Is it possible for a business to reach fresh, targeted prospects without advertising?
It is with UpViral! One U.K.-based firm, Tickets for Good, added 2300 new subscribers and 900 Facebook group members with a single 14-day UpViral campaign. Even better? After running multiple campaigns, Tickets for Good have collected over 13,330 new leads with UpViral.
These results are even more impressive because of Tickets for Good’s uncommon business model.
Tickets for Good’s Unique Business Model
Tickets for Good is based in Sheffield, England and has an interesting business model. They are given unsold event tickets which they then distribute to their subscribers, who are NHS (National Health Service) workers.
The free event tickets can vary from theater shows, music and culture festivals, and everything in between. Tickets for Good estimate that they have saved NHS workers about £5,000,000 on event tickets so far. It’s a win-win for the NHS workers and the event organizers. NHS workers save huge amounts on tickets, and the ticket donors attract new fans and audiences.
But there is a serious catch when Tickets for Good receive free event tickets. Under the terms of receiving the free tickets, they are forbidden to advertise ticket availability with paid advertising.
So unless NHS workers are already members of Tickets for Good’s platform, there is no way to get the word out to them. So Eve explored ways to get the word out to NHS workers without violating the advertising ban.
That’s where UpViral came in.
Referral Marketing Hits a Home Run When Ads are Impossible
After Tickets for Good manager Eve Winter searched for a way to help get the word out without paid ads, she discovered UpViral. Could referral marketing be the answer to growing their list without advertising and getting tickets into the hands of more NHS workers?
Eve gave it a go. She created a 14-day UpViral contest with prizes of 35 pairs of tickets to the Eastern Electrics music festival and a £250 random cash draw. The results were phenomenal.
Tickets for Good ended up with 1,200 new sign-ups to their platform. Overall, this means that 53% of people who signed up for the contest converted to Tickets for Good subscribers. That worked out to a cost of $0.11 per sign-up, which is an excellent cost per acquisition. They also ended up with nearly 900 new Facebook group members as well over that two-week period.
Now let’s look into the campaign in more detail to see how Tickets for Good managed these results.
Instant Verification and Consistent Branding
To kick the contest off, Tickets for Good made an announcement about the contest in their weekly newsletter for subscribers. Both the contest and how to share it with friends were explained in depth in the email.
As a requirement to enter the contest, entrants had to sign up for the Tickets for Good platform with an NHS email address. This requirement instantly verified entrants and qualified them as legitimate NHS workers.
Congruency in branding is a marketing best practice, and Tickets for Good got it right.
One thing Tickets for Good did exceptionally well was to keep the contest branding consistent from email to the landing page to the share page. This eliminates any confusion about whether the entrant is on the right page when they click through.
On the share page, entrants were allowed to share the contest on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. As with many other UpViral clients, WhatsApp delivered significant results for sharing the contest. Having a Facebook sharing option also helped Tickets for Good grow their Facebook group by about 900 members.
Since Tickets for Good cannot advertise tickets, the Facebook group gives them another option besides emails to let subscribers know when they have tickets available.
Getting the Word Out
To keep contest engagement high, Tickets for Good made additional announcements about the contest in their weekly newsletter. They also posted often in their Facebook group to remind members to enter the contest and share with their friends.
Tickets for Good also collaborated with the Eastern Electrics festival, tagging the festival in Instagram and Facebook posts to increase their reach.
Here is the Instagram post the event organizers tagged Tickets for Good in that did so well:
The contest winners were announced by email.
This campaign was so successful that Tickets for Good repeated the campaign with different events.
Eve’s Campaign Takeaways
While Tickets for Good’s first UpViral campaign was a runaway success, Eve felt there were still things that could have been done better.
Looking back, she would have had more emphasis on promoting the contest through email. Because of social platform algorithms, the chances of Tickets for Good subscribers seeing all the Facebook and Instagram posts promoting the contest were low.
One aspect of the campaign that went particularly well was the collaborative posts with the festival organizers. Other UpViral customers, such as Siddarth Pal, have taken a similar approach to Eve with multi-brand giveaways. Collaborating on a contest allows you to get more subscribers and followers for your respective brands than if you went it alone.
Most of all, Tickets for Good was thrilled by how UpViral overcame their advertising restrictions and increased their subscriber and Facebook group base so quickly. By keeping it simple, and repeating the same campaign with different events, they have now generated over 13,330 leads over four UpViral campaigns.
Tickets for Good is now bringing their program to charities and UpViral will play a key role in that expansion.
Eve appreciated how easy and intuitive UpViral is to use. It enabled her to build beautiful landing and share pages with consistent branding almost effortlessly. She also appreciated UpViral’s built-in analytics to see the campaign results at a glance.
This case study should be food for thought for any business that faces advertising restrictions or has a limited budget for ads. While ads can add fuel to your campaign and speed up your results, they aren’t 100% necessary. UpViral can help any business get the leads they need organically without advertising.
Isn’t it time that you started growing your subscriber list with UpViral too? UpViral makes it so easy to build beautiful landing and share pages that are congruent with your branding, even if you’ve never created a lead generation campaign before. Get a 14-day UpViral trial now for only $1.
