Shopify Drew 3,500 Entrants With One Blog Post
Shopify built a store from scratch, then gave the business away with a Gleam Competition embedded in the blog post that told the story.
Author
Stuart McKeown
Australia
Co-Founder
Products Used
Date of Publication
Shopify gave away an ecommerce business through a Gleam Competition embedded in a blog post. About 3,500 Entrants completed about 20k Actions.
One Business, 3,500 Entrants
In June 2015, Shopify built an ecommerce business from scratch and gave it away.
The team built an ecommerce business from scratch, took in close to $1,000 of revenue, then used Gleam to give the whole business to one winner from the Shopify community.
About Shopify
Shopify is a global ecommerce company that helps businesses build online stores and take in-person payments through POS.
Before Shopify, getting a store online meant a storefront design, a cart vendor, hosting, SSL and a pile of plugins, each set up separately.
Shopify’s app store lets merchants install apps for things like running competitions.
The Hello Matcha Giveaway
Shopify wanted to show that anyone with a business idea could launch a store and start taking revenue in 3 days. Talk about eating your own dog food.
They documented the whole setup from start to finish, then let one community member win the business.
They wrote a long-form blog post covering how to come up with an idea, source products, build the store and market it.
It all started with a challenge – build an E-commerce business from scratch and see how many sales we could generate in three days.
Shopify needed a simple way to pick one winner from the community. That’s where Gleam came in.
Shopify embedded the Competition at the bottom of the blog post, so readers could enter right after reading how the business was built.
The widget offered 13 Actions, each worth +1 entry:
Newsletter sign-up (first in the list)
Comment on the blog post
Twitter: follow @Shopify, Tweet, Retweet
Refer Friends For Extra Entries
Instagram: visit @Shopify, view a photo, visit @hellomatchatea
Facebook: visit Shopify
Pinterest: visit @shopify
Two Actions that sent Entrants to Shopify guides: how to start a dropshipping business and how to choose a product to sell online
About 3,500 Entrants completed about 20k Actions, an average of 5.8 Actions per Entrant.
Key Growth Takeaways
Show Customers How to Use Your Product
Shopify’s post shows readers how to start from scratch with the product, and gives them a checklist they can apply to their own idea.
We’ve focused on this tactic at Gleam for a while. Gleam is flexible enough to use in lots of different ways, which can overwhelm new customers.
So we invested in content that teaches people how to use Gleam.
Gleam Examples Page
We get lots of requests from users wanting to know if Gleam could be used to do certain things (like Refer-a-Friend campaigns for example). So we started keeping track of all the requests then I built out fully fledged live examples for each.
Learning What Works for Them
This wasn’t the first time Shopify ran a campaign with Gleam. The team tested different Action setups and incentives to see what their community responded to.
Shopify’s #ShopifyPicks Gallery showed products from its merchants every day.
This particular Gallery was fed images from #hashtags and a competition built using the Gleam Galleries app.
Investing Time Into Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is simply content that will stand the test of time and continually bring you traffic (i.e. it won’t get old). Our Google Analytics Setup guide would be a good example of this.
An example of evergreen content is this article on how to drive sales and traffic from Pinterest. It needs updating when Pinterest changes its features.
Whereas more tactical content revolves around shorter term campaigns to promote new product updates, contests or announcements.
Shopify promoted the giveaway in two posts: the original article, with the widget at the bottom, and a dedicated announcement post.
Making Blog Posts Interactive and Actionable
I’m a fan of blog posts that give readers something they can use. Shopify’s post told a story about building a business, and the Competition at the bottom let readers win the business they had just read about.
Promoting App Partners Through Content
Shopify also writes content that promotes its app partners, companies that sell their apps in the Shopify App Store (Gleam is one).
Ways to use the same approach:
Highlight popular campaigns or customers on social media that you think are great examples
Have a showcase of campaigns, sellers, apps or products for different categories
Interview your customers and make the content engaging and actionable
Build guides geared towards specific demographics and funnel them into different parts of your product (that are most relevant). For example this Exit Intent guide funnels users through to our Capture product.
Get Gleam for Your Shopify Store
Gleam is available in the Shopify App Store. You can use it to grow your newsletter list, reward loyal customers or run something fun for your customers.
Try it now on Shopify:
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