Wet Shave Club Gave Away 20 Shave Kits on Gleam

Overview

Wet Shave Club is a boutique subscription box that delivers a range of wet shave goodies to your door every month.

Rohan Gilkes owns Wet Shave Club. He wrote up how the business works on Reddit’s r/Entrepreneur.

One of the tactics was a giveaway built with Gleam Competitions.

Six Months to Rebuild a Subscription Box

Rohan had inherited Wet Shave Club from a previous owner who didn’t have the time to scale the business. Alongside his business partner they set themselves a target to transform the business in just 6 months.

New Boxes

New Products

A Rebuilt Website

With the logistics sorted, marketing was next.

A 20-Box Giveaway With 8 Ways to Enter

Rohan had read our Beardbrand case study before he set up his own giveaway.

I felt that the Gleam set up is perfect to run social media campaigns because it removes every excuse the person can have about joining the contest. Oh you don’t have Twitter, then here is a Facebook option. Don’t have Facebook? Invite your friends by email. So it removes all hurdles from the process, while infusing a viral component to your contest that is crucial to getting a lot of entries. It was the easiest platform we could find that also had the components we were looking for that could introduce viral growth into the campaign. It literally took like 5 minutes to figure out and get the campaign going, and we also liked the way contestant data was arranged in the backend. Finally, the randomization of contest entries to pick a winner is fully integrated as well. Pretty awesome.

Rohan Gilkes from Wet Shave Club

The giveaway had 8 ways to enter. Entrants could tweet, follow @wetshaveclub on Twitter and Instagram, like the Facebook page, submit a wetshaving photo with #wetshaveclub, visit the Google+ page, refer friends or claim a free daily entry.

Rohan also used the Viral Share Action. Each Entrant gets a unique link to give their friends, and every friend who enters through it earns the Entrant extra entries.

We promoted our campaign on Twitter, through blogs that mentioned us, on Reddit, on Facebook, Instagram, and among our friends. The response was insane. At one point were were getting 25 tweets per minute about our contest. And it kept going for days. An amazing response that not only increased our followers/fans it also got the word out about us to hundreds of people that would have otherwise not known about us. What blew me away was the number of entries. We ended at over 13,000 entries in 30 days. There was no way I was expecting so many people to be engaged with this.

Rohan Gilkes from Wet Shave Club

25 Tweets a Minute at the Peak

At the peak, Rohan says the giveaway drew 25 tweets a minute.

For folks that did not win, they contacted them with a discount code to say “hey, you didn’t win, but as a consolation, here is a 10% discount: runners class=”o-link” up”. And we picked up an additional 20 or so customers right away from this and we can see purchases from this campaign still trickling in, even weeks later. So all in all it was a pretty awesome success.

Rohan Gilkes from Wet Shave Club

3 Takeaways From Wet Shave Club

Have a Compelling Prize

If you sell your own product, your existing customers are the first audience to test a giveaway on.

For something like this we learned that you cannot just throw up a contest and expect it to do well. You have to have a compelling prize (bonus if it’s multiple prizes, so people feel like they do have a chance) and you must then spend some time marketing your contest on as many channels as you have access to. With the viral growth component that is built into the contest, things should pick up from there.

Rohan Gilkes from Wet Shave Club

20 or So Customers From One Coupon

Wet Shave Club contacted the Entrants who didn’t win with a 10% discount code. Rohan says about 20 customers bought straight away, and purchases were still arriving weeks later.

Where a Giveaway Fits in Your Marketing Plan

The giveaway was one part of Wet Shave Club’s plan. The team also marketed to bloggers and ran paid ads and remarketing ads.

A giveaway works best behind a bigger message, like a sale, a product launch, a milestone or a holiday.

You can also tailor a giveaway to engage your existing customers or to attract new ones.

Run Your Own E-Commerce Giveaway

Start from the template below and run a giveaway like this one.