BeThrifty is a vintage clothing e-commerce company based in Austria. They also take part in local clothing events in Germany, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia. The company’s mission is to combine fashion with sustainability. BeThrifty’s website describes their business as “selling unique clothing, jewelry and one-of-a-kind pieces in different sizes and styles to shoppers wanting to escape the boring uniformity of big fashion chains.”
The company has two lines of business:
- An ecommerce website featuring designer and popular brands
- Pop-up in-person events where shoppers pay by weight of their purchases instead of per piece.
Since BeThrifty is in the process of expanding their clothing events to new European markets, they want to increase brand-awareness, grow their email list and attract more social followers to spread the word about their two business lines.
Spreading the Word: BeThrifty's Plan to Connect with More Fashion Lovers
After having some prior success with giveaway campaigns, BeThrifty’s marketing expert, Georg, created a giveaway event with a prize of two tickets to the Frequency Festival. The Frequency Festival is a popular annual event in Austria, featuring German, Austrian bands and top international acts.
BeThrifty discovered UpViral had everything they needed in a viral marketing software to make the giveaway a tremendous success. Their 60-day campaign results were nothing short of spectacular.
The final campaign results included:
- Total leads collected: 9,056
- Direct leads 6608 (31% conversion rate)
- Referred leads 2448 (36% conversion rate)
- WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger shares (4.4k)
- Instagram visitors: 2k
- TikTok visitors: 1.4k
- Instagram shares on stories: 1.2k
Now let’s analyze what made this campaign so effective, starting with the target audience.
Music and Fashion: A Perfect Match for BeThrifty's Audience
Based on experience with previous giveaways, BeThrifty knew their customers had a strong interest in both music and fashion. Vintage clothing stores like BeThrifty often attract music fans interested in putting together a one-of-a-kind look to attend festivals.
Normally UpViral founder Wilco de Kreij cautions against giveaway prizes that aren’t based on a business’ core offers. The reason is that these types of giveaways often attract people who sign up for the contest, but have no genuine interest in your offers.
But in this case, Georg knew their giveaway prize was perfect for their target demographic. He was confident that tickets to the Frequency Festival would generate a lot of social buzz for the BeThrifty brand and help grow the company’s email list rapidly.
Now let’s check out the campaign specifics.
Grabbing Attention: Designing an Irresistible Landing Page
The landing page was simple yet followed best UX practices.
The headline “Get a Chance to Win Two Tickets Worth €400 for the Frequency Festival in St. Pölten” spelled out exactly what the giveaway prize was. A short descriptive paragraph below the headline told how to enter the contest, and also the festival dates.
Short bullets below the paragraph gave further details on the prize, and also the date the winner would be announced.
The form field was well above the fold, especially important for those who enter the contest on a mobile device. If mobile users have to scroll to find your entry form, they soon become frustrated. Many will simply give up and bounce off your landing page.
Last, an additional graphic below the form added a sense of urgency by reminding the audience of the prize and draw date.
Georg says:
It’s always important these days to have something really catchy, not just graphic wise, but also with the text. It has to be broken down to the most crucial information for the visitor. For example, like the title ‘Get a chance to win two tickets worth €400’.
People instantly know what everything is about. And the graphics just add to it. Like what is the Frequency Festival contest? When does it end? And what is the value of the prize? So that's just crucial information. People don't get confused about what they have to do to enter.
After entering their information into the landing page form fields, giveaway entrants were taken to a share page that leaned into some of UpViral’s best features.
BeThrifty's Secret Sauce for Share Page Engagement
The share page featured UpViral custom actions to encourage sharing on the social platforms where BeThrifty’s audience hangs out the most. Custom actions allow you to award extra points to contestants who complete actions you specify, like following you on specific social media platforms.
Everyone who had someone else sign up for the giveaway with their link received 50 points.
BeThrifty then used custom actions to award additional points for following them on WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok, and also for sharing the giveaway via Messenger or in an Instagram story.
Social engagement was exceptional with Messenger and WhatsApp leading to 4.4k shares, and 2k visitors from Instagram and 1.5k visitors from TikTok. There were also 1.2k contest shares on Instagram stories.
What makes this even more remarkable is the long duration of the contest. Most giveaways last between 14-30 days, so to keep up this kind of engagement for 60-days is exceptional!
You might notice that Facebook is missing as a share channel, but that’s not by accident.
Georg noted:
However, custom actions weren’t the only UpViral feature used on BeThrifty’s share page to drive engagement.
Game On! BeThrifty's Leaderboard Fuel a Friendly Competition
Georg also gamified the contest by adding a leaderboard. Leaderboards help to increase engagement and help build brand-awareness and customer loyalty.
People love friendly competitions and leaderboards help drive people to share more than they might otherwise. When users see their friends on the leaderboard, it gives them more incentive to join a contest and compete against them.
Another benefit to a leaderboard is they provide all-important social proof for your contest. Seeing the leaderboard helps to reassure people who aren’t familiar with your brand that your contest is legitimate and safe to enter.
BeThrifty's Share Image Speaks to Young Fashionistas
The share image features an attractive young woman dressed in trendy clothing staring out from the page.
Humans instinctively focus on faces, so using this image was a sure way to grab attention in a busy news feed. This image mirrored the exact demographic BeThrifty wanted to reach for the giveaway, a youthful fashion-forward audience who demanded sustainability.
When prospects see someone who looks like them in a share image, it helps to build an instant connection with the brand. That translates into a desire to check out the contest and the sponsor’s website.
The headline on the share image “Get a chance to win two tickets worth €400 for the Frequency Festival in St. Pölten” was the same one used on the landing page. Reusing the same text and images on different touchpoints in the campaign was one reason this campaign was so successful, and a key to BeThrifty’s low-cost Facebook ad campaign.
BeThrifty's Facebook Ad Success Story
Besides organic contest shares, BeThrifty drove traffic to the giveaway with Facebook ads. The giveaway ad was straight-forward, yet eye-catching.
Emojis and a different font from the rest of the Facebook newsfeed makes the ad stand out from the rest of the Facebook newsfeed. The text is concise and simply states the prize, how to enter and the date winners will be notified. The ad image featured nearly identical information.
To create congruence between the ad and the landing page, the same image was used for both.
Using the same image on both the ad and the landing page is smart marketing. It avoids any confusion people might feel when they click through from an ad to a landing page that looks completely different. If people feel confused, they also get worried your offer isn’t legitimate. When this happens, they won’t sign up for your giveaways.
The simple ad converted well, with 16,673 link clicks on an ad spend of €2345, or an average of only €0.14 per-click.
The same image was also featured on Instagram Reels and Stories to keep up the continuity between the image and the landing page.
Still, no matter how successful a Facebook ad campaign may be, seasoned marketers know that collecting leads is only the start of the marketing process. The real challenge is to get the new leads to open your emails after the giveaway ends so you can continue to market to them.
BeThrifty’s email marketing strategy pulled this off incredibly well.
Keeping Connections Alive: BeThrifty's Sky-High Open Rates and Newsletter Strategy
BeThrifty sends out three newsletters a week; two for their e-commerce store and one for in-person events. For BeThrifty, this is a perfect mailing frequency to keep their audience engaged without overdoing it.
It’s a real balancing act to email your audience enough so they don’t forget you, get not so often that your subscribers decide to hit the unsubscribe button,
BeThrifty got it right with 67% post-campaign open rates that rose to 70% among female subscribers.
After the campaign ended, BeThrifty saw an increase of 5% to 7% in sales.
Georg attributed this to the increased number of subscribers. Because of the two separate business lines, it was difficult to attribute exact revenue numbers to the campaign.
After noticing that several emails collected in the campaign bounced, Georg suggested that UpViral users always turn on the double opt-in feature.
Inbox Delivery Matters - Don’t Make This Mistake
UpViral allows users to enable or disable the double opt-in feature.
Disabling the feature makes for a more seamless user experience, as there is no need to take any further action after submitting their email and personal information.
But that seamless experience often comes at a price.
A small percentage of entrants will submit fake email addresses to avoid being marketed to during and after the campaign. That means these emails will bounce (not land in the inbox.)
High bounce rates threaten your sender reputation and this means your emails can land in junk folders, or worse, be blocked altogether.
So take care to enable double opt-in. Double opt-in means that entrants must verify their email addresses before they are added to your list.
Keys to BeThrifty’s Giveaway Success: Consistency and Understanding the Audience
There are three major takeaways to learn from BeThrifty’s UpViral giveaway campaign:
1. Prospects must see and/or hear about your offer multiple times before they are ready to buy.
BeThrifty was smart to reuse the same images and copy over-and-over in their campaign–from the ads, landing page, share page and social share text. Everything must be familiar to your prospect before they trust in your brand enough to share their email address.
2. BeThrifty’s campaign success owes much to having their customer avatar nailed down.
The company knew that their Generation Z and late-Millennial audiences want to purchase from socially responsible companies that offer sustainable choices that align with their values. They reject fast fashion and appreciate the quality of vintage clothing. Gen Z in particular wants to wear one-of-a-kind items, which makes them big thrifting fans.
Read more: How to Conduct Audience Research That Helps Focus Your Giveaway
3. Make Connections between Your Audience and the Prize Offered
Georg was smart to notice that many of BeThrifty’s buyers were also into music festivals. Festivals are places to be seen and stand out, perfect for epic Instagram selfies. The high number of social shares and exceptional email open rates prove that tickets to the Frequency Festival were a perfect fit for BeThrifty’s audience.
Now that Georg and BeThrifty pulled off this remarkably successful campaign, the question is would they use UpViral again?
BeThrifty’s UpViral Experience
So would Georg and BeThrifty use UpViral in future campaigns? Definitely!
Georg says:
When you’re ready for increased revenues, thousands of new subscribers and social shares for your offer, plus email open rates that are through the roof like Georg and BeThrifty, you’re ready for UpViral!
Take UpViral for a 14-day trial run for only $1 now.
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