

To separate, we exported all giveaway entrants in our KingSumo backend dashboard:

Once we had the CSV of the contestants, we used Microsoft Excel to sort them by confirmed or unconfirmed status.

We used the sort function under the Data menu in Excel.

We imported the unconfirmed entrants into our email provider and tagged them as “unconfirmed.”

For unconfirmed entrants, and existing subscribers who had not entered the contest, we resent the original announcement email with two adjustments:

• Subject line. We added a same-day deadline of 7 pm to get entrants to take action fast
• Body copy. We reiterated the deadline to further convince entrants to confirm their entry

In the body, we also used compelling copy to help unconfirmed entrants visualize what it would be like to win the main prize.

Also, in the PS, we teased the secondary benefit of confirming your entry for additional guaranteed prizes.

Notice the multiple deadlines we added to the email.

This email was sent to existing subscribers who had not entered the giveaway, and unconfirmed entrants… but we still managed to get a 38.3% open rate and 9.3% click rate!

That’s 2.5x normal email averages. Great for a “cold” group of users who didn’t enter the giveaway the first time!

And we didn’t stop there.

We also sent another email reminder to all the confirmed giveaway entrants.

This email was designed to generate more guaranteed prizes for the entrants and more referrals for Little Secrets.

Here’s the email we sent to the confirmed entrants list:

Like the unconfirmed email, this email also performed VERY well:

• 51.9% open rate
• 7.3% click rate

In total, these two emails DOUBLED the number of entrants, and new subscribers, to the Little Secrets email list.

Seriously. Just two simple deadline emails to a group of unconfirmed and confirmed users 2x’d the entrants.

That’s the power of a deadline.

3. Post-Giveaway Promo: How to Turn Your Giveaway Entrants into Raving Fans & Lifelong Customers

Just because the giveaway is over doesn’t mean the work is done.

The best giveaway creators know that post-giveaway follow-ups are critical to turn entrants into customers and get a return on their giveaway campaign.

Here’s how to turn your giveaway entrants into raving fans and lifelong customers after your giveaway ends.

The 3-step strategy to make everyone a happy winner

No one likes to find out they lost a giveaway. We made sure everyone who participated was a winner at the end of the giveaway.

To make everyone a winner, we started by creating 5 segments:

1. Contestants who referred 0 people
2. Contestants who referred 1 person
3. Contestants who referred 3 people
4. Contestants who referred 5 people
5. Contestants who referred 10 people

After the giveaway was over we exported a new CSV and sorted contestants by how many entries they received.

Here’s how all the segments broke down:

1. 1-3 entries = No guaranteed prizes
2. 4+ entries = Coupon for 15% off your next full order of Little Secrets candy
3. 10+ entries = Bag of candy donated in your name to The Women’s and Children’s Shelter
4. 16+ entries = Coupon for 32% off your next full order of Little Secrets candy
5. 31+ entries = Secret swag box full of Little Secrets candy and swag

After sorting entrants in Excel, we uploaded each group into the email provider and tagged them with the appropriate prize level.

The total number of entrants Little Secrets had for each prize:

• 4+ Entries = 53 contestants
• 10+ Entries = 13 contestants
• 16+ Entries = 4 contestants
• 31+ Entries = 11 contestants

We allowed entrants to stack their referral prizes. In other words, if someone referred 10 people they got all the prize levels. Sweet bonus!

Here’s the email we sent to entrants who referred 10 people:

The end result?

An 80% open rate and a 14.3% click rate average for the guaranteed prize emails.

This click rate is even better when you consider that two of the four prizes required someone to buy Little Secrets in order to get a discount. That’s free revenue for Little Secrets.

How to transition from giveaway contestants to life-long customers

Many giveaway creators will drop giveaway entrants into the middle of their email sequence.

Think about how confusing this is for the entrant: These people are new to your brand, and you’re treating them like you’ve known them for a while.

It makes your emails feel weird and transactional.

After the giveaway was over, Little Secrets had two new segments:

1. New subscribers who joined the list because of the giveaway
2. Existing subscribers who entered the giveaway

We wanted to make it easy for new subscribers to understand the Little Secrets brand, so we crafted a special post-giveaway email for them.

We broke down the email into three parts:

• Part 1: The email welcomed entrants to the Little Secrets email list, and told them how the giveaway helped donate chocolate to people in need. This was the “feel good” hook to keep reading.
• Part 2: We talked about where else new entrants could find Little Secrets on the web. This helped people learn about the brand… and it also helped grow their social following.
• Part 3: We invited entrants to say on the Little Secrets Society (the email list) — and enticed them by mentioning the BIG Easter sale.

You can see all three parts in the email that was sent to new subscribers:

The results were a 57% open rate and a 8.1% click rate.

Every click went to high-intent pages for Little Secrets: the Twitter page, Facebook fan page, and store.

For existing email subscribers who entered, we sent a different email.

We segmented the Little Secrets list by looking at the following parameters:

Everyone who entered the giveaway AND their subscription date was before the start of the giveaway.

We sent a similar email as the new subscribers, but removed the section that explained the secret membership since they were already subscribers.

We got an 84% open rate and 4.2% click rate on this email. This meant more Facebook and twitter followers for Little Secrets. Nice!

This 84% open rate was the highest of the giveaway, and there are two reasons why:

1. All these people entered the giveaway, so this was an active list
2. The subject line enticed people to see if they won the grand prize

These open rates are proof that maintaining an engaged list is crucial — and if you do it right, then your open rates, click rates, and sales will continue to increase.

Effective tips for making a healthy profit at the end of your giveaway

The week after the giveaway ended, we sent a 24% off promotion to everyone on the Little Secrets email list.

This email was designed to do one thing…

Convert subscribers into buyers.

From the giveaway, we had increased the Little Secrets email list by 56%.

We purposely planned the sale immediately after the giveaway so the new subscribers had an opportunity to buy before they forgot all about Little Secrets.

You don’t need a seven-part launch sequence to sell your product. Instead, just make an offer ASAP while your new subscribers are still engaged.

Here’s the sale email we sent to all subscribers announcing the sale:

The email got a 38.7% open rate and 7.2% click rate.

All these clicks went to the Little Secrets product page on Amazon, and many of them converted into new and repeat customers.

Two days after the first sale email was sent, we sent a second email to anyone who did not open the first email. Here’s the copy:

This email got an 11.7% open rate and 0.5% click rate.

It was lower than the other emails, but we were still happy with the results. It was a less engaged segment that didn’t open the previous email.

The final giveaway numbers and results (use this as inspiration!)

The giveaway was a massive success for Little Secrets.

Not only for growing the Little Secrets email list, but also for converting new subscribers into customers at a profit!

If we would have spent the same amount of money on Facebook advertising or SEO, the costs would have been much higher.

Here are the final numbers:

• Starting list size: 1,132
• New subscribers: 634
• List growth: 56%
• Number of entrants: 1,016
• Cost of the giveaway: $160 for KingSumo + $300 prizes = ($460)
• Sales from Easter promotion the following week: 50
• Revenue from Easter promotion = $1,044.02
• Net revenue from giveaway + follow-up Easter promotion = $777.29

The giveaway increased Little Secrets list by 56% with 634 new subs, and Little Secrets netted $777.29 after the cost of KingSumo and prizes! 

Another way of looking at the giveaway is…

Little Secrets made $1.23 for every new email subscriber they collected during the giveaway.

And based on past performance, we know that each email address added to the Little Secrets email list is worth $20 a year. This means over the next 12 months, entrants from this giveaway will add an estimated $12,680 in sales!

Because of the booming success of this giveaway, Little Secrets plans on running multiple giveaways a year.

It’s easier than you think to run your own giveaway

Thanks to KingSumo handling all of the technical hurdles, running a profitable giveaway is now easier than ever.

And combined with the strategy outlined above, we’re confident you can turn your giveaway into a profit machine too!

If you have any questions about running a profitable, successful giveaway…

I’ll personally be answering every single question in the comments for the next seven days. If you have any questions or comments, please click here to leave a comment and I’ll reply.

GET OUR BONUS GIVEAWAY SWIPE FILE