RafflePress

WPBeginner has been organizing giveaways for years, so we like to think we know a thing or two about running a successful contest. In fact, our latest competition attracted over 26000 entries, making it our biggest giveaway ever!

So, what’s the secret to running a successful contest? We find it all comes down to choosing the right giveaway plugin.

Not sure where to start? In this RafflePress review we’re putting a popular plugin to the test. We’ll be exploring its features, support, and pricing, to see if it’s the right WordPress giveaway plugin for you.

RafflePress Review: Why Use It in WordPress?

RafflePress is a popular WordPress giveaway and contest plugin that can run all kinds of competitions.

It integrates with all the top social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so you can use social media contests to grow your site. RafflePress also connects with all the top email marketing platforms, so you can automatically add participants to your mailing list.

To help you create professionally designed contests fast, RafflePress has a library of templates for all the most popular giveaways. For example, it has templates to grow your email list, TikTok following, and YouTube channel.

After choosing a template, you can customize it using the RafflePress drag and drop editor.

You’ll also get a ton of powerful features like 1-click fraud protection, success tracking, retargeting, email verification, giveaway landing pages, and much more.

There is a free version of RafflePress that makes it easy to run giveaways and competitions no matter what your budget.

This free plugin comes with a Classic Giveaway template that allows you to create simple competitions. It also has essential actions that can get you more engagement across the major social media platforms.

However, if you want to unlock additional features including email marketing integrations, giveaway landing pages, social logins, and more, then you’ll need to upgrade to the premium RafflePress plugin.

RafflePress Review: Is It the Right Giveaway Plugin For You?

There are plenty of WordPress giveaway plugins in the market, but they may not have the features you need to create a successful viral contest.

With that being said, in this RafflePress review we’ll look at its features, support options, and more.

1. Professionally-Designed Giveaway Templates

Creating a competition from scratch can be daunting, especially if you’ve never run a contest before. The good news is that RafflePress comes with built-in templates that can help you create a giveaway within minutes, without any previous experience.

RafflePress has templates for all the most popular kinds of giveaways.

These templates are designed to help you achieve a specific goal, such as getting more Facebook engagement. This makes it easy to choose the right template for your campaign.

Most of the RafflePress templates come with built-in actions, which is how participants enter the giveaway.

For example, the ‘Grow Your Facebook Following’ template has two actions: Visit us on Facebook, and Visit Facebook Post / Video. You can always add more actions, but this is a great starting point for a Facebook giveaway.

The templates also have built-in login methods so visitors can easily enter the giveaway, placeholder messaging, and areas where you can add your own custom logo and branding.

All the templates are fully customizable, so you can add your own content, login methods, and actions, to create exactly the right giveaway for your WordPress website.

If you can’t find a template that perfectly matches your goal, then there’s also a Classic Giveaway template. This is designed to give you a solid starting point for all kinds of campaigns, so you don’t need to start from scratch.

2. Drag and Drop Editor

As highlighted in this RafflePress review, the plugin has a drag and drop giveaway builder that allows you to build viral contests without having to write code or hire a WordPress developer.

After choosing a template, RafflePress opens that design ready for you to edit. To get started, simply click on the heading area.

You can then type in the headline and description you want to show to visitors.

You might also add a photo of the prize, so visitors can see what’s at stake. All of this can help catch the visitor’s attention and get you more entries.

After that, you can set a start and end date for your giveaway using the settings in the left-hand menu.

This allows you to schedule all your giveaways in advance. It also guarantees that your contests will start and end on time, no matter how busy you get. This kind of automated workflow can save you a ton of time and effort.

Depending on the template you’re using, RafflePress may have already added one or more actions to the giveaway, but you can always add more.

By offering visitors a choice, you can often boost the number of entries you get. For example, if you use the ‘Follow us on Twitch’ action, then some people may not have a Twitch account. With that in mind, you may want to add some more actions, such as subscribing to your podcast or completing a survey in WordPress.

Many people will increase their chances of winning by using more than one entry method, so it’s a great idea to offer multiple actions.

To do this, simply select the ‘Actions’ tab. You’ll then see a list of all the different ways that visitors can enter a RafflePress giveaway, such as leaving a comment, subscribing to your RSS feed, or visiting your latest Instagram post.

If you do offer visitors a choice, then you may want to make some methods more appealing than others.

By default, every action is worth one entry, but you can change this. For example, the following image shows a giveaway that’s designed to get more Twitch followers. In this case, you might make the ‘Follow us on Twitch’ action worth two entries.

You could also make a particular action mandatory, while all other entry methods are optional.

By default, RafflePress will show the actions in the order you add them to your competition, but you can change their order using drag and drop.

When you’re happy with how the giveaway is set up, you can change how it looks by clicking on the ‘Design’ tab. Here, you can change the fonts, select a new button color, edit the background color, add a background image, and more.

When you’re happy with how the giveaway looks, you can configure the giveaways settings by selecting the ‘Settings’ tab.

Here, you can customize the giveaway URL, choose to hide or show the total number of entries, use Google Analytics to track user engagement, add a GDPR consent checkbox, and much more.

3. Allow 1-Click Entries for Your Participants

If a giveaway is easy to enter, then you’ll typically get more participants. That said, no RafflePress review would be complete without taking a look at its 1-click entry.

By default, visitors can enter a RafflePress giveaway by clicking on a ‘Use Your Email’ button. They can then type in their name and email address, which is perfect if you want to do lead generation or grow your email list.

Already, this allows people to enter your giveaway within just a few minutes.

However, you can also enable Facebook login in the RafflePress settings.

This adds a ‘Login with Facebook’ button, so visitors can enter the giveaway using their Facebook account. If they’re already logged into Facebook then they can typically enter your giveaway with just a few clicks.

In fact, visitors can perform almost every giveaway action with 1 click. For example, you can add easy entry options for Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, Pinterest, and more.

By removing friction from the user experience, RafflePress can help you get a ton of participants and achieve your goals.

4. Grow Your Email List with Viral Giveaways

People who sign up for your emails are already interested in your products and services, so they’re highly likely to convert into paying customers. However, it’s not always easy to get people to join your email list.

With that in mind, RafflePress has a ready-made Grow Your Email List template that you may want to use.

It also has a ‘Join an Email Newsletter’ action that you can add to any giveaway. This action even has a ‘Trigger on Sign Up’ setting that will automatically add giveaway participants to your email list.

Here, RafflePress integrates with all the best email providers, such as Mailchimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact. This allows you to connect RafflePress to your favorite email marketing provider.

In the left-hand menu, simply choose the integration you want to use.

RafflePress will then walk you through the process of connecting RafflePress to your email marketing service. After making this connection, RafflePress will automatically collect email addresses and add them to your mailing list.

For more tips, see our guide on how to create a giveaway to grow your email list by 150%.

If you’re using RafflePress to collect leads, then you’ll want to check that the participant’s email address is genuine. It’s also smart to enable verification if you plan to notify the winner via email.

You can quickly and easily enable email verification in the RafflePress settings.

RafflePress will then send an email to every person who enters the giveaway, with a link to confirm their address.

If a participant doesn’t confirm their address, then RafflePress will still show their entry in the dashboard. However, it’ll display their address as unverified.

When it’s time to pick a winner, you can easily filter out all the unverified email addresses.

Pro Tip: If your verification emails aren’t getting delivered as expected, then there may be a problem with your server or settings. With that in mind, we recommend using an SMTP service provider to improve email deliverability rates.

In the RafflePress settings, there’s also an option to enable opt-in confirmation, so you can get permission before adding participants to your email list. This helps you comply with important data regulations laws, including GDPR.

5. Boost Your Social Media Followers

Do you want to create a more effective content plan?

When people follow you on social media, you have the opportunity to show them your latest blogs, products, sales, and other important content. This encourages them to visit your website, which will increase your blog traffic.

A high follower count is also a great form of social proof, so growing your following can make your business seem more trustworthy and genuine. This will encourage more people to buy from your online store, visit your website, and follow your social media accounts.

RafflePress comes with a long list of actions that can grow your following across multiple social media platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

You can even add multiple actions to the same giveaway, and promote several platforms in a single campaign.

As already highlighted in this RafflePress review, you can make certain actions more appealing by marking them as mandatory or offering more entries compared to other actions.

6. Get More Social Media Shares and Engagement

Social media engagement can introduce your brand to new people and help you reach a wider audience. For example, if someone shares your giveaway on Instagram then all their friends and family will see it. Some of these people may decide to visit your WordPress blog, start following you on Instagram, or even enter your giveaway.

With that in mind, RafflePress has lots of actions that are designed to get engagement across all the major social media platforms. For example, it has ‘Share on Facebook’ and ‘Share on Linkedin’ actions.

There are also actions such as ‘Visit us on Instagram’ and ‘Visit a YouTube Channel.’

These may not automatically get you more likes, comments, and shares. However, once participants arrive on your social media pages there’s always a chance they might engage with it in some way.

Another option is RafflePress’ a refer-a-friend campaign.

This creates a unique referral link that participants can share across social media, similar to an affiliate link.

Every time someone clicks the link and enters the giveaway, the original participant gets an extra entry. In this way, you can encourage people to promote your giveaway across all their social platforms, potentially multiple times.

To help you get started, RafflePress has a Refer-A-Friend Giveaway template that already has many of the settings and actions you’ll need to go viral.

RafflePress also has a ‘Refer a Friend – Viral’ action that you can add to any giveaway.

To make it even easier to post the link, you can add social share buttons.

Giveaway participants can then share their unique link to Facebook, Twitter, and more with just a few clicks.

In this way, you can encourage people to post the link across all the major platforms.

Finally, if you’re worried that some participants may try to cheat or manipulate the system, then you can set a limit on how many entries someone can get via referrals.

This can keep the competition fair, while still encouraging participants to share referral links.

7. Automatically Set Up Giveaway Rules

It’s important to set some giveaway rules, so visitors will know whether they’re eligible to participate in the contest.

RafflePress comes with a built-in rule generator that can automatically create rules for your giveaway, so you don’t need to write these guidelines manually.

In the RafflePress settings, simply type in some information about the contest’s sponsor. In most cases, you or your company will be the sponsor, although sometimes you may partner with other businesses.

Just type in the sponsor’s name, business email address, country, eligible locations, and the minimum age that participants must be to enter.

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

Depending on your giveaway, you may still need to fine-tune the rules so you don’t break any local laws, or any guidelines for platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, this gives you a great starting point and can save you a ton of time.

8. Protect Your Giveaway Against Spam Entries

Without proper protection, spam bots may complete your giveaway form and make it difficult to achieve your goals.

While competition spam may be less noticeable than comment spam and contact form spam, it can still cause problems. In particular, lots of dummy email addresses can make it difficult to measure the success of your future email marketing campaigns.

In addition, almost all email marketing services charge based on your number of subscribers. With that in mind, you don’t want to end up paying for subscribers who are just bots.

To help you out, RafflePress offers multiple ways to protect your contest against spam. As already mentioned, you can enable email verification to check that participants are using genuine email addresses.

You can also protect your giveaway form with an invisible reCAPTCHA.

This reCAPTCHA works in the background and only appears when it detects suspected spam. In this way, you can block fraud signups without adding friction to the visitor experience.

For more on this topic, please see our guide on how to add reCAPTCHA to WordPress.

9. Easily Add the Giveaway to Your Website

When you’re happy with how the giveaway looks, you can add it to any page, post, or widget-ready area using either a shortcode or the built-in RafflePress block.

The easiest method is to add the RafflePress block in the WordPress content editor, and then choose a giveaway from the dropdown menu.

Another option is to add the contest using shortcode. This may be a good option if you want to show the contest in multiple locations, as you can simply paste the same shortcode into every page, post, or widget-ready area.

RafflePress automatically creates a unique shortcode for each giveaway. You can find this information by selecting the ‘Publish’ tab in the RafflePress editor.

For more information on how to place the shortcode, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.

Another option is to create a landing page. This will show your giveaway with no other content, so visitors aren’t distracted by your sidebar, banners, or navigational menus.

Since this is a standalone page, you can easily share it on social media, add it to your email newsletter, post it on a forum, and more.

To create a landing page, you simply need to type in the URL you want to use as a permalink.

RafflePress will then go ahead and publish the giveaway as a landing page.

10. Manage and View Giveaway Entries in One Place

After publishing your giveaway, you’ll need a way to manage your entries.

RafflePress has a dashboard that shows an overview of your different contests. This includes the total number of entries, start date, and end date.

This overview is particularly useful if you run multiple competitions at once, or you schedule all campaigns in advance.

Here, you can also compare your different campaigns and easily identify the giveaways that get the most entries. You can then use this insight to create more successful campaigns in the future.

You can also see a list of all the people who entered each giveaway. This includes their name, email address, and whether it’s a verified or unverified address.

Sometimes, you may need to share this information with people who don’t have access to the WordPress dashboard. For example, you might run a WordPress development agency or marketing company and need to share the data with your clients.

RafflePress can export the users and entries as a CSV file, with the click of a button.

This can also help you import user information into a separate program, such as your learning management system or customer relationship management app.

11. Automatically Pick a Random Winner

RafflePress comes with a built-in random winner generator, so you don’t need to use a third-party service.

As soon as the giveaway is over, RafflePress shows a ‘Needs Winner’ link next to that contest.

Simply type in how many winners you want RafflePress to pick.

If you’ve enabled email verification, then RafflePress can even filter out all unverified email addresses. In this way, you can avoid choosing spam entries as the contest winners.

If you plan to contact the prize winner via email, then it’s also a good idea to filter out unverified email addresses.

12. Track Your Giveaway Landing Pages and Retarget Visitors

Sometimes, it can be difficult to measure a contest’s success.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track user engagement, then you can easily add tracking scripts to your RafflePress giveaways. This allows you to record how many people visit the giveaway page, the time they spend on the page, and how many visitors convert.

You can then track your campaign directly from the Google Analytics dashboard. For more information, please see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Similarly, RafflePress also lets you add retargeting pixels. For example, you can use the Meta retargeting pixel to run ads and bring participants back to your website.

13. Community and Professional Support

As we’ve already seen in this RafflePress review, you can create all kinds of campaigns using the drag and drop builder and ready-made templates. However, sometimes you may still need a helping hand or have outstanding questions.

If you prefer to do your own research, then RafflePress has detailed online documentation that you can access at any time of the day or night.

There’s also a RafflePress blog.

Here, you’ll find posts on specific RafflePress features, plus guides on how to create a WooCommerce giveaway, run a viral TikTok giveaway, and more.

Even better, you can access all these resources no matter whether you’re using the free RafflePress plugin or you purchase a premium license.

If you do upgrade to RafflePress Plus or higher, then you’ll get professional support. Simply raise a ticket in your account and the RafflePress team will aim to respond within 24 hours, Monday-Friday.

RafflePress Review: Pricing

If you’re looking for a free giveaway plugin, then you can download RafflePress Lite from the WordPress repository.

This plugin comes with the Classic Giveaway template and a generous selection of free actions. However, if you want to unlock all the templates, customize the giveaway’s design, and unlock more advanced actions, then you’ll need to upgrade to a premium license.

There are four RafflePress plans to choose from:

• Plus. $39.50 per year, to use on a single website.
• Pro. For $99.50 per year, the Pro plan adds email marketing integrations, support for mandatory actions, and allows participants to upload files. This is perfect for creating photo contests.
• Growth. You can use RafflePress on up to 20 websites, for $199.50 per year. The Growth plan also unlocks the refer-a-friend action and social logins, and you can create landing giveaway pages.
• Ultimate. With this $499.50 lifetime license, you can use RafflePress on as many websites as you want, forever.

How WPBeginner Uses RafflePress

At WPBeginner, we use RafflePress to run all our competitions including our 14th birthday giveaway celebration.

As part of this contest, we gave away premium plugins worth $50,000 and collected tens of thousands of leads. Even better, thanks to RafflePress’ advanced features and great user experience, the whole process felt effortless despite the 20,000+ participants.

RafflePress Review: Is it Worth It?

After looking at all the features in this RafflePress review, we’re confident that it’s the best contest and giveaway plugin for WordPress. It has everything you need to create all kinds of contests with multiple entry methods.

If you’re just getting started with contests, then there’s a free RafflePress plugin that comes with a fully-customizable Classic Giveaway template. This is a great starting point for blogs, non-profits, or new businesses that are looking to get more engagement on social media.

Do you want to build your email list? Then the RafflePress Pro plan connects to all the best email service providers, so you can automatically add participants to your lists.

Meanwhile, if you want to create viral giveaways, then RafflePress Growth comes with the refer-a-friend action. This is the best way to drive as many people as possible to your giveaway, and reach an entirely new audience.

Finally, if you’re a marketer or manage multiple client websites, then RafflePress Ultimate is great value for money. It allows you to use RafflePress on an unlimited number of websites, including client sites, for as long as you want.

We hope this RafflePress review helped you decide whether it’s the best giveaway plugin for WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site, or see our expert pick of the best popup plugins.

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