Every product launch needs a solid reason behind it if it’s going to blow up big.
To celebrate their third anniversary in May 2022, Brazilian business education firm G4 Educaçao launched the biggest and most comprehensive course bundle they had ever offered, “G4 Pass.”
Since G4 Pass was a high-ticket bundle, G4 needed to generate 50,000 new qualified leads via an offer of a free entrepreneurship course ahead of the launch. The free course was a perfect lead magnet because this offer was highly appealing to both prospective and current business owners.
Since the G4 bundle was a high-ticket course, only a small percentage of those 50,000 leads would actually purchase the bundle. (That’s why this large number of fresh leads was required.)
Generating this many prospects through lead generation ads alone would be cost-prohibitive.
So G4 Operations Manager Gabriel Bechi turned to referral marketing to keep lead gen costs low, while still attracting an ideal audience for their products.
When Gabriel searched for an ideal referral marketing campaign platform, UpViral ticked all the boxes. It proved to be a perfect fit for G4’s needs. To find out more, we interviewed Gabriel and wrote this case study detailing their success with UpViral.
Why UpViral?
Gabriel’s requirements for a referral marketing platform were strict.
The ideal platform needed to provide:
1. Fraud protection: It’s a waste of time and effort to market to people who provide a fake email address in order to claim your opt-in gift. Once they claim your gift, most of them will unsubscribe from your list.
2. Campaign performance data: G4 needed to see real-time data so they could make tweaks on the fly to optimize the campaign. Since this was a new campaign with a new product, it was crucial that G4 could monitor the data to learn what was working–and what wasn’t.
3. User-friendliness: As multiple G4 employees from different business units would work on the campaign, the platform needed to be intuitive and simple to use for everyone on the team.
UpViral ticked all those boxes with its user-friendly templates, built-in analytics dashboard, fraud detection features, and easy-to-use drag & drop page editor.
Now that Gabriel decided on UpViral, G4 got busy designing their campaign.
The Mission Behind the Launch
While their third anniversary was an ideal reason to launch a new product, G4 Educaçao has a bigger mission:
To help Brazilian entrepreneurs create a million jobs to provide their employees with dignity and economic security.
While in the words of Gabriel, this is a ‘big, hairy audacious goal,’ in just three short years, G4 has already helped their customers create over 100,000 jobs.
The company founders were featured in New York’s Times Square for this feat.
So the goal of the launch was not just to create an additional revenue stream, it was also to further G4’s mission of creating jobs for Brazilians.
In hindsight, Gabriel thought that G4 should have focused more on telling the story of this mission throughout the launch instead of just promoting the benefits of the free course giveaway.
The Campaign Details
In a unique twist, Gabriel & G4 combined the best of a milestone campaign with a contest running from April 27th to May 15th.
The lead form was a simple UpViral widget on the G4 website:
The form asked for the leads’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. The phone number was to contact the winners, but they could also use it for WhatsApp marketing, one of the most-used channels in Brazil, or for SMS marketing purposes.
After leads opted in to receive their free digital entrepreneur course, it immediately took them to the share page.
On the share page, the first thing the leads saw was information on how to access their course.
Next, G4 presented the leads with the opportunity to share the campaign with friends who were thinking of starting businesses or were already entrepreneurs.
If the new lead shared the campaign with one friend, they received an ebook on how to market new products.
For five referrals, leads received a gift of a Leadership Playbook, along with manuals with execution strategies. (This was also the most valuable prize in the milestone campaign. Most leads can come up with at least five friends to share a contest with, but forcing them to share with a greater number of friends is discouraging. Many will decide the prize isn’t worth the effort. )
The top milestone was thirty shares. For this, the lead received a sales kit from a top Brazilian sales specialist, Alfredo Soares and Theo Orosco.
To keep engagement high, G4 also offered prizes for the top ten referrers in the contest. This group received a grand-prize of a trip to the G4 offices for a day of in-person training. (This is an important detail for reasons to be shared with you soon.)
The Psychology of the Share Page
The share page contained some powerful psychological motivators.
After the contest was already underway, G4 added a progress bar to show participants how many referrals they needed to reach the next milestone. This gave participants a visual reminder of their progress.
The page contained brief prize descriptions and information about the course creators, all famous Brazilian business leaders. Including this information about the creators’ credentials and accomplishments helped to increase the perceived value of the prizes.
G4 also included details about the referral contest on the share page. The top ten referrers were eligible to win a day in the G4 offices for in-person training. This friendly competition increased the total number of shares as entrants made extra referrals to be in the running for this prize.
This prize proved so popular that G4 later offered the training day package as a paid product. This move created an unexpected $40,000 revenue stream.
An FAQ was added to the bottom of the share page during the contest. The G4 customer success team was getting a lot of questions about the contest, and the FAQ helped to reduce the number of support tickets.
The Contest Results
Not only did G4 meet their goal of 50,000 new leads, they exceeded it. They generated nearly 60,000 fresh leads with their first UpViral campaign.
Here is a screenshot of the final campaign totals below:
To get the contest rolling, G4 spent only about $4000 on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn ads. This means that G4’s cost for lead acquisition was only about .06 per lead–almost unheard of in 2022.
What’s even more remarkable is that of those 59,993 leads, approximately 20,000 were direct leads, and the rest were UpViral referrals. This 2:1 referral ratio.
When the referral contest ended, G4 began the promotion of their new G4 Pass product. The leads generated with the free course giveaway were a perfect fit to purchase this product, as they expressed a strong interest in entrepreneurship.
The launch generated exceptional results for G4 with $1.5 million in sales by the end. Gabriel estimated that at least $400,000 in sales were directly because of UpViral leads.
Gabriel’s UpViral Contest Takeaways
Gabriels’ biggest takeaway from this hugely successful campaign was that there were still things G4 still could have done better.
He felt that better storytelling about G4’s mission could have made the launch even bigger and more successful. Don’t just launch a product, build a narrative that makes sense for the launch and has a purpose.
Gabriels says for best results, referral marketing campaign prizes must be easy-to-understand, share and use. The “use” is especially important. Help people consume your product, so they’ll want more of your offers in the future.
UpViral founder Wilco de Kreij also recommends that businesses should choose contest prizes that are part of their core business offers. This ensures that the highest quality leads are generated, and likely to purchase from you in the future.
Use all the campaign data available to make adjustments along the way. G4 did this when they added the progress bar to the share page to increase campaign conversions.
Activate your leads to share through as many channels as possible: email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and LinkedIn–whichever channels your target audience is most active on. Brazilians love WhatsApp so G4 made sure to include that option on their share page.
As the campaign enters its last days, email your leads and remind them about the contest deadline. When G4 did this, they saw a spike in referrals at the end of the campaign.
Don’t forget to explore the full potential of your existing lead base. There are sure to be some people on your existing list who would gladly share your contest with friends. G4 included contest details in their newsletter to reach this base.
Ready to Exceed Your Own Lead Gen Expectations?
Gabriel and G4 Educaçao pulled off these stunning lead generation results with their very first UpViral campaign. Here’s what Gabriel had to say about UpViral:
While G4 had a bit of an advantage in that they already had an existing customer and subscriber base it still goes to show the potential of UpViral to get quality leads for your business at a low cost.
And speaking of low-cost, did you know you can start a 14-day UpViral trial for only $1? Try it now and enjoy how easy it can be to attract profitable leads whether you’re a new or an established business.
