Snowboarding and surfing enthusiast Niek Theeboom is a co-founder of the Montem Agency. Montem is a 100% remote agency that specializes in working with eCommerce brands. After working for their now client, Bataleon snowboards for five years, the three partners in Montem struck out on their own about 18 months ago. The partners wanted the flexibility to enjoy travel and sports on their own schedule.
Since all three of Montem’s partners love action sports, they have built a name running growth campaigns for brands selling sports equipment online. One of their most successful strategies for their clients is running an UpViral campaign for every client.
Niek says:
Niek added:
That's when we started trying it for the other brands and saw similar results. So now it's just basically a standard campaign we run for each of the brands we work with.
That’s why UpViral was Niek’s first choice to promote a new snowboard collaboration between the Bataleon and YouTube influencer Gimbal God (aka Spencer Whiting.)
With a 14-day UpViral giveaway campaign Montem generated 30,791 leads for Bataleon and created an additional $34,000 in revenue within 60 days of closing the campaign. But what was unique about this UpViral campaign was that it ran simultaneously in Europe, the U.S. and Canada.
Three Simultaneous UpViral Campaigns in One
Instead of running a single campaign for the giveaway, Niek created three separate campaigns with identical ads, landing and share pages for Europe, Canada and the United States that ran at the same time.
This made it easy to add the leads to the correct email segment without having to sort them after the campaign ended. This was important because there were three regional Shopify stores supplying the prizes, so shipping from the correct location was imperative.
The tight ad targeting and the congruency of the campaign creatives produced a rock-bottom cost-per-lead of only €0.20 on the Meta platform and generated 30,791 leads across the three campaigns.
Here are the number of leads generated by each 14 day campaign.
This was not surprising to Niek because of Bataleon’s relatively small Canadian market.
Let’s take a closer look at what made these campaigns such a spectacular success.
Targeting a Very Specific Audience for the Campaign
Spencer Whiting (aka Gimbal God) produces YouTube content aimed at snowboarding and surfing fans. With over 41 million views to date, Gimbal God was a perfect fit for Bataleon to partner with on a new snowboard because of his existing audience base.
Niek says:
The collaboration with Gimbal God brought a lot of buzz to the giveaway because of his huge YouTube following. Bataleon piggybacked on his notoriety and collected leads from among Gimbal God’s followers.
If you can find the right influencer to work with, it can be a huge win-win for both of you. Interested in powering up your campaign by working with an influencer? Check out our YouTube interview with Andre Hutanu of the Lesna agency.
Campaign Branding, Graphics and Copy
To create excitement and generate leads for the new product, Niek and Montem prominently featured the collaboration branding in his landing page, share image and his ads.
Notice that the graphics, font and colors used are consistent between ads, landing page, and share image.
This is not by accident.
The reason there is so much consistency in the campaign ads and pages is to make prospective entrants feel they are in the right place when they click through from the ad to the landing page.
If people feel a disconnect when they click through from the ad to the lander, they’ll leave the page. People value their privacy, and if anything feels off, they won’t give up their email address.
The campaign copy is minimalistic by intention and uses industry-specific jargon to attract the right audience for the giveaway. The short copy and use of jargon speaks to the level of sophistication of the audience: hardcore snowboarders who take their gear seriously.
Niek got everything right here.
The conversion stats for the landing page are impressive, with a 42.3% sign up rate.
Clever Custom Actions Grow Bataleon’s Social Following
Niek gave participants the usual options to share the giveaway on Facebook, Messenger and by email. (The biggest point totals were also awarded for these actions.)
Because people are often reluctant to share giveaways on their social profiles, Niek made good use of UpViral’s Custom Actions feature.
UpViral Custom Actions lets you award points for completing actions you specify to earn extra giveaway entries. A few examples are to award points to complete a survey, write a review, or follow you on social media.
Here, Niek used UpViral Custom Actions to help grow Bataleon’s TikTok and YouTube subscribers. In a nice bit of marketing reciprocation, points were also awarded for following Gimbal God on YouTube.
In an unusual move, Niek also gave points for visits to Bataleon’s binding and boards website pages. There were fewer points awarded for these actions, but this Custom Action helped introduce new subscribers to Bataleon’s product line-up.
Visits to these pages were also pixeled for future retargeting campaigns.
A Jaw-Dropping Low Cost-Per-Lead with Paid Ads
Ads for the campaign did exceptionally well, thanks to the free leads generated by referrals. There were 30,791 total leads captured with an ad spend of only €3,420.
Even more impressive? The new lead value was €28,951 by the end of the campaign.
Niek didn’t rely on ad performance alone. He paired the ads with smart email marketing to bring in these numbers.
He said:
What we do is launch the campaign, then launch the Facebook ads, and then a couple of hours or even a day after the Facebook ads are launched, we also send an email to our existing list. We see that as soon as that campaign is sent out, the Facebook pixel optimizes really quickly.
Because we're sending a lot of people who are already engaged with the brand to the landing page, which trains the pixel to know, Okay, these are the persons we're looking for. So we see that as soon as we send out the email campaign, the cost per lead decreases significantly.
Because of huge number of referrals, the cost per new lead was only €0.20.
Outstanding Email Performance Revs Up Results
The giveaway announcement email sent to Bataleon’s existing regional lists totalling 58,233 subscribers had an impressive click-through rate of 9.2% and an open rate of 52.3% indicating high interest in the giveaway.
From those who opened this initial email, attributed sales revenue was €5116.
An urgency email sent to remind subscribers to enter the giveaway was sent to 53,290 subscribers. The click-through-rate on this email was 4.3% with an open rate of 41.1%. Revenue attributed to this email was €5,580, for a total of €10,996 for the UpViral campaign.
New leads were also sent emails previously sent to the existing list to familiarize them with Bataleon’s product offerings and prime them to buy in time for the next snowboarding season.
According to Niek:
This campaign was run mid-season even a little bit more towards the end of the (snowboarding) season. This meant that a lot of the new leads were simply not ready to buy a new snowboard yet. And there's a big chance that these people will still convert at the beginning of next season or through the next few seasons. Because that's what we see with selling snowboards.
It's a much, much longer funnel than selling a low ticket item because most of the snowboards we sell go for more than €500 euros. And yeah, because it's a high ticket item, people are really looking into it. You know, they're thinking about it for a long time. So there's a big chance that if we look at these new leads by the end of next season that we will see even bigger lead value from them.
Niek’s prediction came true. Sixty days past the end of the campaign, another €25k was attributed to new leads sent prior emails.
Post Campaign Emails and the Flash Sale
Winners were picked by UpViral’s internal picker to ensure the winners were from the correct geographic area and were over 18. After the winners were contacted, Niek announced a 48-hour flash sale email that included a 20% off coupon.
Something we've learned from the past is that you really want to center it around the main products you're selling. So we've centered it around the limited snowboard and binding pair we released. We gave a 20% discount on buying the snowboard set.
We released two emails about the flash sale. The first was the sale announcement and included the coupon. The final email was an urgency follow up email to make sure that they are aware that the flash sale ends very soon.
In the past, we’ve also run sitewide flash sales which were even more successful. Because if a subscriber can choose any of the products they like, they're much more likely to convert. With snowboards, it's actually quite a specific thing because of all the different riding styles.
So when we send a flash sale around one specific product, overall, we see less of an impact than when we do a sitewide sale.
Next, let’s look at the key takeaways from Niek’s terrific campaign for Bataleon.
Key Campaign Takeaways
Your Copy Must Appeal to the Right Audience
Niek kept all the campaign copy short so it would only appeal to avid snowboarders. There was little information on the lander other than the brands involved and an email-only sign up.
Niek says:
So what we've learned from the past campaigns we run is that for signup pages it's essential to keep it straightforward, to keep it simple. Don't distract people with a lot of copy, don't distract people with a lot of design elements. Make it straight to the point.
By keeping the copy short, and adding industry-specific jargon, it appeals only to those who have genuine interest in the product. That makes for great conversions and lower ad costs.
Use Best UX Practices in Page Design
Don’t ignore page design as an important conversion factor.
Going the extra mile and creating a visually-stunning landing page doesn’t mean that it will convert better than a simple page. Instead, focus on proven conversion elements like timers, and landing pages with above-the-fold opt-in fields.
Niek shared:
We went with a very simple page, designed for UX best practices like a timer showing up above the fold. Another thing, which we learned from the past, is that we want to have a sign up form rather than a pop up. This way people can sign up straight from the page.
Another thing we did was make sure that you can sign up straightaway when it's loading on desktop and also mobile. If people cannot sign up above the fold on the full page, then you can really see the conversion rate drop.
Simple changes like these to your landing pages can make a huge difference in your conversion rates.
Forget Perfection - Get the Campaign Up and Running
While Bataleon’s design team created several variations of the same pages and ads, they decided not to split test campaign pages.The pages the design team liked most were the ones Montem went with.
This is an important lesson: it’s better to get a campaign up and running than spending weeks trying to make it perfect before launching.
Get your campaign up, tweak it as you go and apply what you learn to your next campaign.
Be Systematic in Your Approach
While you might think you need to hit every social platform hard to get out the word about your giveaway, Niek advises not to go there. It can do more harm than good.
We did some stories on our Instagram about the giveaway going live. And that's about it. It’s really the main channel we use because it's a giveaway.
People can receive a giveaway as a spammy kind of thing if you push it too hard. So we're a little bit cautious with really going all out on our organic channels.
Focus on your most important channels and ignore the rest.
What Niek Would Do Differently Next Time
Now that this UpViral campaign has been so successful for Bataleon, plans are in the works to run an identical UpViral campaign next year with a different product.
Even though this year’s Bataleon campaign was a huge success, it doesn’t mean that Niek is content to rest on his laurels.
Next time out he wants to test:
- Adding more creatives and copy for Meta ads
- Text-only emails for urgency
- Running the campaign for a longer period (3-4 weeks vs. the two weeks this campaign ran)
- Advertising on other platforms like TikTok
- A campaign for an unreleased product, to build buzz ahead of its launch
That’s a great lesson for anyone using UpViral.
Study your campaigns in depth; celebrate your wins and decide what you can do better next time. Don’t be afraid to test and tweak where you see fit.
Niek & Montem Create an UpViral Campaign for Every Client - Shouldn’t You?
You’ve just read about the enormous success Niek from Montem Agency had with their UpViral Bataleon campaign. Montem loves UpViral so much that they use it to get fast, super-targeted leads for all their clients.
If you run an agency, creating a referral marketing contest with UpViral is a sure way to grow your clients list, social following and sales.
Creating beautiful pages is a snap with UpViral’s drag & drop editor. Easy integration with most autoresponders lets you automatically import new leads for your clients. Plus, UpViral’s built-in analytics let you share results with your clients without any complicated calculations.
Why not try a 14-day trial of UpViral for only $1? If Montem can get results like these in just two weeks with UpViral there is no reason you can’t either! Especially now that you have read their incredible UpViral case study!
