COCONUT BOWLS CASE STUDY
See how this eCommerce store that sells coconut bowls generated 41,820 emails, 37,703 new followers and 15,536 social shares from a single Instagram giveaway.
Replicate this campaign and similar results for your business!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Coconut Bowls, a Shopify ecommerce store that sells coconut bowls, was able to generate over 41k emails in 4 weeks using a viral giveaway that cost them less than $1,000 to run.
Building an engaged audience around a household product is tough. Getting people to share, like, engage, and get updates on kitchen products like bowls is no easy task for a marketer.
But that is why Coconut Bowls is different, in this case study we go in depth about how this brand generated a huge amount of buzz and made their product extremely interesting and unique.
Let’s show you how to use the power of social sharing, referral loops, and engaging content. We will focus on how they used an Instagram giveaway to achieve this.
CAMPAIGN REACH
Reached over 222,263 pageviews
NEW FOLLOWERS
Added 37,703 new social followers
CONVERSION RATE
The landing page converted at 18%
EMAIL LEADS
Generated 41,820 new email leads
THE CAMPAIGN GOAL
The goal was to generate emails, social awareness, engagement, and sales about this unique product. Not only that, but Coconut bowls was also looking to generate some awesome user generated content!
Instagram has played a huge part in growth of Coconut Bowls and their mission for a sustainable future. Getting people on social to share their store and brand was a huge factor. We will go into more incentivized sharing methods later in this case study.
That’s why an Instagram giveaway was a good place to start when looking for growth opportunities for the brand.
The story of this brand is just as important as the product so rewarding people for creating content and using the product was another by-product of the giveaway. User generated content has been a key focus for marketing the company.
ABOUT THE BRAND
Coconut Bowls are more than just a brand – it’s a movement for global sustainability. Since 2016, they have been repurposing coconut shells into usable household products.
They handcraft 100% natural products from reclaimed waste. Coconut shells have traditionally been burned or discarded as landfill. Coconut Bowls reclaim over 10,000 discarded coconuts a month.
Their hero products are coconut bowls made from discarded coconut shells, while their range extends to wooden cutlery, coconut candles, bamboo straws, sustainable bags and a cook book.
Coconut Bowls target audience
The brands target market is primarily women aged 25 – 44 who strive to live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle for themselves, their families, and the planet.
Marketing tactics they employ
- Use Instagram to share their brand story.
- Use influencers to create engaging content (Can also use giveaway bonus actions for this).
- Capitalize on trending topics (Acai Bowls).
- Run Instagram giveaways to build awareness, email list, social followers and user generated content (see examples below).
- Working with customers to produce content to use in Facebook and Instagram ads.
COCONUT BOWLS FACT SHEET
Type → eCommerce
CMS → Shopify
Founded → 2016
Industry → Sustainable kitchen products
Campaign Type → Instagram giveaway
Website → CoconutBowls.com
They have run multiple giveaways with VYPER, each with improving results.
A few standout facts that make this eCommerce store successful (you can take some of these points and apply them to your store):
- Invested in offering a great prize for their audience
- Created and used great content to promote their brand
- Leverage Instagram and social sharing to the max
- Leverage trendy eating habits and diets (Acai bowls)
HOW TO RUN A GIVEAWAY
The strategy of giveaways to build an email list is nothing new. Large brands have been using this tactic for years. Where Coconut Bowls really excelled was leveraging their giveaway on social media.
A number of things had to take place for this brand to generate over 15,536 social shares and engagements. Setting up the giveaway, running, and marketing the campaign was another thing.
Here’s a quick overview of what you’re going to need to generate tens of thousands of emails, followers, shares and $$$$$ using an Instagram giveaway.
🔧️ THE TOOLS
When it comes to the key tools you will need to pull this off, there is no doubt, VYPER is #1. Then you will want to also have an email service provider like Mailshake or Klaviyo. These will be important later on.
🎁️ THE PRIZE
Choosing a prize can make or break your contest. Coconut Bowls picked a very relevant prize. Their customers loved using their product to make acai bowls. In order to do that, you need a Vitamix. So they offered that in their giveaway along with their own products.
😬️ THE SEED AUDIENCE
Your giveaway or contest is not just going to magically collect emails, followers, and engagements. You need to get the ball rolling. Leverage your own email list, followers, network and website to get your first few entrants, and from there, the referrals and shares will start to work their magic.
🤸♀️️ ENGAGEMENT
Once you have launched your giveaway you are halfway there. Use social posts, emails, and remarketing campaigns to get your contestants coming back to refer, share, and engage with your campaign.
Above is an example of the VYPER contest page. You can see that Coconut Bowls had a lot of social engagements added as bonus actions in their giveaway.
The real benefit to these bonus actions is to incentivize people to do things that usually happen organically. All these actions tell the social platforms that this content is good and it should be shown to more people.
We would like to put emphasis on how many of them are sharing or tagging friends on social. This was a key success factor in the campaign. Without the the shares and referrals it’s hard to scale a giveaway.
So make sure you incentivize your sharing for the best results. Ideally pick the channel that your brand is strong in. In this study it was Instagram and Facebook.
⚡️
WANT TO CREATE A SIMILAR CAMPAIGN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
Check out VYPER for free or sign up to a live webinar to see how the tool works and all ways you can use it to build contests, giveaways, sweepstakes, leaderboards and reward programs.
- Build your email list & website traffic
- Increases social followers & engagements
- Improve your paid ads social proof
- Incentivizes sharing + referrals
- Collects user generated content
- Have multiple reward options = milestone, placement, & random
- Generate reviews & feedback
BUILDING AN INSTAGRAM GIVEAWAY!
Building an on-brand landing page for your giveaway should be easy. Here’s how to create a giveaway designed to convert and grow your audience.
In this example, Coconut Bowls decided to use the VYPER landing page. It was easy to setup and already optimized for conversions.
All they did was add some images that showed off the prize and their product. It was nothing too complicated and right to the point.
As soon as a visitor landed on the page, they knew exactly what they could win if they invest the time into entering and collecting points.
Using the VYPER landing page allows brands to get good looking giveaway or contest campaigns up and running fast. There are also a lot of features that you can enable or disable to help with conversions.
- FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) popup
- Count down timer
- CTA button styling
- Show rewards on the landing page or not
- Adjust header image, overlay, and fading
See an example and walkthrough of the landing page below. Here is also a live demo of the giveaway.
You can see from the video and demo page that they kept the value proposition basic. They had a great prize that talked to their target market and attracted the right people.
What do your ideal customers like doing while using your product? Is there a complimenting product they like? Is there a specific place they use your product?
Creating a clear prize with a high perceived value paired with clear instructions on how to win it, simplicity goes a long way.
Below are 5 key conversion aspects of the contest building process you need to focus on to get the best possible results from your hosted partner giveaway.
🎁️
PICKING THE PRIZE
Make sure you pick a prize that is unique and has a high perceived value to your target audience. This will improve the quality of your leads. Give out your product, experiences, trips, other brand products, etc.
📸️
LEVERAGE IMAGE
A picture will do a much better job at explaining the value of your product. Make sure you have some nice images or even video that shows off your product to encourage people to sign up.
👩💻️
THE CONTEST DISPLAY
The VYPER landing page is the easiest way to run your giveaway, but the widget will help convert more website traffic while the embed option gives you a huge amount of customization.
🎉️
BRAND YOUR CAMPAIGN
It’s important to use the same colors, images, fonts, and styles as your website and brand. This will make your giveaway and campaign look a lot more natural.
Once you have created your landing page, make sure to share it with a few co-workers and friends to see if they understand what you are trying to do and what the benefit to them (giveaway contestant) is.
Once they understand the value you are offering, it is much easier to ask them to enter your giveaway, share your brands content, engage with your social content, and refer their friends.
Before you launch, think: Does the effort = the value of the reward?
For example, am I going to spend 5 hours trying to win a $5 gift card? Probably not.
MARKETING AN INSTAGRAM GIVEAWAY
Marketing is a key success factor in most viral giveaways. Below are some key marketing strategies that you can deploy to improve your campaign results.
It’s important to not only build an awesome giveaway, but also have a kickass marketing strategy to get your campaign in front of the the right people.
Focusing on the right channels and leveraging the share is an easy way to get your brand in front of more people. That’s definitely what Coconut Bowls focused on and it paid off with their top bonus actions being “share on Facebook” and “tag your friends on Instagram”.
If you do not have a huge social following. The next easiest way to kickstart a giveaway is through your immediate network: your email list!
In this case study, Coconut Bowls had relied on their Instagram the most to get where they are.
In the case study interview, they stated that “We’re very fortunate to receive so much support from our customers. Since day one, our customers have done a lot of our marketing for us by sharing our story”.
One awesome tactic this brand used was encouraging people to create with our Coconut Bowls on social media.
How can you incorporate this into your marketing? What do your customers do with your product? And how can you encourage them to share it on social media? There is a little hint below. ?
Once the UGC (user generated content) ball gets rolling, your brand could have customers posting like Coconut Bowls. Jake commented in the case study interview that, “Every day they have hundreds of people from within their community sharing posts about their brand – this has allowed them to grow organically”.
A few other marketing strategies that contributed to the success of this giveaway…
GROWTH ACTION #1
Email your list
It’s super important to start your giveaway with a big bang. The easiest way to do that is to share it with your immediate audience. Sharing it with a your email list (people who are already familiar with Waiakea) are much more willing to share your giveaway with their friends, family, and co-workers.
Not only that, but they are more than likely to hang around people similar to themselves so you are still attracting new leads and customers.
GROWTH ACTION #2
Get partners or influencers to send out an email or social post
The larger your starting seed audience, the better. If you can get your brand partners/friends to share the giveaway with their list, social, or website it will kickstart your campaign.
This strategy highly depends on your network so it’s not for every brand. No need to worry if you don’t, there are plenty of other methods.
GROWTH ACTION #3
Get your followers to comment & engage on your giveaway posts
Organic reach is rubbish on Facebook and Instagram nowadays, but you can beat the system with engagement.
The more comments, likes and shares a post has, the more organic reach it will receive. The below post was used to promote a giveaway. The more likes share and comments you can get on this “giveaway” post, the more people you can convince to enter.
GROWTH ACTION #4
Leverage video and stories
Posting to your social media accounts is great, but you can’t post the same thing every day. It starts to get a little old and annoying. Try and post to your wall/feed every 4-5 days.
What Coconut Bowls did was leverage Instagram and Facebook stories. This way they could post multiple times a day.
One thing to keep in mind is that you can currently only add a link to your giveaway if you have over 10k followers.
GROWTH ACTION #5
Maximize the opportunity to share
It’s important to get as many shares and referrals as possible, this is by far the most effective way to scale you giveaway. A few ways to do this are:
- Have steps on your landing page on how the contest works
- Add messaging on the thank you page to remind people to share
- Add a reminder to share in all emails
- Send update and engagement emails every 3-4 days
THE GIVEAWAY RESULTS
There is a lot we can learn from the marketing tactics and results that Coconut Bowls generated from their VYPER giveaway. Below are all the statistics & results from the giveaway campaign so you can see exactly what made an impact in their giveaway and how much it benefited their business.
“The VYPER bonus actions really helped expose our giveaway to more people. “
This giveaway crushed the social and email collection metrics, but this is no fluke. This is actually the second time Coconut Bowls has run a giveaway. This one was much more focused on being an Instagram contest, but we can still learn a lot from the metrics that they were kind enough to share.
Engagement is key
You can see from these results that it was really the engagement that made this giveaway so successful. On average, everyone who entered completed at least 1 or 2 bonus actions.
So from everyone who entered the Coconut Bowls giveaway, an email address was collected along with a new social follower or social share.
Run multiple giveaways
If you want to focus on all your channels, host a giveaway every few months for each specific channel or rotate the bonus actions during the giveaway.
The compounding effect of running contests will help you launch to a larger and larger seed audience each time.
This was Coconut Bowls second giveaway with VYPER and every giveaway has had increased results.
You can see the most important part of the giveaway is the first 1-2 days. This is when the giveaway is shared with the brands seed audience. From there, the sharing and referrals kick in to generate an ongoing flow of traffic to the giveaway.
The bonus actions
The shining start of this marketing campaign was the bonus actions which drove a number of results.
- New followers & subscribers on social profiles
- Social traffic from shares
- New awareness from tagging friends on Instagram
- User generated content from people uploading images and video
- New customers as the posts that were asked to share were promotional posts to purchase
So not only were the bonus actions being used to generate shares and awareness about the giveaway, they were also being used to promote an offer that they had running at the same time. This can also be used to increase the engagement on the brands ads.
You can see below that “BONUS” in the bonus action title. These were added at a later date to keep people engaged with the giveaway and coming back.
Once every 3-5 days, introduce a new bonus action for people to complete. Then email everyone in the contest that there is a new bonus action. This gets people excited and re-engages them after they have already signed up.
You can see that the most successful giveaway bonus action was the follow us on Instagram.
Coconut Bowls also used this opportunity to build another Instagram as VYPER lets you add as many accounts as you like to a single giveaway. This makes Facebook and Instagram giveaway’s much easier to run as you can share the followers between brands.
CONVERTING YOUR LEADS
Once you have collected all these new followers and email leads, the next natural step is to monetize them. Coconut Bowls did something extremely clever in this giveaway.
They not only setup educational and value based email drips to engage their new leads and share their story, but they also used those bonus actions to get people sharing a 20% OFF discount they were running.
By getting more shares and awareness on the promotion they were running at the same time, they were able to monetize their giveaway right away and not have to wait for people to convert via email.
Think about how you can get a direct response revenue funnel our of your giveaway.
A few options are:
- Add a signup discount (Get $5 OFF when you sign up to the giveaway)
- Give a discount in the confirmation email
- Have a milestone reward that unlocks $20 off when they collect 500 points.
You do not have to wait until the campaign ends to start generating revenue from your giveaway. The best strategy is to do both. Monetize the giveaway while it is running and nurture those leads after.
Here are a few more tips to improve your email marketing campaigns.
Create a compelling title for the winner announcement email
Writing something like “The Winner of Our Giveaway….”. This will get better open rates!
Leads will not convert right away, be patient
Make your email drips 2-3 months long. Clean your list of non-openers every 4-8 months to keep open rates high.
Keep entrants engaged the entire time during the giveaway
Send emails to your list during and after the giveaway. Get people used to opening your emails.
Types of Emails to Send
Your lead nurture email drip would look and include emails like the ones below. It’s important to have a variety of emails to keep people engaged and wanting to open your next email.
Sending emails 2-4 days apart is a good rule of thumb for the first few weeks. Then after that once every 1-2 weeks is good.
Giveaway Follow-up Email
It’s important to provide value to your leads, then pitch for the sale after the lead feels like you have given them something and they know you a little better.
We usually suggest you include a sales pitch email ever 2-3 emails you send out.
The winner announcement email is also a good time to pitch a sale as you have got such a high open rate. You can see this in the example email we sent for one of our contests.
This action packed email should include a number of things.
The winners list
A free prize (content, access to something, discount)
An reminder of what your brand does
Preparation that they will be getting more emails from you
An easy opt-out if they don’t want emails from you
Request to whitelist your email (move to primary folder)
More Email Ideas
- Announcement of winner & runner up (them).
- Positive customer stories and use cases of your product.
- Answer FAQ’s about your product or service.
- Send exclusive offers for people who entered the giveaway only (sales, product announcement, bundle sells, open the box, pre-orders).
- “Trust builder” emails such as screenshots of social proof (Facebook posts, reviews etc).
- Share you top blog posts.
- Offer something of value. A free content such as checklists, guides, or downloads.
- Offer them free shipping.
- Fun facts, stats, and knowledge about your product or industry.
- Send them more content from your blog (tips, funny, curated content they will like).
- Testimonials, publicity & social validation.
- Send buy 1 get 1 free offer.
- Debunk risks or objections that customer might have. For example, answer the question that usually stops people from buying.
- Link roundups from the top blogs or writers in your niche.
- Send discounts or give the product away for free if it has a refillable aspect to the product (For example, Waiakea gives anyone who refers 2 people a free case of water as they know they will need to buy more if they like it).
- If they have not converted by now you can start giving $ or % discounts.
Announce that you also have a referral program.
We help brands build viral contests, giveaways, and reward programs. Create a FREE account (no credit card required) today to test out some of our amazing campaigns and features!
Use the short code to dynamically populate someone’s name as the “runner up” or “random winner” this makes everyone feel like a winner.
Offer those winners a $20 gift card, but have conditions that they must spend over $50 to use it.
LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS
To help you run a successful giveaway campaign we have outlined the top takeaways and learnings in a question and answer style with the founder of Coconut Bowls Jake Mckeon.
If you have any additional questions you would like answered about this case study or running a giveaway like this yourself, just add them in the comments at the bottom of this page and we will add them to this section.
Q&A WITH JAKE
Why did you decide to run a contest?
Contests are a fun way to engage our community, and offer them a prize that may usually be out of reach. It also builds our email list, allowing us to have a deeper relationship with people, and take them on a journey so they learn what we’re doing behind the brand.
Q&A WITH JAKE
What has been your top converting marketing channel to date?
Instagram. We’ve very fortunate to receive so much support from our customers.
Since day one, our customers have done our marketing for us, by sharing our story and what they’re creating with our Coconut Bowls on social media.
Every day we have hundreds of people from within our community share about our brand – which has allowed us to grow largely organically..
Q&A WITH JAKE
What prize did you offer and why?
Vitamix and Coconut Bowls prize pack.
The most popular way for our customers to use our Coconut Bowls is for smoothie bowls and nice cream (an ice-cream like dessert, made from frozen bananas).
A Vitamix is a high quality blender that makes making either of these very easy..
Q&A WITH JAKE
What was your most important metrics? (traffic, emails, followers, Youtube views, etc.)
Emails but we had a lot of additional lift in the social department as well.
Q&A WITH JAKE
How did you display/implement your contest and why (landing page, embed, widget)?
Vyper landing page. We wanted to keep things simple, the Vyper landing pages have been tested and optimised for conversion – plus it’s super easy.
Q&A WITH JAKE
What contest bonus actions were the most successful?
There were two really valuable Bonus actions which helped expose our giveaway to more people. 1) was Like, Comment and Share a Facebook post, 2) was sharing an Instagram post to their story.
Q&A WITH JAKE
How did you promote your contest and what worked the best for you?
Largely Instagram. We used a combination of posting and stories.
With any posts we did, we would direct users to coconutbowls.com/giveaway which redirected to the Vyper giveaway, and on stories we directed people to swipe up directly to the giveaway.
We also asked our community to share our giveaway with their friends and family – this worked really well as we have some infleuncencial people within our community who really supported the giveaway.
Q&A WITH JAKE
What results did you get from the contest?
41,820+ contest sign ups, 37,703+ new Instagram/Facebook/YouTube followers, 221,851+ unique visits to the giveaway landing page.
Revenue was also made on the offers people shared through bonus actions, as well as the drip emails.
Q&A WITH JAKE
What are 3 things that made your campaign successful?
Giveaway prize, community sharing, bonus actions.
Q&A WITH JAKE
3 things you would avoid for your next contest?
Next time, I would add an exit intent pop up to those who didn’t enter the giveaway, and also invest in retargeting these people to comeback and enter the giveaway.
Q&A WITH JAKE
How did you convert these leads after the contest?
Welcome offer and series of educational emails that built trust, shared our story, and added value to the reader. You need to craft ena email that has a balance between a sales pitch and a value add email that people want to actually open and read.
Q&A WITH JAKE
What are the top tools your business couldn’t run without?
Shopify for our store, Klaviyo for email, Instagram (@coconutbowls) for organic social traffic and Facebook Ads for paid traffic.
So when you run a giveaway, it’s important to set goals and leverage your strongest channels. In this case Coconut Bowls set out to collect emails, but in actuality turned this into a very successful Instagram giveaway.
They were able to collect user generated content, leads, sales and followers from a single campaign. Go and check out Coconut Bowls, they’re an awesome company doing some fantastic things for this earth.
Plus acai bowls taste great!
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Jack Paxton is the co-founder of VYPER, a marketing tool that helps brands build email lists, social followings, and revenue using viral giveaways, referral, and reward programs. After millions of dollars spent testing different marketing strategies at his marketing agency. He then also co-founded Hyax a fast, conversion & design-focused course and funnel builder for creators.
That was a great case study. Actually I think the way that Vyper do it, is a revolution in marketing industry.