Are you wondering how to do a giveaway on WordPress? Creating a giveaway is a great way to increase brand awareness, boost engagement, grow your email list and social media following, and even generate more sales.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily create a successful WordPress giveaway using RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market.
Here’s an overview of the steps for creating a successful giveaway on your WordPress site:
- Determine Your WordPress Giveaway Goals
- Pick a Good Contest Prize
- Set the WordPress Giveaway Rules
- Use RafflePress to Create a New Giveaway
- Name Your Giveaway and Choose a Giveaway Template
- Add the Giveaway Prize Details
- Choose Your Giveaway Entry Actions
- Design Your Giveaway
- Configure Your Giveaway Settings
- Publish Your Contest
- Promote Your Giveaway
- Pick the Contest Winner
But, before we get started with this tutorial on how to create a giveaway on your WordPress site, let’s take a closer look at RafflePress.
About RafflePress: The Best WordPress Giveaway Plugin
RafflePress is an easy-to-use and powerful WordPress giveaway plugin. With their drag and drop giveaway builder, even beginners can create an awesome giveaway widget or landing page in no time at all.
It offers a ton of cool features including pre-built giveaway templates, 1-click entry and fraud protection, social media integrations, viral sharing (refer-a-friend), marketing and CRM Software integrations, tracking and retargeting, and more.
RafflePress also helps you know how to grow your email list, social media followers, and website traffic.
Now, let’s get started on how to create a successful giveaway on your WordPress website.
1. Determine Your WordPress Giveaway Goals
Before you start to build your giveaway, you first need to determine why you want to run a giveaway and what you want the outcome of the giveaway to be. By setting goals for your WordPress giveaway, you’ll be able to tell whether your giveaway was successful or not.
There are a number of different goals you can set for your WordPress giveaway, some common ones include:
- Generate sales
- Grow your email list
- Increase website traffic
- Boost brand awareness
- Grow your social media following
- Increase user engagement
- Gather user-generated content
- Promote a new product or service
One of the great things about RafflePress is that they offer verified bonus actions that you can add to your giveaway campaign. These actions, such as “follow us on twitter” and “join email list”, allow users to get more contest entries by completing them.
So, it’s important to choose the goals for your giveaway campaign and then create your RafflePress giveaway based on those goals.
2. Pick a Good Contest Prize
Of course, if you want people to enter your giveaway, you need to pick a good prize. A good contest prize is what will attract a ton of people to your giveaway.
Some of the most popular giveaway prizes include:
- Cash
- Gift certificates
- Free products or services
Choose a giveaway prize that relates to your business and is something that you know your target audience will be interested in.
For instance, this hair salon chose a free haircut as their contest prize, makes sense right?
By choosing a contest prize that promotes your business at the same time, you’ll be able to attract a ton of your ideal customers to your website.
3. Set the WordPress Giveaway Rules
Every contest needs rules, so plan them out before you start creating your giveaway.
First, decide how users will enter your contest. Will they be able to simply enter their email address for a chance to win? Or will you require them to submit something in order to enter?
For instance, requiring users to submit a photo to enter your contest is a great way to gather user-generated content to use in your marketing. On the other hand, more people may be willing to enter a contest if nothing is required from them because it’s easier.
You also have to set rules for:
- Start and end dates – How long will your contest run?
- Participant rules – Who can enter your contest? Are there age or location limits? How often can they enter?
- How to pick the winner – Will you pick the winner by random draw, vote, etc.?
When planning the giveaway rules it’s also important to remember your goals. For example, if your main goal is to grow your following on Twitter, make sure to set the rule that users have to follow you on Twitter to enter the giveaway.
Now it’s time to start building your WordPress giveaway with RafflePress.
4. Use RafflePress to Create a New Giveaway
After downloading, installing, and activating the RafflePress plugin, you’ll want to create a new giveaway.
To do so, hover over the RafflePress icon in your WordPress dashboard and click Add New.
5. Name Your Giveaway and Choose a Giveaway Template
After clicking Add New, you’ll be taken to a new screen. On this screen, you’ll want to name your giveaway first. For example, you can name your giveaway after your prize, such as “iPad giveaway”. This is just for your own purposes, the giveaway name won’t be seen on the front-end.
You’ll also want to choose a template for your giveaway campaign. RafflePress offers a number of pre-built templates that make building your giveaway even easier. These templates are designed to help you reach specific goals such as Grow Your Email List, Grow Your Facebook Page, Pre-launch Campaign, and more.
For this tutorial, we’ll choose the Classic Giveaway template, which allows you to create any type of giveaway you want.
To choose this template, hover over it and click on Use This Template.
6. Add the Giveaway Prize Details
After selecting your template, you’ll be taken to the RafflePress builder.
The first step to creating your giveaway is adding your giveaway prize and its details. Click on the pencil icon in the Giveaway Prize Details section.
Here you can enter the name of your prize along with a short description and upload an image of your prize.
To upload an image of the prize, click on the Select Image button to choose a photo from your media library or upload a photo from your computer.
You can also add a start and end time to your contest and select which timezone you want to use. Once you’re done adding the prize details, click on the Done Editing button.
If your contest has more than 1 prize, you can add another by clicking the +Add Another Prize button.
Underneath the Giveaway Prize Details section, you can also set the start and end dates and times for your WordPress giveaway.
Click the Save button in the top right corner when you’re finished. Remember to click the Save button throughout the process of building your giveaway so you won’t lose any of your changes.
7. Choose Your Giveaway Entry Actions
As we mentioned earlier, RafflePress provides a number of actions users can complete to enter your giveaway. For instance, users can get extra entries by following you on Twitter. So, you’ll want to choose those entry methods for your giveaway now.
You can choose to add as many actions as you want. Most users will be willing to complete all of the actions in order to get as many entries for your giveaway as possible.
Think back to the goals you set for your giveaway earlier when choosing your giveaway entry actions. You’ll want to choose actions that align with those goals.
To pick your actions, click on the Actions tab. The entry actions are sorted into 3 different groups based on goals: Get More Subscribers, Get More Social Engagement, Get More Traffic.
Simply click on any action you want to add to your giveaway.
Then, you can set entry options for the action. This includes the title for the action, the value (how many entries users will get for the action), and whether the action is mandatory or not. For certain actions, there will also be a field to enter a URL such as your Facebook page URL.
You can add as many actions as you want. Just make sure the most important actions you want users to take are worth the most entries. That way you’ll be able to reach your giveaway goal easier.
To rearrange actions, simply drag and drop them into the desired order.
When you’re finished adding giveaway actions, click Save and continue to the next step.
8. Design Your Giveaway
RafflePress also allows you to customize the design of your giveaway to match your brand and your website.
So, go to the Design tab.
Here you can choose from 2 different layouts, set a background image or color (for landing pages), choose button color, pick different fonts, and so on.
When your giveaway is looking good, click Save.
9. Configure Your Giveaway Settings
Next, you’ll want to configure the giveaway rules. To do this, head to the Settings tab.
Luckily, RafflePress makes it incredibly easy to come up with rules for your giveaway. You can use the Rules Generator Template to create contest rules in an instant.
Click the +Generate Rules button. A window will come up where you can enter the sponsor name, address, email, minimum age to enter, eligible locations, and other details.
The tool will then generate basic contest rules for you.
In the Settings tab you can also configure settings for email verification, success tracking, success redirect, social logins, and more.
10. Publish Your Contest
Now that you’ve finished building your WordPress giveaway, it’s time to make your giveaway live!
To publish your giveaway, simply click on the Publish button at the top of the screen.
On the next screen you’ll find 3 publishing options, which are:
- RafflePress WordPress Block – This option allows you to embed the giveaway widget in your WordPress post or page with the new WordPress block editor.
- WordPress Shortcode – With this choice you can embed the giveaway in the classic WordPress editor, sidebar widgets, or inside your WordPress theme.
- Giveaway Landing Page – This option allows you to create a distraction-free giveaway landing page on your website.
We recommend creating a giveaway landing page. Because a landing page removes all other distractions from the page, users will be more likely to enter your contest. So, it’s a great strategy for getting more contest entries.
Choose the giveaway landing page option, and click View Page to view your new giveaway landing page.
That’s it!
11. Promote Your Giveaway
Now that you have a giveaway landing page, don’t just sit around and wait for people to enter your contest. If you want to get a lot of contest entries, you need to promote your giveaway.
Some of the easiest and best ways to promote your giveaway include:
- Share it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
- Submit it to online sweepstakes and contest directories
- Announce it in an email newsletter
Remember to start promoting your giveaway before it goes live, so you can create a ton of buzz around your giveaway and get a lot of entries on day 1.
12. Pick the Contest Winner
Finally, it’s time to pick a winner for your giveaway. If you’re wondering how to pick a winner for your giveaway, don’t worry, RafflePress makes it simple.
The easiest and most fair way to choose a giveaway winner is by random draw.
So, when your giveaway is over, go to RafflePress » Giveaways and then click on the Needs Winners link next to your giveaway campaign.
Here you can see all of the people that entered your giveaway and how many entries they each have. To pick a random winner, just click the Pick Winner button, select your options, and then click the Choose Winners Now button.
This will instantly highlight a winner.
Now, you can email the winner and make their day by clicking the Email Winner link!
That’s it! Congratulations on running a successful giveaway.
Related Best Email Marketing Platforms.
We hope you enjoyed this guide on how to do a giveaway on WordPress with RafflePress.
You may also want to check out our guide for the best gamification plugins. This will help you add game-like elements to engage visitors to your website.
Or, you can check our guide on the best Rafflecopter alternatives. This post will help you find the best giveaways tools on the market other than Rafflecopter.
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