THE CAMPAIGN GOAL

The goal was to generate as much social buzz as possible and bring some excitement into the Testbook learning community. It would also help bring awareness to their new payment plan, which was being introduced to give back to the community.

A lot of Testbook’s success can be attributed to the community they build around their product. These communities and audiences do not come from anywhere. It takes time hard work and time to build, but one of the fastest ways is to leverage referral marketing through contests.

Testbook solves a great pain point of helping people pass tests. They go well beyond that with additional services like courses, quizzes, live coaching, and practice tests.

None of this product expansion would be possible without a passionate audience to consume the content. So an expanding community is vital to their growth. 

By building their social following, email list, and app downloads. They are able to funnel more people into their products and continue to grow. The audience and community is a key part of their company.

Using a referral contest can be an excellent seed campaign to get your audience started if you are just starting out. Just look for companies like Testbook to partner with 😉

ABOUT THE BRAND

Testbook.com is a personalized learning and assessment platform providing a full-stack portal to prepare for employment from anywhere in the country.

The EdTech platform provides live coaching, online Courses, mock tests, and doubt solving support that ensures 360 degrees learning at one place for the students preparing for public sector jobs & respective tests.

Testbook’s target audience

A referral contest needs to attract the right people so that those people can refer others like themselves. Lucky for Testbook, that their audience is quite engaged and learning is a product that is relevant to a lot of people.

The training they offer is giving access to those who might not have schooling opportunities. They have classes in Banking & Insurance, SSC & Railways, Engineering, Teaching, Defence & Police, Civil Services, and State Exam industries.

Marketing tactics they employ

1. Leverage their current community using gamification through a contest.

2. Utilized their current video channels like TikTok and YouTube to get more sign-ups and social reach. Double down on what works!

3. Partnered with influencers on Instagram and TikTok to share and promote the campaign, which generated a lot of referral sign-ups.

Influencer marketing tip

Sending influencers free content in exchange for content (images and videos) is a good trade-off. Make sure that you get the influencers posting the content to social and sending you the original files for advertising material.

Another way to get user-generated content is to include it as a bonus action in your contest.

For example:

• Upload a video of you using our product for 100 points.
• Upload a video letting us know how Testbook changed your life.
• Upload an image of you doing XXX for 100 points.
• Post a photo to Instagram of you doing XXX for 100 points.
• Etc. Etc. This can work for any type of content or channel and most niches.

HOW TO BUILD A REFERRAL CONTEST

Using referral marketing to expand your audience, following or email list is a great keep acquisition costs low. The beauty of a referral contest is the compounding effect. Testbook generated 28,944 referred leads (leads they paid $0 to reach). 

When it comes to setting up a referral contest, you need to consider the incentive behind the referral. People are not going to share your brand and products with all their friends, family, and co-workers for nothing. No such thing as a free lunch!

🎁 THE CONTEST PRIZE

Understanding your customer and the needs, wants, and desires is a good starting when choosing a prize for your referral contest. There is no way Testbook could have generated that many referral leads by giving away a $100 Amazon gift card.

Invest some money and effort into creating a prize that is worth participants’ time. If you want them to rave about your brand, make it share-worthy. Think about perceived value, not just monetary value as well.

📗 CONTEST POSITIONING

It’s always a good idea to position your campaign around an event so that you can have a meaningful purpose around your campaign.

For example, Testbook launched this around the Exam taking time and positioned the campaigns as “win everything you need for your exam preparation?”.

🗣 THE REFERRAL SYSTEM

When you are trying to leverage referral marketing, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to share. Using something like VYPER allows all participants to have dashboards and unique URL’s. Remind them to share every chance you get.

🤝 USING PROMOTIONAL PARTNERS

Running a contest is a great excuse to reach out to partners like influencers or publications. It gives you a reason to pitch your campaign and get them to help share it. This can sometimes cost a few $$$. 

USING CONTESTS TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

If your brand relies on a community or audience to monetize, engagement should be one of your key growth measures.

Some of the largest brands in the world are built of a strong brand, community, and audience. These brands engage people, which generates word of mouth and referrals.

The easiest way to grow is to lean on the people who already like your product and brand. They are the best brand advocates. You just need to give them a little incentive to do so.

Referral marketing is nothing new, but if you can engage and incentivize your customers or website visitors to just tell 1 or 2 other people about your brand, you can start growing at exponential rates.

For example, Grow your communities on channels and get them to engage with each other. Testbook incentivized people to download their app, join telegram, follow on social, upload content, tag friends, and repost on Instagram. All these actions help build communities.

Below is an example of a confirmation email to increase engagement of participants in you referral contest campaign.

As mentioned, it’s essential to create engagement. A few ways Testbook did this using a referral contest & bonus actions are below.

• Focus on your core channels. Choose 2-3 channels you want to grow and make them all about your referral contest before, during, and after your campaign launch.

• Incentivize people to tag friends. This is a great way to get people to introduce your brand to their friends without being pushy. Create a social post about your referral contest, then a bonus action to get people to tag others in that post.

• Focus on the share and tag. This will generate “earned impressions”, which means your brand getting shown to people for $0 cost!

• Use personal images and videos to build a connection between you and your community. This is much easier when your product is courses and training as they can all be taught in person. If you are an eCom brand or SaaS company, it’s a good idea to go tip videos or company updates in video format.

• Engage with your community. Once you bring all these people into your social channels, talk to them. Tag them in posts, generate discussions, reply to all comments. Over time this engagement will build and automate itself as your community builds.

So focus on building an audience and community, then monetization. As we showed you with Testbook, using giveaways and contests are a great way to engage and grow these audiences.

If you have limited bandwidth, focus on just a few channels that fit your brand and niche. We would strongly suggest putting your email list at the top of that.

Then Choose 1 or 2 social channels that you can really commit to. Most brands will be tossing up between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.

Then make your campaign and bonus actions around those channels.

You can see the Testbook referral contest thank you page below and all the different types of actions they incentivized with their bonus actions.

BUILDING THE REFERRAL CONTEST!

Creating a contest that generates a strong referral system is not easy. There’s an art to building up enough incentive to make someone tell everyone they know about your brand, let’s see how Testbook did this!

In this example, Testbook decided to use the embed option to run their referral contest.

This meant that they designed their own landing page then embedded the VYPER contest sign up fields on that page.

Brands will usually do this when they have a developer and designer on staff. It gives you the maximum customizability.

Most brands starting out will use the VYPER hosted campaign pages. This does not require a dev or design skills, so is super easy to use.

In the screenshots of the contest sign up pages, you can see that they did a few things really well to help get them an 18% conversion rate.

 This means pretty much 1 in 5 people that visited their referral contest participated.

Then for every 2 people that entered, 1 of them referred a friend!

That’s a pretty good conversion rate backed out to a great referral funnel.

The incentivization is what really makes this system work well. Not to mention offering a sing up bonus could have boosted these stats even more. 

Below is a breakdown highlighting a few things Testbook did well to make this referral contest campaign a success.

Once you have created your landing page, make sure to share it with a few coworkers and friends to see if they understand what you are trying to do and what the benefit to them (giveaway contestant) is.

You must make your contest clear as to what the benefit is to the contestant.

Once they understand the value your are offering, it is much easier to ask them to share your brand, engage with your social content, and refer their friends.

Before you launch, think: Does the effort = the value of the reward?

For example, would you spend 5 hours trying to win a $5 gift card? Probably not.

You can see the full Testbook sign up and thank you flow blow.

STEP 1 – Referral Contest Sign Up Page

STEP 2 – Referral Contest Thank You Page

MARKETING THE GIVEAWAY

Marketing is one of the most important steps when launching a successful contest, but it can also be the most challenging. See how Testbook marketed their way to 57k new email leads.

The success and growth of the Testbook contest came from a few things which we will highlight below.

Just because Testbook already had an audience so not mean that new brands can not replicate these tactics.

If you do not have your own audience, think about how you can leverage someone else’s. Partners, influencers, ads, etc.

A referral contest is very effective if you can get people to engage and refer others.

To do that, several things have to happen as people do not just share brands for no reason.

1. The incentive needs to be there (a good prize).
2. The brand has to get the “offer” (contest sign up page) in front of as many people as possible.
3. The share option has to be easy (unique referral URLs or bonus actions to tag friends, etc.).
4. Once someone enters, the brand has to keep encouraging people to share and take action.

We see the most successful brands emailing their participants and posting to social multiple times throughout the contest campaign.

As mentioned a few times, if you do not have a large audience to share your referral contest with. You can always borrow one!

Use partners, influencers, ads, forums, or any other channel that has groups of people that would be relevant to your brand and want to win free stuff.

Below are 5 marketing tactics and strategies that Testbook used to  get viral results from their referral contest. Really pay attention to the social channels they use and why.

Check them out!

THE GIVEAWAY RESULTS

Now the moment we have all been waiting for. The cold hard metrics and stats from the Testbook Referral Contest. What worked and how well it worked!

Pay attention to the ongoing engagement and the high referral/share rate of this contest.

You can learn a lot from their social channels on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Testbook do a lot of video content, which is one of the key factors for such an engaged audience.

Below you can see some of the stats achieve during the contest.

A few things from the results above stand out. First off, that’s a lot of emails but also a huge amount of bonus actions.

Almost every single person who entered completed 1 extra bonus action on average.

When you run your own referral contest, watch these metrics.

If you see your conversion rate is under 20%, think about how you can improve it. Or if your virality score is under 20, how can you make your participants refer more. And finally, if your social engagements are less than 50% of your total entrant number, reconsider the bonus actions you are using. 

Timing is everything, and Testbook nailed it. They timed their referral contest around student exams. This is a key period of the year for their business as it plays into their product offering of test exams and preparation material.

If you are planning to run a referral contest, try and plan it around a date, event, launch, or special occasion.

In the US, there’s some sort of holiday or major event every 2 weeks pretty much. The more specific the event or date to your niche and product, the better.

For example — If you sell dog products, run your referral contest around world dog day, adoption day, or any other major event in the dog community and niche.

Another thing that Testbook did really was keeping people engaged, all the spikes below correlate to marketing efforts (emails, social posts, and influencer posts).

You can see a drop over the 16th and 17th when they were not posting or promoting their contest.

So before you start, plan out your dates, campaign length (suggest 30-40 days), emails, brand, partner and influencer social posts.

This next chart is one of the most important. It breaks down all the bonus action results. You can see some were more popular than others.

This will sound repetitive but lean into the channels your brand is good at and present on. You can see that Testbook really leaned on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

It was a good idea to use the bonus actions not only to get more app downloads and Telegram group members.

Most products or services will take 8+ touchpoints before a conversion (purchase mostly) takes place. It takes a long time to rack that up on 1 channel.

If you are connecting with your audience and potential audience across 3 or 4 channels they can consume a lot more of your content quickly. Please don’t go too crazy with this as we usually see brands only do 2-3 channels well. Focus on your strengths!

One of the reasons Testbook added in bonus actions to like, comment, and share on social posts was to increase the social validation to improve the rate of engagement but also make their posts more attractive in the newsfeed when they run ads using those posts.

There are a few benefits to this technique.

1. People are much more likely to stop and look if there is a lot of commotion (like a crash on the other side of the highway causing traffic jams).
2. A good way to show the ad networks that your promoting quality content is through engagement indicators. The ad networks then reward you by decreasing your CPM.

So, a big part of this referral contest was not just the individuals sharing their personal links, but also the bonus actions helping spread the word on social media.

CONVERTING YOUR LEADS

A common question we get is, “how do I monetize and convert all these new leads?” It’s a valid point as there is a lot of factors that go into nurturing a lead into a customer.

The easiest way is to add all your new giveaway leads into a lead nurture email drip.

Before you add all your leads, make sure you run the exported list through a list cleaning service, here are a few to choose from.

Here are a few more tips to improve your email marketing campaigns.

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. Sending them 2-4 days apart is a good rule of thumb.

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LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS

To help you run a successful referral contest campaign, we have outlined the top takeaways and learnings Q&A style with Neer from Testbook.

This is so you can understand common questions for running a similar campaign and also learn from the success of Testbook.

If you have any additional questions you would like answered about this case study or running a giveaway yourself, just add them in the comments at the bottom of this page and we will add them to this section.

NEED VYPER’S MANAGED SERVICES?

VYPER works with eCommerce brands that are doing at least $50k/m in revenue and helps them get to $500k/m using referral marketing, incentivization (VYPER tool) and paid social ads. Get in touch HERE if that’s you!

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