Building influencer partnerships gives you access to a huge audience. Imagine your favorite celebrity or tech YouTuber sharing a new product. You’re more likely to be interested in making a purchase!
If you’re a brand that’s curious about giveaways, using an influencer will help take your campaign to the next level — on the condition that you do it correctly.
The UpViral team was impressed with Lesna’s results. Since they launched, the company used our platform to generate more than 116,474 leads through contest and giveaway campaigns.
One of these campaigns focused on a tech company named iSTYLE, a premium Apple reseller based in Romania. After running a 10-day UpViral campaign for iStyle, from February 1 to 10, Lesna was able to get these results for them:
- 9,365 direct leads
- 3,312 referred leads
- For a total of 12,677 total leads
Here’s a screenshot of the results:
It’s also worth noting that people who entered the giveaway also registered for iSTYLE’s newsletter. This would allow iSTYLE to build a relationship with them as potential customers down the road.
Curious how Lesna did it? You can watch our full interview with Lesna’s co-founder Andrei Hutanu where he reveals their influencer strategy for successful giveaways.
We also provide a breakdown of their campaign below. Hopefully, it inspires you to start your own influencer giveaway no matter what goals you have for your business!
What Is Lesna and Why Did They Choose Upviral?
Lesna is the first platform in Romania that does contests and giveaways for brands that need a boost. Not just that, but Lesna has set themselves to be “creators of joy” by bringing exciting gifts and prizes to consumers across a wide range products and services.
Andrei told us that Lesna was looking for a tool that would allow them to promote sweepstakes where participants could increase their chances of winning. Moreover, that tool should be able to spark rapid shares and gain immediate traction. In other words, go viral.
UpViral was the perfect solution.
Some of our users have shared about tactics they’ve used before going for UpViral. However, in Andrei’s case, they went for UpViral right away.
According to him, “I learned how UpViral works, learned from the group, and then decided to use it. Now, it’s one of our tools in our marketing technology stack.”
Lesna’s Client iSTYLE and Their Campaign Goal
The Apple reseller iSTYLE hired Lesna to increase their email subscribers. This was their main goal. Based on the results generated through UpViral, we would say that the campaign turned out to be a great success. 12,677 leads in as little as 10 days would seem like an impossible goal for a lot of brands, but it’s definitely attained with the right system in place!
💎UpViral Tip: When setting up your UpViral campaign, take advantage of our Custom Action feature to reach any specific goal. Custom actions can get your participants to do anything in exchange for more points, such as completing a survey, writing a review, or following you on social media.
The Giveaway Prize
iSTYLE gave away 3 units of the MacBook Air, which was one of the products they sell in their store. This product was highly relevant to their tech audience, making it just the right prize for the giveaway. On top of this, a MacBook Air in and of itself is considered to be a “shiny object,” as Andrei puts it.
Here’s an image of the MacBook Airs held by iSTYLE’s chosen influencer Codin Maticiuc:
Andrei adds, “Even if the prizes cost a bit more, they bring results. The point is that iSTYLE had a good incentive and used a good influencer to promote the giveaway.”
We believe that the combination of the prize’s relevance, value, and the influencer’s involvement made it very attractive for the giveaway audience.
Working with Influencer Codin Maticiuc
Let’s talk about Lesna’s influencer strategy. Andrei shares how they search for influencers:
1 – First, they ask their client if they have connections on social media that can promote their campaign. Based on Lesna’s experience, they find that most brands they work with have at least one connection. The person needs to have a huge following.
2 – If the brand isn’t connected with any influencer, Lesna will find one on social media, particularly Instagram. Then they send a direct message to the influencer. According to Andrei, influencers with less than 50,000 followers are more likely to respond to collaboration requests than influencers with over 100,000 followers. At least this is what they’ve observed.
3 – Communicate the value of your product and explain your giveaway campaign. Since not every influencer they reach out to accepts their offer, they make sure to be completely transparent and tell them everything about the campaign. It’s also important to explain to an influencer how they can actually benefit by participating. Will they gain more followers? Grow their newsletters?
iSTYLE ended up partnering with Codin Maticiuc, a businessman, producer, and author who is also based in Romania. This meant that the giveaway audience knew him well!
Although Codin has over 300K followers (because earlier, we mentioned that aiming for influencers with less than 50K followers is better in terms of response rate) — Codin is known for doing giveaways often.
In the photo below, you can see that Lesna was highly strategic in their giveaway marketing materials. They made sure that their giveaway posts featured Codin to build hype and engagement.
Read this article: Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy for Your Giveaway Campaign
The Giveaway Opt-In Page
The giveaway campaign was found on Lesna’s web page so that every visitor would see it and be given the chance to enter. They used an UpViral widget to collect a visitor’s name, email address, and phone number on the opt-in page.
We asked Andrei why they included a field for participants’ phone numbers instead of just their names and emails. Because, most of the time, giveaway hosts use only the name and email fields on their opt-in pages.
Andrei mentioned that they think that collecting people’s phone numbers would be useful for Lesna’s future campaigns. He emphasizes that though they have their phone numbers, they’re not spamming them and are fully aware of data protection policies.
The rest of the opt-in page looks awesome. As soon as someone arrives on the page, they’ll be able to see the headline, “Joy makers Lesna & Codin Maticiuc & iSTYLE Apple Premium Reseller offers 3x Apple MacBook Air 13.3”, totaling €3,000.”
This headline is clear. It tells people who are the main partners in the campaign — Lesna, Codin, and iSTYLE — and the prize being offered, including the total value.
Aside from the headline, Lesna nailed the following:
- Hero shot that shows influencer Codin with the 3 MacBook Airs
- The specs of the prize
- Registration period and winner announcement date
- Full details of how the campaign works and important reminders
Please note that the opt-in page screenshot has the names of the winners, which weren’t shown on the live campaign. (This screenshot was taken when the campaign ended.)
The Giveaway Share Page
Once people entered their contact details to sign-up, Lesna led them to a second page (share page) where they could start sharing the giveaway with their friends on social media in exchange for points. They also had the option to simply copy the giveaway campaign share link and paste it anywhere.
Aside from the social share buttons on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, there were Custom Action buttons. These Custom Action buttons asked participants to follow Lesna, Codin, and iSTYLE on Instagram so they would earn an additional 9 points per action.
💎UpViral Tip: As you’ve learned earlier, you can take advantage of any Custom Action for goals, in addition to getting more leads for yourself or an agency client of yours. To get the best possible results, assign a higher number of points for actions that matter most to your business. This will convince people to complete these actions.
Below the share link and share buttons, Lesna placed a leaderboard to show who had the highest points so far.
Promoting the Campaign On Social Media
When it came to getting the word out, Lesna posted iSTYLE’s campaign on social media. For example, they created plenty of Instagram stories around the campaign and each story featured images of the prize, Codin and the prize, and iSTYLE.
Here’s one of the IG stories. (See the screenshot below)
It tagged both iSTYLE and Codin. This marketing strategy served to be highly beneficial for Codin himself because all he had to do was simply reshare the post with his followers!
“This makes the influencer’s job easier,” said Andrei.
Feel free to head over to Lesna’s IG story highlights to check out everything they’ve posted throughout the campaign. It’ll be great for inspiration.
Announcing the Winner
Lesna announced the giveaway winners on social media a day after the campaign ended, which was February 11th. The 3 winners also received an email. (Lesna created the email within the UpViral app, which was automatically sent to the winners.)
Takeaways and Final Thoughts
Influencer giveaways can be an excellent option to boost email list growth. Andrei’s success shows that partnering with influencers doesn’t have to be difficult.
To make it happen, it’s important to invest time in finding the right influencer and being completely transparent with them about your campaign. Having a tool like UpViral has also allowed Andrei to build a giveaway that has the potential to go viral.
UpViral has features other than Custom Actions that lets you do more. Want to generate 12,677 leads like Andrei, or even higher? Get started with UpViral today.
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