Campaigns dedicated to generating leads, such as email campaigns, contests, influencer campaigns, and referral programs, are essential to bringing in new customers and increasing sales. But if you don’t promote your new customer campaign properly, and no one in your target audience finds out about it, all your efforts will go to waste.
How do you promote your campaign, and get it in front of the eyes that matter? We surveyed the experts to find out. A total of 34 experts shared their insights on promoting new customer campaigns. And their hacks will work for almost every new customer campaign.
But first, let’s check out the statistics to see which types of new customer campaigns they prefer, and the promotional methods they found to be most effective.
Email and referral campaigns are the most popular and easiest to run
To start our survey, we asked marketers what types of new customer campaigns they’ve run before. A majority 76% shared they have run email campaigns, making it the most popular type of new customer campaign.
Email campaigns work well because they’re always targeted to relevant eyes. Once you’ve convinced a potential customer to sign up for your email list, you know they’re interested in what you have to offer. And you’ll be able to spend your time and energy targeting these warm leads with relevant content and offers.
Referral programs were second-most popular, at 62%. Referral programs (also called refer-a-friend programs) provide the unique benefit of both bringing in new customers and encouraging customer retention. Since referred leads trust their friend’s recommendations, they’re more likely to become your new customers and stay loyal to your business for longer periods of time.
Plus, referral programs empower your existing customers and earn their loyalty, by encouraging them to play an active role in your brand’s success and growth. By incentivizing both existing customers to share with their friends, and new customers to make their first purchase, referral programs create wins for everyone involved.
Email campaigns and referral programs were also named the top two easiest new customer campaigns to run. We discovered 38% of marketers find email campaigns the easiest to run, while 32% say referral programs are the easiest.
Social media is the most effective promotion channel
Now, let’s dive into the best marketing channels and techniques for promoting new customer campaigns. How do marketers get the word out about new customer campaigns?
When it comes to channels, 44% of marketers find social media most effective for promoting campaigns, making it the overall winner. Another 26% find email most effective, and 18% find promotions on their website most effective. Overall, all of these owned channels were rated much more effective than paid ads (6%).
When asked about social media promotions on specific platforms, the majority of marketers (56%) thought Facebook was best for increasing awareness of a new customer campaign. This is likely because Facebook is the platform with the most diverse audiences, allowing the most flexibility in how you promote your campaign.
Instagram came in a clear second, with 21% rating it as the most effective. This is unsurprising, because most influencer campaigns involve Instagram personalities.
But just how many new customer campaign’s leads come from social media promotion? While half of the marketers said social media is responsible for bringing in between one and twenty percent of leads for a new campaign, 35% share the channel brings in twenty to forty percent of campaign leads, and 12% say social media brings in forty to sixty percent of their leads. For many marketers, social media promotion appears to be a very effective method for generating campaign leads.
Promoting your campaign on social media: Think beyond the post
With social media being the most effective channel, how should you use it to best promote your new customer campaign?
Unsurprisingly, over three-quarters of marketers promote a campaign on social media simply by posting about it. But to use social media to your full advantage, you should promote your campaign in other ways, as well.
About 41% of marketers have promoted a campaign in their profile’s header or feature image, and another 41% have tapped into engaging video marketing to promote their campaign. Meanwhile, 24% have mentioned it in their social bio – one of the most overlooked yet effective strategies, especially if you use your bio to link to another part of the campaign.
Add a call to action in your emails
Even if your campaign isn’t fully email-based, email marketing can help to promote a new customer campaign.
Based on our survey, the most effective technique is adding a call to action to every email you send (44% of marketers named it most effective). The second-most effective technique (according to 26% of marketers) is to mention the campaign in a newsletter. Remember that many potential customers, especially those in the B2B sector, sign up for emails from a business they’re interested in.
Create value and urgency on your website
As for promoting a campaign on your website, most marketers shared that using a call to action on your blog or other page (35%) or using a pop-up (32%) is most effective.
Calls to action capture a potential customer’s attention, offering a valuable proposition or reason to share the campaign. Meanwhile, pop-ups help create a sense of urgency, with time-sensitive offers.
Points and share widgets encourage people to interact with your campaign
Interestingly, marketers thought rewarding points for certain actions (29%) and using “share” widgets (26%) were the two best ways to get people to interact with new customer campaigns.
Rewarding points not only help increase motivation, but the possibilities are also endless. You can reward a desired action taken by an existing customer, such as when their referral results in a new customer.
A “share” widget can be integral in getting the word out about a campaign on social media. With one click, a current or potential customer can share your campaign on their feed, reaching all of their friends and followers at once. 
20 hacks for promoting new customer campaigns
Looking for inspiration on how to promote a new customer campaign? We put together 20 expert hacks for new customer campaign promotion.
These hacks cover a wide range of topics, including gathering lead information, choosing strategic times and channels for your campaign, and encouraging existing customers to promote your campaigns for free.
Identify your target audience
Alex Membrillo of Cardinal SEO Company shares, “Knowing your target audience is crucial for developing a successful campaign strategy. This way, you’ll be able develop target campaigns for your market. For example, if you’re looking to get in front of B2B decision-makers, LinkedIn may be much more effective than Instagram. However, a B2C contest usually performs best on Instagram.”
Find what motivates your customers, and use this to drive your campaigns
Yaniv Masjedi of Nextiva tells us, “Pay attention to the demographics, interests, and characteristics of your existing customers. [Ask] them to fill out a survey so you can create the persona of your most successful prospect. Once you have the necessary data, analyze the trends evident in most of them. Then, use those details to target new audiences.”
Himanshu Rauthan of MakeWebBetter shares, “Research your audience type and their buyer personas. What are people who have a relationship with your business most interested in? Where are they spending most of their time? Which form of content do they interact the most with? I prefer detailed user insights over mere speculation every day of the week. With solid insights like these, you can start a stellar customer campaign that’s bound to succeed.”
Offer targeted incentives
Tom Mumford of Undergrads Moving shares, “Providing incentives for a new customer campaign is one of the easiest ways to get potential customers motivated and engaged with your business. The reward behind your incentive is likely to appeal to your specific audience and demographic based on their interests, and can be anything from discounts, special advice from a thought leader, access to a limited sale, and more.”
Amanda Fisher of EPOCH Clemson explains, “Our target audience (students) engage and interact extremely well with social promotions and giveaways. These types of campaigns have been our best resource for spreading awareness of who we are and breaking into the market. It creates a buzz or hype around what we’re doing and invites them to check us out.”
Create engaging contests with a valuable prize
Brian Patrick of Pest Strategies advises, “Social media contests are the most effective way to spread awareness of your new customer campaigns without breaking the bank. However, a highly engaging game with a highly coveted prize is essential for the success of the contest. When people’s competitiveness and desire to join the bandwagon take over, your post might end up going viral and reaching hundreds or thousands of people. The best part is it will only cost you the expenses for the main prizes and consolation rewards.”
Muhammad Mateen Khan of PureVPN agrees, “Running a competition is an excellent growth hack to encourage visitors to give you their information. Since they only have a limited number of days to enter this contest, this will likely compel the visitor to enter right then and there.”
Invoke urgency
When potential customers are offered a limited-time deal in a campaign, the urgency involved will make them more likely to take action.
Melanie Musson of CarInsuranceComparison says, “Sending an email that gives the customer a countdown (i.e., 24 hours) to use a coupon or incentive as a first-time purchaser is very effective. If they were close to converting, this technique gives them a deadline to commit.”
Alistair Dodds of Ever Increasing Circles recommends, “Use a FOMO strategy with a time-limited and space-limited offer. It compels users to make a snap decision and not to procrastinate. Add in a decent enough reward, and you can quickly convert on the basis of impulsive decision making.”
Combine popups and email marketing
Bailey Hahn of Cosmetic Packaging Now shares, “We combine our popup campaign and email marketing campaigns for a ‘one-two punch’ digital approach. We use the popup forms with two step opt-ins and strong CTAs to increase email subscribers, and we have increased email subscribers by 754%. After we gather email subscribers using popups, we then send out monthly email campaigns to highlight our best selling products, new product launches, special promotions, and new blog posts. Our email campaign revenue has increased over 1,327% year-over-year and has only continued to grow!”
Use your email list
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers explains, “When running a new campaign, the best hack is to use your email list. Your subscribers have signed up because they’re interested in the content you share. Create a sequence of 2–5 emails introducing your new campaign to them. Make sure your subject line is enticing, your copy compelling, and your CTA powerful. Email marketing isn’t only the best channel to promote your new customer campaign, it’s also the most effective and the one with the highest ROI.”
Form valuable partnerships
Forming partnerships with influencers and other figures who have a rapport with your target audience is another effective campaign strategy for generating new leads and sales.
Katie Fellenz of Trust & Will says, “Partnerships have yielded us the best results so far. It has helped us reach a whole new audience instantly that might have taken us quite a while to reach on our own. Choosing the right partner has a lot to do with the success of this tactic, however, so be diligent and selective if you choose to go this route.”
Shane Barker of Shane Barker Consulting tells us, “To promote my customer campaigns, I prefer using the power of influencer marketing. By collaborating with niche authority figures, I’m able to get the message across to my audiences with ease. Additionally, this method of marketing isn’t as apparent and intrusive for the audience and this makes it more effective than other forms of promotions. Lastly, it helps build solid relationships with influencers, and this can come in handy for future partnerships too.”
Alex Azoury of Home Grounds explains, “For new customer campaigns, we work with influencers who position our website in front of new audiences. This is the best ROI we’ve seen in recent years, and although influencers will become more expensive, we plan to continue with niche influencers.”
Drive relevant paid traffic
Henrik Saetre of AdChina explains, “Set yourself up for success by driving enough traffic to the campaign. In that way, you get enough data to optimize. For us, this means driving relevant paid traffic to the new customer campaigns. For example, in the app advertising giveaway we have shown below, here we ran paid campaigns promoting the giveaway on Facebook and Linkedin, targeting relevant app advertisers. We were able to run several tests and optimize quickly, followed by a period of strong conversions on traffic driven to the registration page. As the giveaway was made with functions for inviting friends and taking certain actions to get more entries, this multiplied the impact of our paid advertising as well.”
Run A/B tests
Laura Gonzalez of Audi Las Vegas advises, “Always test a couple of different versions of your message. Your message and copy are very important and the best way to constantly be improving on it is to be testing it. Run an A/B test every time you do an email blast, run an ad campaign, etc. and see which performs better.”
Consider all touchpoints
Leave no stone unturned when determining how to promote a campaign. Don’t forget about often-overlooked methods, such as email signatures and social media bios.
Matt Erickson of National Positions explains, “We create a multi-prong approach. We consider each and every touchpoint and make sure they are in place before launching. For example, we recently launched a new referral program that has its own page on our site, is in every email signature for every team member in our company, and is mentioned in our monthly newsletter. While every campaign is different, we never treat any campaign as a single tactic, but rather a collection of trackable tactics in the overall strategy.”
Schedule promotions for when potential customers are most engaged
Carrie Rose of Rise at Seven shares, “We’ll schedule a series of social media posts about the campaign at the times our target audience is typically online. We interact, follow, like accounts and people on social media so we can be in their mind right before the post is live. When we split tested this, the pre-launch process generated around 15–25% engagement over the control option.”
Tap into sharing widgets
Anand Iyer tells us, “Sharing widgets are one of the best ways to increase engagement, shares on social media, and reach a wider audience. By adding sharing widgets on your websites, you are reducing the friction and making it easy for users to interact with your content. Some of the best widgets that can maximize your campaign promotion are social sharing and ‘invite friends’ widgets.”
Let your loyal fans promote the campaign for you
Paul Farmer shares, “Find a way to excite your most loyal fans. You can’t have a lukewarm or general campaign that’s supposed to appeal equally to everyone. It’s best if there are elements in the campaign or promotions that specifically call your most loyal fans to action. The people who love your brand will be the first to share your campaign. Even if they don’t directly bring you new customers, that initial push is absolutely the key to running a successful campaign and giving it a hint of virality.”
Wrapping things up
Now that you’ve learned effective techniques and hacks for promoting a new customer campaign, it’s time to get the word out. Choose your promotional channels and methods, decide how you’ll incentivize new leads and purchases, and think about all best ways to promote your campaign.
And when you gain new customers, make sure you have a way to retain them, as well. Referral programs are a new customer campaign that also help you with customer retention. Plus, the promotional aspect comes at little to no cost, as the main payment is for the incentives you give only after a successful sale. Learn more about how referral programs can help you with both customer acquisition and retention.
