When WPBeginner turned 14 years previous in 2023, we threw a giveaway to have fun, which is a long-standing custom we’ve been following for over a decade now.
With the giveaway, we wished to say thanks to everybody who helps WPBeginner and use the chance to supercharge our progress
The birthday giveaway was an enormous success. You could be questioning precisely what we did so you should use the identical methodology to develop your individual e mail listing and conversions.
On this article, we are going to share how we deliberate and ran a giveaway on WPBeginner that grew the our e mail subscribers whereas boosting our social media followers and extra.
Observe: This text is a part of our WPBeginner Insider collection, the place we introduce you to the merchandise we use at WPBeginner. We publish WPBeginner Insider each different Thursday.
Why We Used a Giveaway to Develop Our E mail Checklist
Earlier than we get into nitty-gritty particulars of a viral giveaway, you may be questioning why we determined to run a giveaway.
Operating the birthday giveaway within the first week of July, is a long-standing custom we’ve been following for over a decade at WPBeginner.
It’s, certainly, one of many methods we select to present again to the WPBeginner group.
Through the years, we’ve gifted a number of giveaway prizes like laptops, premium WordPress plugins, 1-hour mentoring calls with our CEO, Syed Balkhi, and even an all-expense paid journey to go to him for a 1-1 mentorship.
It’s additionally the time of the yr after we look again on issues we did within the earlier years, talk with our viewers and plan a yr forward.
To have fun the birthday to the fullest with our viewers, we wished to make sure most attain for our giveaway.
We use viral sharing (refer-a-friend) to unfold the phrase out, which in flip additionally helps us supercharge our consumer progress by way of e mail subscribers, social media customers, web site engagement, and extra.
Listed below are the teachings we realized by operating annual birthday giveaways at WPBeginner.
1. Choose the Proper Prize That Connects with the Viewers
The very first thing you must do is select a sexy prize that can generate pleasure and encourage your guests to take part within the giveaway.
So, it’s an excellent thought to decide on a prize that connects with your small business and audience. For instance, many on-line shops award free merchandise, free delivery, or present playing cards.
At WPBeginner, we frequently give away free licenses of WordPress plugins and themes to our winners. Our sister model, WPForms, runs month-to-month giveaways of cool devices resembling MacBooks.
As a result of our 14th birthday was an enormous celebration, we provided an enormous prize: premium plugins price $50,000. On prime of that, we provided a 1-1 mentorship name with WPBeginner founder, Syed Balkhi.
We additionally determined to have a number of winners to encourage our readers and supply them a much bigger likelihood to win.
2. Select the Proper Giveaway Instrument
To create our birthday giveaway, we used RafflePress, which is the WordPress giveaway plugin created by our workforce that permits you to create all types of contests utilizing a easy drag-and-drop editor.
We designed it to make creating giveaways simple, highly effective, and reasonably priced. It additionally integrates with standard social platforms and e mail providers that can assist you create viral giveaways.
Whereas we used the premium model, there’s additionally a free model of RafflePress that you should use to get began. Observe that the free model lacks some superior options, resembling viral sharing, e mail advertising and marketing integrations, and bonus actions.
We shortly created a brand new giveaway utilizing the Traditional Giveaway template. As a substitute of itemizing all the prizes on the entry kind, we simply entered a easy and descriptive title. We then described the prizes in additional element in our birthday weblog submit.
On the plugin’s Setup web page, we entered the beginning date as July 4th, WPBeginner’s birthday, and an finish date 9 days later. That gave our readers loads of time to enter the competition whereas nonetheless being quick sufficient to create a way of urgency.
On the prime of the entry kind, we displayed the consumer’s variety of entries, the entire variety of entries throughout all customers, and the time remaining earlier than the competitors closed.
3. Select a Aim for Your Giveaway
It’s necessary to maintain your giveaway marketing campaign targeted by setting a aim. In the event you goal at nothing, then you definitely’ll most likely hit it.
On-line manufacturers typically use giveaways to encourage their clients to submit opinions on evaluation web sites like Answer Heart, TrustPilot, and G2.com. This helps manufacturers to foster belief amongst their potential clients when the purchasers evaluate the merchandise on-line.
One other standard aim web site homeowners typically set is to rising e mail subscribers. Your e mail listing is essential as a result of it provides you direct entry to our customers’ inboxes and permits you to ship them customized content material, gives, information, and extra.
Truth: In keeping with the Direct Advertising and marketing Affiliation, e mail advertising and marketing, on common, sees a 4300% return on funding (ROI) for companies within the USA.
Equally, you possibly can incentivize customers to hitch you on social media, depart a weblog remark, and extra.
Here’s a screenshot from our final yr’s giveaway:
4. Use Viral Sharing to Supercharge Your Development
Every time we run a birthday giveaway at WPBeginner, we guarantee it’s simple for our readers to unfold the phrase out concerning the giveaway. One of many best methods to unfold the phrase out is with viral sharing, which is a technique of incentivizing customers to supercharge your progress.
It doesn’t matter what your aim is along with your giveaway, you possibly can add the aim as an motion and encourage customers to take that motion. On prime of that, by including social sharing motion, you possibly can carry in additional customers to your giveaway as effectively.
RafflePress actions are the issues that individuals must do to enter your giveaway. They’re the important thing to maximizing your giveaway’s conversions.
RafflePress comes with numerous completely different actions, so that you simply want to decide on those that assist you obtain your targets.
Actions are grouped into ones that allow you to get extra subscribers, get extra social engagement, and get extra site visitors.
For instance, among the actions that may assist you get extra subscribers embrace becoming a member of an e mail e-newsletter, visiting a YouTube channel, and visiting us on Fb. These all align with the targets we set for our giveaway.
You’ll be able to add as many actions as you want. Providing a number of entry strategies encourages extra contributors to enter and might develop your following throughout a number of social media platforms.
RafflePress will monitor how many individuals use these actions individually so you possibly can see what number of new subscribers have been added to your e mail listing and social channels from the giveaway.
We added 11 entry strategies in whole and dragged an important ones to the highest of the listing, beginning with ‘Be part of the WPBeginner E mail E-newsletter’.
After that, we personalized every of those actions.
We gave the e-mail e-newsletter motion a worth of ‘+3’. This provides the consumer 3 entries into the competitors as an alternative of 1. The additional worth will encourage customers to finish this motion as a result of it provides them a much bigger likelihood to win.
We additionally gave greater values to becoming a member of our Fb group (+5) and visiting our YouTube channel (+4) as a result of they align with our targets. We gave ‘Refer a Good friend’ the worth of +4 per referral to encourage customers to share the giveaway with their associates.
In addition to that, we enabled the ‘Set off on Signal Up’ choice. This can mechanically add customers to our e mail listing after they join the giveaway.
The most effective factor is that RafflePress comes with integrations for the most effective e mail advertising and marketing providers, resembling Drip. This saved us a ton of effort and time.
We arrange the ‘Be part of an E mail E-newsletter’ motion to mechanically add customers to our e mail listing.
Observe: Throughout this giveaway, we had been utilizing Mailchimp for our e mail listing, however we’ve since moved to Drip. You’ll be able to try our WPBeginner Insider submit to see why we switched from MailChimp to Drip.
5. Unfold the Phrase Out
We created a brand new submit on WPBeginner speaking about what we achieved in our 14th yr and introducing the competitors.
RafflePress permits you to simply add your giveaway to your WordPress web site utilizing a WordPress block, shortcode, or a devoted touchdown web page.
We selected the block choice as a result of it’s the simplest way.
All we needed to do was drag the RafflePress block into our submit and choose the proper giveaway from the dropdown menu.
This allowed our guests to enter the competitors through the dates that it was lively. As soon as the competitors was closed, it mechanically displayed a notification that ‘This giveaway has ended’ and didn’t enable additional entries.
Subsequent, we promoted the competitors on our social channels, together with Fb, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. We defined the giveaway and linked again to our 14th birthday weblog submit.
It’s at all times a good suggestion to make it clear who’s eligible to take part. RafflePress permits you to generate guidelines and phrases and hyperlinks to them on the backside of the entry kind.
6. Choose Giveaway Winners
If lots of people enter your giveaway or competitors, then selecting a winner may be troublesome and time-consuming. Fortunately, RafflePress makes it simple.
As soon as the competitors is closed, a ‘Choose Winner’ button will seem on the prime of the marketing campaign.
Whenever you click on this button, you’ll be requested what number of winners you need to decide and whether or not to solely think about customers who verified their e mail.
We had an excellent response to our competitors, so we ended up selecting 600 winners, and we additionally allowed unverified emails to win.
Upon clicking the ‘Select Winners Now’ button, RafflePress shortly selected the winners for us, bearing in mind what number of entries every consumer had.
As soon as the winners had been chosen, we contacted every one by e mail. In the event you solely have just a few winners, then you definitely merely click on the ‘E mail Winner’ hyperlink below every successful consumer.
Nonetheless, when you’ve got a whole bunch of winners like we did, then it can save you time by exporting the customers and importing them into your favourite e mail advertising and marketing service.
Lastly, we up to date our weblog submit to state that the competitors was closed and all winners had been contacted.
Closing Ideas
RafflePress works effectively for giveaways of all sizes, even these with tens of 1000’s of entries. We used it for our 14th birthday giveaway celebration, and RafflePress’ superior options and usable interface made the entire course of easy regardless of the 20,000+ contributors.
The free RafflePress plugin comes with a customizable Traditional Giveaway template and is ideal for blogs, non-profits, and new companies trying to develop their social media engagement.
The RafflePress Professional plan additionally connects to the most effective e mail service suppliers, making it your best option if you wish to develop your e mail listing.
Total, we advocate RafflePress for on-line companies and eCommerce shops that want to use giveaways and competitions to get extra subscribers, enhance their social engagement, and enhance their web site site visitors.
Knowledgeable Guides on Utilizing Giveaways in WordPress
Now that you know the way highly effective giveaway may be, you possibly can observe these guides to do the identical by yourself WordPress web site:
Create a Giveaway to Develop Your E mail Checklist by 150%
Run a Giveaway / Contest in WordPress with RafflePress
Add a Fb Giveaway in WordPress to Enhance Engagement
Run a Social Media Contest to Develop Your Web site (Finest Practices)
Create a Viral TikTok Giveaway in WordPress
Do a Twitch Giveaway in WordPress (Step-by-Step)
We hope you discovered this text useful find out how our giveaway generated 5000+ e mail subscribers. You might also need to see our information on confirmed methods to earn money on-line running a blog with WordPress or our professional decide of the most effective social media plugins for WordPress.
In the event you favored this text, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. It’s also possible to discover us on Twitter and Fb.
The submit 6 Tricks to Run a Profitable Viral Giveaway Like WPBeginner (Behind the Scenes) first appeared on WPBeginner.
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