In 2023, to celebrate CanadaCreate’s 14th anniversary, we hosted a giveaway, continuing a cherished tradition we’ve maintained for over ten years.
A common question I receive is why we choose to host giveaways at CanadaCreate.
With this giveaway, I aimed to express gratitude to our supporters and leverage the event to accelerate our growth.
The birthday giveaway was incredibly successful. You might be curious about the strategies I implemented that you can apply to enhance your own email list and conversion rates.
In this article, I will outline the planning and execution of a giveaway at CanadaCreate that significantly increased our email subscribers and boosted our social media following.
Important Note:This article is part of ourCanadaCreate Insiderseries, where we share insights into our practices at CanadaCreate.
The Reasons Behind Our Giveaways for Email List Growth
Before diving into the detailed aspects of a successful giveaway, you may be curious about my motivation for launching this event.
Hosting the birthday giveaway during the first week of July has been a beloved tradition I’ve upheld for over a decade at CanadaCreate.
It truly is one of the ways I aim to give back to the CanadaCreate community.
Throughout the years, we have offered a variety of giveaway prizes, including laptops, premium WordPress plugins, one-hour mentoring sessions with me, and even an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida for personalized mentorship.all-expensespaid trip to Florida, where I reside, allowing me to provide one-on-one mentorship.
This time of year, I reflect on past achievements, engage with our audience, and strategize for the upcoming year.
To fully celebrate this occasion with our audience, I aimed to maximize the reach of our giveaway.
I utilize viral sharing techniques, such as refer-a-friend, to amplify our message, which significantly boosts our growth in email subscribers, social media followers, website engagement, and more.
Here are the insights I’ve gained from hosting annual birthday giveaways at CanadaCreate.
1. Choose the Right Prize That Resonates with Your Audience
The first step is to select an appealing prize that generates excitement and motivates your visitors to join the giveaway.
At CanadaCreate, I frequently give away free licenses for WordPress plugins and themes to our winners. Additionally, I host giveaways across several of my other brands; for instance, WPForms conducts monthly giveaways featuring exciting gadgets like MacBooks.
To celebrate our 14th anniversary, we hosted a major giveaway featuring premium plugins valued at $50,000.
I also opted for multiple winners to motivate our readers and enhance their chances of winning.
One important lesson I’ve learned is that giveaways don’t always need to be costly, but they should be engaging. Select a prize that resonates with your business and target audience. For instance, many online retailers offer free products, complimentary shipping, or gift cards.
2. Select the Ideal Giveaway Tool
For our anniversary giveaway, I utilized RafflePress, one of my own products. This WordPress giveaway plugin allows you to create various contests effortlessly with a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.
RafflePress is crafted to engage users in giveaways while simultaneously boosting our email list, website traffic, and social media following.
Regardless of the giveaway plugin you choose, ensure it encourages visitors to submit multiple entries to enhance their winning chances.
While I opted for the premium version, RafflePress also offers a free version that you can use to begin your giveaway journey. Check out our comprehensive RafflePress review for more information.
I quickly set up a new giveaway using the Classic Giveaway template. Instead of detailing all the prizes on the entry form, I opted for a simple and engaging title. I provided a more comprehensive description of the prizes in our birthday blog post.
On the plugin’s Setup page, I set the start date to July 4th, coinciding with CanadaCreate’s birthday, and the end date to 9 days later. This timeline allowed our readers ample opportunity to enter the contest while maintaining a sense of urgency.
At the top of the entry form, I showcased the number of entries each user had, the total entries from all users, and the countdown to when the competition would close.
3. Define a Clear Goal for Your Giveaway
Setting a clear goal is essential for keeping your giveaway campaign on track. If you don’t aim for anything specific, you’re likely to achieve nothing.
Brands often leverage giveaways to motivate customers to leave reviews on platforms like Solution Center, TrustPilot, and G2.com. This strategy helps establish trust with potential customers as they evaluate products online.
Another common goal that website owners frequently pursue is increasing email subscribersBuilding your email list is essential as it provides direct access to your audience’s inboxes, enabling you to send personalized content, special offers, updates, and more.
Fact: The Direct Marketing Association reports that email marketing generates an average return on investment (ROI) of 4300% for businesses in the United States.
You can also encourage users to connect with you on social media, leave comments on your blog, and engage in other activities.
Take a look at this screenshot from last year’s giveaway:
4. Leverage Viral Sharing to Accelerate Your Growth
When I host a birthday giveaway at CanadaCreate, I make it easy for our readers to share the giveaway with others throughviral sharing, which is an effective strategy to boost your growth.
Regardless of your giveaway objectives, you can incorporate them as anactionand motivate users to participate. Additionally, by including social sharing actions, you can attract more participants to your giveaway.
RafflePress actions are the steps users must take to enter your giveaway, and they are crucial for maximizing your giveaway’s conversion rates.
RafflePress offers a variety of actions, so you can select the ones that align with your goals.
We categorize actions to help you gain more subscribers, enhance social engagement, and increase traffic.
For instance, actions that can boost your subscriber count include signing up for an email newsletter, visiting our YouTube channel, and following us on Facebook. These actions align perfectly with the objectives of our giveaway.
You can include as many actions as you want. Providing multiple entry options encourages more participants to join and can expand your audience across various social media platforms.
RafflePress will monitor the number of participants engaging with each action, allowing you to track how many new subscribers have joined your email list and social media channels through the giveaway.
I included a total of 11 entry methods and prioritized the most significant ones at the top of the list, starting with ‘Join the CanadaCreate Email Newsletter’.
Next, I tailored each of these actions to fit our strategy.
I assigned a value of ‘+3’ to the email newsletter action. This means users receive 3 entries into the competition instead of just 1. This added value motivates users to complete this action, increasing their chances of winning.
I assigned higher point values for joining our Facebook group (+5) and visiting our YouTube channel (+4) as they support our objectives. I also valued ‘Refer a Friend’ at +4 points per referral to motivate users to share the giveaway with their friends.
Additionally, I activated the ‘Trigger on Sign Up’ feature, which automatically adds users to our email list upon signing up for the giveaway.
One of the best features of RafflePress is its integration with top email marketing services like Drip, which saved us significant time and effort.
I configured the ‘Join an Email Newsletter’ action to ensure users are automatically added to our email list.
Important Note:During this giveaway, we were using Mailchimp for our email list, but we have since transitioned to Drip. You can read our CanadaCreate Insider article to understand why we made the switch from Mailchimp to Drip.
5. Promote the Giveaway
I published a new post on CanadaCreate highlighting our achievements in our 14th year and announcing the competition.
RafflePress allows you to seamlessly integrate your giveaway into your WordPress website using a WordPress block, shortcode, or a dedicated landing page.
All we needed to do was drag the RafflePress block into our post and select the appropriate giveaway from the dropdown menu.
This feature allowed our visitors to participate in the competition during its active period. After the competition ended, a notification appeared stating ‘This giveaway has ended,’ preventing any further entries.
We promoted the competition across our social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. We provided details about the giveaway and linked back to our blog post celebrating our 14th birthday.
It’s essential to clearly define who can enter the giveaway. RafflePress allows you to create rules and terms, which can be linked at the bottom of the entry form.
6. Selecting Giveaway Winners
When many participants enter your giveaway or competition, selecting a winner can be challenging and time-consuming. Fortunately, RafflePress simplifies this process.
After the competition concludes, a ‘Pick Winner’ button will appear at the top of the campaign.
Clicking this button prompts you to specify how many winners you’d like to select and whether to include only those users who have verified their email.
By clicking the ‘Choose Winners Now’ button, RafflePress quickly selects the winners for us, considering the number of entries each participant had.
After selecting the winners, we reached out to each one via email. For a small number of winners, you can easily click the ‘Email Winner’ link beneath each winning entry.
If you have a large number of winners, like we did, you can streamline the process by exporting the winners and importing them into your preferred email marketing platform.
We also updated our blog post to inform readers that the competition has ended and all winners have been notified.
Conclusion
RafflePress is effective for giveaways of any size, including those with tens of thousands of entries. I utilized it for our 14th birthday giveaway celebration, and its advanced features and user-friendly interface made managing over 20,000 participants a breeze.
The free RafflePress plugin includes a customizable Classic Giveaway template, making it ideal for blogs, non-profit organizations, and new businesses aiming to enhance their social media presence.
The RafflePress Pro plan integrates with top email service providers, making it an excellent choice for anyone looking to expand their email list.
In summary, we highly recommend RafflePress for online businesses and eCommerce stores seeking to leverage giveaways and competitions to gain more subscribers, enhance social interaction, and boost website traffic.
Comprehensive Guides for Implementing Giveaways on WordPress
We hope this article has helped you learn how to execute a successful viral giveaway. You may also want to explore these guides to achieve similar results on your own WordPress site:
- How to Create a Giveaway That Increases Your Email List by 150%
- How to Organize a Giveaway or Contest in WordPress Using RafflePress
- How to Incorporate a Facebook Giveaway in WordPress to Enhance Engagement
- Best Practices for Running a Social Media Contest to Expand Your Website
- Steps to Create a Viral TikTok Giveaway in WordPress
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting a Twitch Giveaway in WordPress
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