How to Increase Your Sales Using Giveaways and Presales
Guys June has been cray. Crazy good though because it’s been super busy. Not only was I launching Lucrative Leathercraft last week, but I also launched my new leather handbag line for www.MarySavel.com.
So I want to talk about how I did a giveaway and boosted my email list and relaunched a new leather line and made sales along the way. Thats a lot of “ands”!
If you’re someone who is struggling to get your business off the ground this post is for you.
In this blog post i’m going to show you
How to build your email list by doing a giveaway
How to presell a new leather product and
How to make sales without spending time and money on inventory.
So upfront I want to give you my results: By implementing the below 4 step strategy, in one week I made over $1500 in sales and gained 1350 new subscribers from my giveaway. I did not have any inventory and did not have to spend any of my own money on materials for my inventory.
STEP ONE - WARM YOUR AUDIENCE AND TEASE NEW LEATHER PRODUCTS
If you’re going to be rolling out a new product you want them to be warm, not cold . You dont’ want to have a list that hasn’t heard from you in months and then all of the sudden, they get an email from you saying, buy my new leather handbag.
instead of doing that, send them a few emails leading up to the sale nd giveaway, let them know what you’ve been working on, give them some behind the scene sneak peeks, let them know why they should be excited about this new product.
When you do this, two things happen. You build anticipation with your audience and you get an opportunity to get initial feedback on your new leather handbag.
When you post on instagram people should be commenting, liking and dming you about your product. They should be asking you when it’s available, when they can get their hands on it. That’s when you know your audience is warmed up and they’re ready for your offer.
How do you warm up your audience?
You post on instagram, on facebook, on pinterest or wherever else you’re building a following. You’re sending emails to your subscribers. You might be blogging or vlogging. And you’re building interest and anticipation around whatever it is that you’re about to launch and announce. You always want to be sure it is clear to your audience, what’s in it for them. Spell it out.
Things I would do differently next time
Next time I will warm them up even more. I think they were like room temperature this time and thats on me. Next time, I will focus on talking more about why i’m so excited about what i’m making and whats in it for them. I really want to play into the where they’re struggling or having pain (for my customer, it’s her boring ass commute, or not having any exitement or adventure in her life) and how I an help (I can help make even a boring commute to work, and exciting adventure with the right handbag).
And I would do more video.
STEP TWO - HOST A PRE-PRESALE GIVEAWAY
So i knew that I was going to be rolling out my new line, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to do a giveaway right before the launch. Giveaways are amazing to do because…
They boost your email list
Get people excited and energized
It allows you to introduce the new product
Give back to your audience
Validate your leather product
Collect warm leads
Also, people love free stuff!
And they’re easy and free (besides the prize) to do. I did the giveaway mainly as a marketing vehicle and to boost my email list.
How do you do a giveaway?
I announced the giveaway a week or 2 beforehand and told my followers to keep on the look out. On the day the giveaway opened, I announced it to my email list and on social media and posted about it everywhere I could. I continued to promote the giveaway across all channels and platforms during the giveaway.
On the last day of the giveaway I did a big push by mentioning it multiple times on social media, and emailing my list twice in once day and letting them know that this was their last chance.
The great thing about a giveaway is you really can’t talk about free stuff, too much.
And as a result I got over 1350 new subscribers onto my email list.
Things I would do differently next time
I would only ship my giveaway within the USA. While i’m not against shipping internationally, right now, i’m not trying to target people out side of the USA. I want to focus more on people within the US mainly for shipping and logistical reasons.
I also would not tag my giveaway as #giveaway on instagram. This attracts those folks who will sign up for anything whether they like it or not. And the point of doing a giveaway is to get warm leads: people who are actually interested in your products.
STEP THREE - SALES FUNNEL OR GIVEAWAY ENTRANTS
Some people call this a sales funnel, it can also be called a nurture sequence, but basically, you want to reach out to all of the participants of the giveaway, that did not win.
Normally, new subscribers would have signed up on my website and go through my welcome sales funnel that way, but since these guys are coming in at a different entry point, you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to serve them.
How do I create a sales funnel for giveaway entrants
It’s pretty much the same process of creating a welcome sales funnel for new subscribers. You want to send them 3-5 emails over a few days or weeks introducing them to your brand, what makes you stand out and special, how you can help and serve them and why they need what you have.
You also want to give them some sort of thank you in the very first email for participating in the giveaway.
You could say something like,
“Thank you so much for participating in my giveaway.
Unfortunately, this time, you did not win. BUT I do appreciate you taking the time to participate.
I appreciate you so much, that I’d love to offer you a 15% coupon code for playing along. Use code ‘giveawaycoupon” at check out. (make sure you use it soon, because it expires in 1 week)
Things I would do differently
Because I was doing too much at once, with the www.lucrativeleathercraft.com launch AND launching my new www.marysavel.com line, I’d like to go back and up the value in the sale funnel for giveaway entrants email. I was doing too much at once, and I think I can craft some better messaging.
I also would love to add a video for a personal touch.
STEP FOUR - PRESALE FOR ALL
After the giveaway has ended you want to roll right into your presale. Doing this allows you to take advantage of the marketing momentum and all of the promotion that you’ve been doing and hit your customers with yet another awesome offer.
That awesome offer, is the presale.
What is a presale?
A presale is basically when you offer a discount on product orders in exchange or a longer leadtime. In my case, my customer was getting a really good deal (25% off) any handbag order which wouldn’t ship for 3 weeks. This 3 weeks allows me time to purchase materials and make the handbags. The book industry uses this tactic as well. They say “preorder my book now” and they do this so that they know how much interest there is and how many books to print.
It’s a great way to validate a new product and not make a product that people do not want to buy.
Why do you do a presale?
Presales are great, because you don’t have to create inventory upfront which saves a lot of time that could be wasted if no one orders.
You don’t have to buy materials up front when you do a presale. You’re using the money you made on these orders to buy your materials. This is great if you don’t have a lot of money yourself to get started in your business.
When you do a presale, you’re able to validate your product. If no one buys during your presale, consider yourself lucky that you didn’t spend the time and money creating the inventory.
If no one buys, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board. Ask yourself, “Is it my product? Is it my marketing? What went wrong and how can I fix it?”
How do you do a presale?
Like with everything else, you want to announce your presale a week or so ahead of time. I like to create all of my emails and social posts ahead of time so that when the time comes, I can just roll it out and not have to worry about the content under pressure. I always announce the presale on the day that it opens as well as the day that it closes. And then I email and post about it on social media multiple times inbetween.
You might feel like you’re talking about it too much, or that your followers and subscribers are tired of reading your emails about the presale, but the truth is, rarely are your followers/subscribers seeing every email and every post about this presale. Rarely is your customer that zero’ed in on everything that you’re doing. So thats why you want to make sure you’re giving everyone a fair chance and opportunity.
What i’d do differently next time
Next time I will blog more and do some live video of me or someone else wearing the handbags on the street. Anything that you can do to show the product in real life with real people using it allows your customer to put themselves in their shoes and imagine themselves using your product.
So all in all, i’ll be doing this entire process again and again and look forward to seeing my email list grow as well as my sales results. When you plan out your launches, sales and giveaways ahead of time, it allows you to put the strategy in place and craft messages that your ideal customer needs to hear from you in order to buy.
If you would like to increase your email list and get sales without making inventory first, sign up here for the Lucrative Leathercraft waitlist, or take the quiz to find out what kind of leathercrafter you are.