It might not seem like 350 new leads is a lot in 25 days, but in a unique and small niche, it certainly is.  Would you be happy if you added 350 new subscribers to your email list in less than a month? I know I would be.

How did we do it?  The simple answer is using a marketing tool called Upviral.

Upviral is touted as “the world’s most complete viral referral system.”  In other words, Upviral uses the marketing tactic of running a sweepstakes/contest and leverages word of mouth to help spread the word and get more leads.  As a matter of fact, to date, Upviral has collected 13,857,959 new leads for businesses.

Let’s face it.  People LOVE to win stuff!

Here’s how Upviral works.  You pick something that you are willing to give away for free.  It must be something that your audience will want to win. This is the way we set up our campaign:

Grand Prize:  (3) Healing Sessions with our client  (Cost:  My client’s time)

2nd Prize:  Access to a Pre-recorded Live presentation (Cost: $0 plus we turned this into a paid product)

3rd Prize:  Autographed book (Cost:  $75.00)

Everyone wins:  Free Ebook  (Cost:  Time it took to produce it but now it’s a lead magnet)

For our Upviral campaign, we gave away (1) grand prize, (3) 2nd prize winners, (5) 3rd prize winners and EVERYONE received the free eBook.

Once we had the campaign strategy outlined, we went to work building a landing page to explain and sell the giveaway.  In order to participate, you must register for the giveaway. This is the first way you get a new lead. But here is where the magic happens.  Once you have registered, you are directed to a thank you page and here is where you can increase your chances of winning.

On the thank you page, you have all Upviral’s social sharing options.  This enables your new lead to help spread the word about your giveaway, ultimately resulting in even more leads.  But what is the incentive for your new lead to help you spread the word?

Because the more your new lead shares the giveaway, the more points they earn.  The more points they earn, the more chances they have to win. Upviral is great because you can reward different actions with different amounts of points.  We, of course, gave a person the most amount of points if someone they referred actually registered. But everyone still got points just for sharing.

Once someone registered for the giveaway, we set up an email campaign to encourage participants to start sharing with their friends and family.  I love Upviral because they have a unique tracking link that makes it super easy for people to share and track their referrals. To make it even easier, we integrated Upviral with ActiveCampaign and the unique tracking link would automatically display in an email for each user.  People didn’t have to remember what their sharing link was because we gave it to them in the email.

Upviral also has a leaderboard so we were able to see, at any time, who was sharing the most and getting the most referrals.  Winners can be picked in a variety of ways: random selection, selection based on number of points, or handpicked winners. For our campaign, we chose random.  But even though it was random, remember that someone with 100 points had 90 more chances to win than someone with 10 points. Every point = one chance to win.

You might be wondering how we drove people to the landing page.  If you have a large email list, you will most certainly want to advertise the giveaway with those individuals.  We also used our social networking channels and ran $100 worth of Facebook ads to drive cold traffic. All in all, the majority of the leads were new leads.

Running a giveaway is fun!  If done right, it can produce a lot of leads quickly.  But more than anything, it just plain feels good to award winners with something they want.  In our campaign, everyone was a winner, but the lucky ones were thrilled with their prizes.

What creative and fun ways have you used to get lots of leads for your business?

Need some help running a marketing campaign for your heart-centered business?  Amazing OBM has a full team waiting to support your marketing efforts and help you spread the word, create an impact, and get more leads/customers.