How to Run a Giveaway / Contest in WordPress with RafflePress

Do you want to run a giveaway or contest in WordPress?

Running a contest is one of the fastest ways to get more subscribers, customers, and users on your website. With the right tools, you may even be able to create a viral giveaway and reach an even bigger audience.

In this article, we will show you how to easily run a giveaway or contest in WordPress.

Why Run a Giveaway or Contest in WordPress?

There are many ways to get more subscribers, increase traffic, and boost sales on your website. However, running a giveaway gives you instant results.

By running the competition on your WordPress website, you get complete control over the user experience.

It also gives you more flexibility to achieve your goals. For example, running a contest on Instagram may get you more Instagram followers, but it won’t help you get email subscribers.

By contrast, when you run a contest in WordPress you get to choose exactly how visitors enter your contest. By choosing the entry method carefully, you can achieve lots of different goals including:

• Increase your blog traffic
• Get more followers on social media
• Engage with your customers
• Build your email list
• Do lead generation and turn visitors into loyal customers
• Build brand recognition and grow your business

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to run a successful giveaway or contest on your WordPress website.

Plan Your Giveaway Campaign

Before you start, decide what you want to achieve with your giveaway. For example, you might want to promote an event, get more visitors, or make more sales on your online store.

By setting a clear goal, you can design every of the contest to help you reach that target.

You also need to choose a suitable prize that will motivate your target audience to take part in the contest.

The prize doesn’t have to be expensive, but it should reflect your business niche and your customers. For example, if you run a dropshipping business, then you may want to offer a t-shirt or mug with your brand name on it.

If you run a restaurant, then a discounted or free meal could be a great prize.

You can also offer multiple prizes to give people a better chance of winning. This will make your competition more exciting and encourage more visitors to enter.

Once you’ve planned your giveaway, it’s time to set it all up in WordPress.

Setting up a Contest / Giveaway in WordPress

In the early days, WordPress didn’t have many reliable contest plugins. The few third-party services that existed were either too buggy or were simply too expensive.

This changed with RafflePress.

It is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market, and it allows you to easily run giveaways on your WordPress website.

RafflePress comes with integrations for all popular social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so you can use social media contests to grow your site.

RafflePress also comes with 1-click fraud protection and verified actions so you can confident that all entries are genuine.

Let’s set up your first giveaway.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the RafflePress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

There is a free version of RafflePress that makes it easy to run giveaways and competitions no matter what your budget. However, in this guide we’ll be using the premium version since it has more integrations and features.

Upon activation, you’ll see the RafflePress welcome screen in the WordPress dashboard. You can now go ahead and enter your license key.

You’ll find this information in your account on the RafflePress website. Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Verify Key’ button.

After that you’re ready to create your first giveaway by going to RafflePress » Add New.

This will launch the RafflePress giveaway builder.

First, you need to type in a name for your new giveaway campaign. This is just for your reference so you can use anything you want.

Next, choose the template that you want to use. RafflePress has ready-made templates for specific goals such as growing your email list or getting more Instagram followers.

You can choose the template that best suits your goals, but we’ll be using the Classic Giveaway template as it lets us start from scratch.

Simply hover your mouse over a template and then click on the ‘Use this Template’ button when it appears.

RafflePress will now load the template in the builder.

Add Your Giveaway Prize Details

First, you need to let visitors know what they could win. To do this, click on the headline, which shows ‘My Awesome Prize’ by default.

You can then go ahead and type some information about your prize into the ‘Name’ and ‘Description’ fields.

To encourage visitors to enter your competition, it’s a good idea to give them as much information as possible, such as how much the prize is worth and what it has to offer.

You might also add a photo of the prize, so visitors can see what’s at stake. Even simply adding the product’s logo can make the competition more eye-catching.

To do this, simply click on ‘Select Image’ and then either choose an image from the WordPress media library or upload a new file from your computer.

When you’re happy with the information you’ve entered, click on ‘Done Editing.’

Add Your Contest or Giveaway Actions

Giveaway actions are the ways that users can participate in the contest, such as subscribing to your podcast or sharing a post on social media. RafflePress comes with lots of different actions that you can add to your campaign.

You need to choose the actions that will help you achieve your campaign goal. For example, if you want to increase your blog traffic then you might use ‘Share on Facebook’ or ‘Visit a Page’ as your actions.

To see all the actions you can add, simply click on the ‘Actions’ tab in the left-hand menu.

To add an action to your campaign, just give it a click. The action will now appear below your prize details.

You can then configure the action using the settings in the left-hand menu.

Each action has some basic settings. You can type in a title, which will be shown to your visitors, and make the action mandatory so that visitors must complete the action in order to enter your contest. This is useful if plan to offer multiple entry methods, but want to ensure visitors perform one task over all the others.

By default every action is worth one entry, but you can change this to make certain actions more valuable than others. Again, this will encourage visitors to complete a particular action, even if they have a choice of entry methods.

Apart from these options, you will also see settings related to specific actions. For example, if you want users to visit your Facebook page, then you will need to enter the page’s URL.

Once you’ve filled in these settings, you can click on the ‘Add Actions’ tab and add more entry methods to your competition.

You can add as many actions as you like. Giving visitors multiple ways to participate can get you more entries. There may also be some people who complete all the actions to give themselves the best possible chance of winning. In this way, you can achieve multiple goals with a single giveaway.

However, we do recommend prioritizing actions based on your campaign goals. For example, if you want to promote your Instagram page, then it’s a good idea to put the ‘Visit us on Instagram’ action at the very top of the ‘Entry Methods’ list.

Simply hover over the action in the editor and then grab the dotted button that appears to the left of the action. Then, move the entry method using drag and drop.

When you’ve happy with how the giveaway is set up, don’t forget to click on ‘Save’ to store your changes.

Customize Your Giveaway Appearance

Now that your giveaway is set up, you can change how it looks by selecting the ‘Design’ tab.

Here, you can change the fonts, select a new button color, change the background color, and more. You can even customize the giveaway template using custom CSS.

RafflePress will show a live preview of the giveaway so you can see your changes in action. When you’re happy with how it looks, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button.

Adjust Giveaway / Contest Settings

RafflePress has lots of settings you can use to configure how your giveaway runs, including showing and hiding options, setting up tracking, and more.

Let’s take a look at these options by selecting the ‘Settings’ tab.

In ‘General’ you can set the basic options for your giveaway including showing the contest’s winners, the total number of entries, limiting signups based on IP address, and more.

After making your changes, switch to the ‘Giveaway rules’ tab.

RafflePress comes with a Rules Generator that you can use to quickly and easily create giveaway rules for your campaign.

Clicking the ‘Generate Rules’ button will bring up a form where you can enter information about the giveaway.

In most cases, you or your company will be the contest’s sponsor. This means you’ll need to type in the company name, business email address, country, and the eligible locations.
.

RafflePress will then use this information to create some basic giveaway guidelines and rules.

Just be aware that this is a starting point. You’ll still need to make sure your giveaway is following all local laws and guidelines about contests.

Next, switch to the Email Verification tab.

If you’re using the contest to get more subscribers for your email newsletter or mailing list, then it’s a good idea to only accept entries from people who verify their email address.

To do this, simply click on the ‘Contest Must Confirm Their Email’ toggle so that it turns green.

If you use Google Analytics to track user engagement, then you can select the ‘Success Tracking’ tab.

Here, you can add Google Analytics code so you can see exactly how people are interacting with your giveaway.

When a user submits an entry, it’s not the end of the process. You may want to redirect the participant to a specific page such as a custom thank you page or your top-performing blog.

To set up a redirect, select the ‘Success Redirect’ tab and click to activate the ‘Enable Success Redirect’ toggle. You can then add the page to the ‘Redirect URL’ field.

You may want to allow visitors to sign into your giveaway using their Facebook account. This can get you more entries by making it easier to participate in your giveaway.

To allow logging in with Facebook, simply select the ‘Social Logins’ tab and then activate the ‘Allow logging…’ toggle.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union (EU) law that aims to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. If you break GDPR then you could get a fine or even jail time.

Thankfully, RafflePress can help you comply with GDPR by asking for consent before each visitor enters your giveaway. To add this checkbox, simply select the ‘GDPR’ tab and then activate the ‘GDPR Consent’ toggle.

RafflePress has some default text that it will show to visitors, but you can change this if you want. For more on this topic, see our ultimate guide to WordPress and GDRP compliance.

Spam and fake entries can make it harder to achieve your goals. With that in mind, you may want to protect your giveaway form using an invisible recaptcha.

Unlike standard captchas that ask visitors to complete a puzzle, invisible recaptchas run in the background. This allows them to block spam without damaging the visitor experience.

To add an invisible recaptcha to your giveaway, select the ‘Repatcha’ tab. Then, activate the ‘Enable Invisible Recaptcha’ toggle.

To learn more about how recaptcha works, please see our guide on how to how to add recaptcha to WordPress.

When you’re happy with how your contest is set up, click on the ‘Save’ button.

Publish and Add Giveaway to Your Website

Now that your giveaway is ready, it’s time to publish it. You can either:

• Use the RafflePress block to add the giveaway to a blog post or page
• Use shortcode to add the contest to any page, post, or widget-ready area
• Create a giveaway landing page

Let’s check out each of these methods.

Method 1. Using the RafflePress block

To start, simply create a new post or page in WordPress or edit an existing one. Then, In the block editor click on the ‘+’ button and type in ‘RafflePress.’

When it appears, select the RafflePress block.

After adding the block, open the dropdown and choose the giveaway you created earlier.

You can then either publish or update the page to make the contest live on your website.

Method 2. Using the shortcode

RafflePress also has a shortcodes that allows you to add the contest to any page, post, or widget-ready area such as a sidebar.

In the giveaway editor, go ahead and click on the ‘Publish’ tab. From here, click on ‘WordPress Shortcode’ and RafflePress will show the shortcode that you can use.

Simply copy the shortcode and then add it to your website. For more information on how to place the shortcoode, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.

Method 3. Create a giveaway landing page in WordPress

RafflePress also allows you to create a standalone giveaway landing page. This is perfect for sharing on social media or adding to your email newsletter.

In the giveaway editor, select the ‘Publish’ tab. Then, choose ‘Giveaway Landing Page’ and select the ‘Click here…’ link.

In ‘Page Permalink,’ type in the URL where you want to publish the page.

After that, go ahead and click on ‘View.’

RafflePress will now publish your giveaway as a landing page.

If you visit the URL, then you’ll see the giveaway live.

Publicize Your Giveaway / Contest

After creating a giveaway, you’ll want to promote it so more people can enter. Wherever possible, it’s smart to start promoting a contest before publishing it, so you can spread the word and create a sense of excitement.

You can start by sending an email newsletter to your subscribers and announcing the competition on your social media profiles. You can also promote the contest on relevant online communities and forums.

Another option is creating a floating bar with a link to the giveaway using a plugin such as OptinMonster.

You might even create a sense of urgency by adding a countdown timer to the floating bar. In this way, you can use FOMO on your WordPress site to get more participants.

Sending web push notifications can also boost your participants. You can ask your push notification subscribers to enter the competition, or to refer any friends or family members who might want to participate.

Announcing Giveaway Winners

Once your giveaway closes, you need to pick a lucky winner.

To choose a winner at random, simply head over to RafflePress » Giveaways in your WordPress dashboard.

If you didn’t schedule an end date for the contest, then you’ll need to hover over the giveaway and click on the ‘End Now’ link when it appears.

Then, click on ‘Needs Winners.’

On the following page, RafflePress will show all the people who entered your giveaway, along with how they entered, their total entries, and more.

Here, just type in the number of winners that you want to pick.

When you’re ready, go ahead and click on the ‘Choose Winners Now’ button. RafflePress will then show the winner highlighted at the top of the list.

You can now send this person an email to let them know the good news.

That’s all, you have successfully created a giveaway in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily create and run successful giveaways and contests in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert pick of the best email marketing services and how to create a contact form.

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