Recently, on WPBeginner's 4th birthday, we ran the biggest WordPress giveaway of all time. Thanks to the wonderful companies and our users who entered the giveaway, we were able to raise $25,000 to build a school. Some of our readers asked us how they can run giveaways on their own WordPress sites. Giveaways are a great way to increase user engagement and reward readers, while promoting your brand and website. In this article, we will show you how to run a giveaway in WordPress with Rafflecopter.
Rafflecopter provides a simple and easy way to run and manage a giveaway. At the same time, it also makes it easy for your users to join a giveaway with just a few clicks. You can set up tasks for users to perform in exchange for sweepstakes entries. These tasks can be sharing content on social media channels, making comments, joining the mailing list, etc. Each task spreads the word about your website and keeps your users interested. You do not need to edit any code or install a plugin to add a Rafflecopter giveaway to your WordPress site.
Sign up for a Rafflecopter account. The basic account is free, but they have paid plans with additional features. The business plan does not have the Rafflecopter branding on the widget, and it also has some awesome features to increase the viral reach of a giveaway campaign. At WPBeginner, we subscribe to the business plan, because we think it's worth the price. However, if you are not a business user and just starting out, the free plan will work just fine.
After signing up, you will be taken to the Rafflecopter Dashboard. Click +New Giveaway to create your first gift.
On the next page, you will see a form to create your giveaway. The first thing you need to do is give a title for your giveaway. This will help you organize your gifts in the Rafflecopter dashboard. Next, add the prizes you want to the drawing. With the free account you can't add a prize picture, but in most cases you don't need to. Simply add the prize list to your WordPress post or page where you are hosting the giveaway.
The next option is to choose how people can enter the giveaway. There is a checkbox to enable Refer a friend This option is only available for business accounts. Click Add an option to see a list of options you can add. These are tasks that you can ask the user to perform in order to enter your giveaway. You can add multiple options and give your users the opportunity to maximize their chances of winning while spreading the word about your website.
With the free account you can add these options:
With a paid account you can also add these options:
After adding your entry options, the final step is to choose the start and end dates for your giveaway. The goal here is to allow the maximum number of readers to join. We recommend that you run the giveaway for about 7-10 days, but you can choose any limit you like.
Lastly, you need to enter the terms and conditions of the giveaway and that's it. You have successfully created your first giveaway.
Once you have created your gift, click Get Widget button. Rafflecopter will now give you a code that you can paste into WordPress to display the giveaway widget. Copy the code and go to your WordPress admin area. Create a new post or page for your giveaway. Switch to text editor mode and paste the code.
If you are using the visual editor to create your posts, you must switch to the text editor before pasting the Rafflecopter code. If the widget does not appear on your page or post, please refresh the page.
To edit your giveaway, simply login to your Rafflecopter account and edit your giveaway. You don't need to update the code in your WordPress post or page because it will automatically reflect the changes you make in your Rafflecopter account.
Giveaways are successful when you inform all your users. We use the floating footer bar to promote our giveaway on every page of our site.
We also send an email to all our newsletter supporters on how to enter the giveaway. We also share our gifts on social networks and ask all our friends to share it.
Last but not least, we added a prominent floating social bar on our giveaway posts, for others to share.
Rafflecopter is good for 99% of the people out there. Our giveaway was very unusual in that we had over 200 prizes. Most draws have a maximum of 10. If you have a lot of prizes (over 200) like ours, then you're going to run into some trouble like us. First, you will not be able to display the number of winners in the widget. But this is the least of your problems..
If you want to use the random winner picker in Rafflecopter, get ready to work harder. There is no easy way to randomly select winners in bulk. We had to click the Add Winner button over 200 times, so the contest is fair and each person has an equal chance of winning. Again, this isn't too bad when you only have 10 winners like most giveaways.
Also, there is no easy way to export the list of winners. You can export all entries, but not all winners. We wanted to create a spreadsheet with each winner and the prizes associated with the person for our records. We had to do that manually. This again is a specific issue with our giveaway. Doing it for 10 winners isn't too bad, but 200 is.
We hope that Rafflecopter will add the button to choose the winners in bulk and download the list of winners because even when you have 10 winners, this will save you time.
We hope this article helped you start a fabulous giveaway on your WordPress site with Rafflecopter. At WPBeginner, we often give away cool WordPress products, so be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date on our giveaways and other cool WordPress tutorials we post. For comments and questions please leave a comment below.
