How a Gourmet Food Company Captured 1,488 Emails
December 5, 2014 | By Lauren Wilson | 3 Comments">3 Comments
Do you have a few social media channels? Looking to bring your followers from Pinterest over to your Facebook, or Twitter followers to Instagram? Whether you’re trying to grow your fan base, or just want to take advantage of your social channels, this blog post is for you. Read on to find out how a small specialty food company based in Prosser, Washington captured 1,488 emails by promoting their Holiday Gift Basket Giveaway on their social media channels.
Chukar Cherries is a specialty food company that began in 1988 as a family farm and orchard in Washington state’s cherry-growing region. They focus on transforming locally grown cherries and berries into all-natural, gourmet gifts and confections. Their most popular treats are their naturally dried cherries covered in unique chocolate blends, but they also offer savory sauces, preserves, pie fillings, baked goods, and even a no sugar added product line.
Setting Up the Contest
Meet Beth Cole, Communication Coordinator for Chukar Cherries. Like many companies, she knows that the holidays are a great time to run contests to gain new email leads and grow her Facebook fan base. After trying several other apps, and not achieving the goals she had in mind with her contest, she tried a free trial with Heyo, and was hooked.
“I loved Heyo because it was so user-friendly, and the contest was quick and easy to create. The feature I appreciated the most was the drag and drop editing. When we’ve used other apps in the past, we’ve had to have a designer create the graphics, but with Heyo, I was able to create the contest from start to finish on my own. “
She used Heyo’s most popular contest template – the Sweepstakes template. Remember that Beth was looking to grow her email list and fan base on Facebook. With Facebook’s recent removal of the like-gate, and rules about giving a prize for liking a page, many people are struggling with this. Beth, very tactfully, encouraged her fans to like the page and share the contest by saying, “Enter to win a basket of chocolates from Chukar Cherries! Then, like us on Facebook and share with your friends so they can enter too.”
Promoting the Contest
As I mentioned before, Beth collected emails from her followers simply by promoting her contest across her social channels, and sending an email to her existing email list. This plan is the best way to get your contest exposed to all of your followers. Here are some of the places she promoted:
Promoting your campaign over Facebook is obviously a no-brainer, but it’s crucial to the success of your contest. Beth focused on posting to the timeline while the contest was running. She created three custom link-share posts. One on the day the contest was published, another in the middle of the contest, and one more the day the contest ended to remind fans to enter. Below is the initial promotional post. If you’re not sure about how to create a good looking post like this one, check out The Anatomy of a Link Share Post.
Instagram & Pinterest
Along with promoting to Facebook, Beth took advantage of Instagram and Pinterest to promote the Chukar Cherries Holiday Chocolate Giveaway. This very simple strategy pulled her followers from Pinterest and Instagram into her Facebook page. Some followers on those channels, may not have liked Chukar Cherries on Facebook before the contest.
Beth used the same image to post to her social channels as she used as a hero image in the actual contest. It’s important to note that, instead of the Facebook URL to the contest, she included the Smart URL that Heyo gave her when she published the campaign.
Just as simple as posting to Instagram, Beth posted to Pinterest as well. She used the same image, as well as the Smart URL. For more information on using Pinterest for business, check out my article Pinterest for Business.
Chukar Cherries is also on Twitter, so Beth posted her photo and Smart URL to their Twitter page. Notice that Beth used the same photo that she used in one of her Facebook posts to keep consistency between her social channels. She posted to Twitter a few times through the contest to keep reminding her followers there to enter.
Along with promoting to their social channels, Beth also sent an email to Chukar Cherries current email list. The contest lasted exactly one week, which is the optimal amount of time that a contest should run! When the contest was over, it had captured 1,488 emails, and the page had gotten 310 new page likes. Chukar Cherries now has a total of 6,007 fans, and the Holiday Chocolate Giveaway got 25% of those fans email addresses to use for the holidays!
Try it out!
Do you have social media channels that you could promote to? Interested in purely organic reach? Click here to start your free trial with Heyo! No credit card required, just enter your name, email, and password to get started creating awesome contests.
Meet Lauren Wilson
Lauren Wilson is a Technical Writer and Customer Engagement Specialist at Heyo. She graduated from Virginia Tech in May 2014 with a degree in English/Professional Writing and Creative Writing.
