Discover how WPBeginner’s annual birthday giveaway generates massive growth. Learn the strategies, tools, and insights to run your own contest and achieve your marketing goals.
✅Resources✅
👉🏼RafflePress: https://rafflepress.com/
👉🏼Email Marketing ROI reference: https://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/tips-to-run-successful-giveaway/
Discuss the tradition of WPBeginner’s birthday giveaway (over a decade!)
Highlight the goals: thanking the community and growing social/email engagement
Why Run a Giveaway?
Opportunity to give back to your audience and foster loyalty
Chance to reach a wider audience and attract new leads
Lessons Learned from WPBeginner Giveaways
Lesson 1: The Perfect Prize
Must align with your business and target audience
WPBeginner example: WordPress plugins/themes
Consider multiple winners to boost participation
Lesson 2: The Right Tool
RafflePress – flexible, user-friendly WordPress giveaway plugin
Importance of features like viral sharing, email integration
Lesson 3: Set a Clear Goal
Decide your focus: email list growth, social following, etc.
Benefits of email marketing (direct audience access, ROI)
Lesson 4: Viral Sharing for Exponential Growth
RafflePress “actions” to incentivize sharing
Customize actions and points to promote your desired goals
Lesson 5: Promote, Promote, Promote!
Dedicated blog post detailing the giveaway
Social media announcements (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
RafflePress rules/terms for clarity and compliance
Lesson 6: Choosing Winners and Follow-Up
RafflePress simplifies winner selection
Contacting winners and announcing the results
Importing winner data to your email marketing service
Key Takeaways
Giveaways are a powerful way to supercharge your marketing growth
Plan carefully and use the right tools to ensure success
Creativity and a focus on giving back will attract participants
Have you tried giveaway contests to support your business growth? What lessons have you learned? Let us know!
When WP beginner turned 14 years old in 2023 we threw a giveaway to celebrate Which is a long-standing tradition we've Been following for over a decade now With the giveaway we wanted to say thank You to everyone who supports WP beginner And Ed the opportunity to supercharge Our growth the birthday giveaway was a Huge success you may be wondering Exactly what we did so you can use the Same method to grow your own email list And conversions that's what I want to Share with you today I'll cover how we Planned and ran the giveaway on WP Beginner how that grew our email Subscribers and boosted our social media Followers and more but before we get Into nitty-gritty details of a viral Giveaway you might be wondering why we Decided to run one in the first place Well running the birthday giveaway in The first week of July is a Long-standing tradition and it's one We've been following for over a decade At WP beginner it's just one of the ways We choose to give back to our community Over the years we've done several Giveaway that included prizes like Laptops premium WordPress plugins 1-hour Mentoring calls with our CEO Sayad balky And even an all expense paid trip to Visit him for a oneon-one mentorship It's also the time of the year when we Look back on things we did in the
Previous years communicate with our Audience and plan the year ahead to Celebrate the birthday to the fullest With our audience we wanted to make sure We got the maximum reach for our Giveaway we use viral sharing what's Called refer a friend to spread the word This in turn also helps us super charge Our user growth in terms of email Subscribers social media users website Engagement and more now that we've Covered some of the backstory let's talk About some of the lessons we learned by Running annual birthday giveaways at WP Beginner lesson one select the right Prize that connects with the audience The first thing you need to do is choose An attractive prize that will generate Excitement and encourage your visitors To participate in the giveaway make sure To choose a prize that connects with Your business and your target audience For example many online stores give away Free products free shipping or gift Cards at wpb beginner we often give away Free licenses of WordPress plugins and Themes to our winners since our website Is all about WordPress this makes total Sense since our 14th birthday was a big Celebration we offered a big prize Premium plugins worth $50,000 on top of That we offered a one-on wall with WP Beginner founder s ed balky we also Decided to have multiple winners this
Made more people willing to enter since They had a better chance to win Something lesson two choose the right Giveaway tool and to create our birthday Giveaway we use raffle press raffle Press is the WordPress giveaway plugin Created by our partner company you can Create all kinds of contests using their Simple drag and drop editor now while we Use the premium version for things like Viral sharing and email Integrations There is also a free version that you Can use to get started we quickly Created a new giveaway using the classic Giveaway template and instead of listing All of the prizes on the entry form we Just entered a simple and descriptive Title then we used our birthday blog Post to describe the prizes in more Detail we ran the giveaway from July WP Beginners birthday and ended it 9 days Later that gave our readers plenty of Time to enter the contest while still Being short enough to create a sense of Urgency at the top of the entry form we Display the users number of entries the Total number of entries across all users And the time remaining before the Giveaway ended lesson three choose a Goal for your giveaway it's important to Keep your giveaway campaign focused by Setting a goal like we wanted to grow Our email list and grow our social Following your email list is crucial
Because it gives you direct access to Your audience and allows you to send Them personalized content offers news And things like that and just to share a Fun stat according to the direct Marketing Association email marketing on Average sees a 4,300 return on investment for Businesses in the United States if email Is not your thing you can focus on Getting users to join you on social Media leave a Blog comment and more Lesson Four use viral sharing to Supercharge your growth whenever we run A birthday giveaway at WP beginner we Make sure it's easy for our readers to Spread the word out about the giveaway One of the easiest ways to do that is With viral sharing this is a great Method of incentivizing users to Supercharge your growth no matter what Your goal is with your giveaway you can Add the goal as an action and encourage Users to take that action on top of that By adding social sharing action you can Bring in more users to your giveaway as Well raffle press actions are the things That people need to do to enter your Giveaway for example some of the popular Actions include joining your email Newsletter visiting a YouTube channel or Visiting us on Facebook these all align With the goals we set for our giveaway You can add as many actions as you like
Offering multiple entry methods Encourages more participants to enter And can grow your following across Multiple social media platforms raffle Press will track how many people use These actions individually so you can See how many new subscribers have been Added to your email list and social Channels from the giveaway we added 11 Entry methods in total and dragged the Most important ones to the top of the List starting with join the wp beginner Email newsletter after that we Customized each of these actions we gave The email newsletter action a value of Three this gives the user three entries Into the competition instead of one the Extra value will encourage users to Complete this action because it gives Them a bigger chance to win and we did Similar values to joining our Facebook Group visiting our YouTube channel and Doing a refer a friend action besides That we enabled the trigger on signup Options this will automatically add Users to our email list when they sign Up for the giveaway lesson five spread The word we created a new post on WP Beginner talking about what we achieved In our 14th year and introduced the Competition we added the raffle press Giveaway to the post you can also use a Dedicated landing page if you want then We promoted the competition on Facebook
Twitter LinkedIn and Pinterest we Explained the giveaway and linked back To our 14th birthday blog post some Social sites like Facebook are very Particular about running contests so It's always a good idea to make it clear Who is eligible to participate with Raffle press you can generate rules and Terms and links to them at the bottom of The entry form lesson six picking the Winners if a lot of people enter your Giveaway or competition then choosing a Winner can be difficult and timec Consuming luckily raffle press makes it Easy Once the competition is closed a Pick winner button will appear at the Top of the campaign when you click this Button it will ask you how many winners You want to pick and if you want to only Consider users who verified their email We had a great response to our Competition so we ended up picking 600 Winners and we also allowed unverified Emails to win upon clicking the choose Winners Now button raffle press quickly With randomly pick the winners we Contacted each one by email but if you Only have a few winners then you simply Click the email winner link under each Winning user however if you have Hundreds of winners like we did then you Can save time by exporting the users and Importing them into your favorite email Marketing service finally we updated our
Blog post to state that the competition Was closed and all winners had been Contacted overall the giveaway was a Huge success for growing our email list And our social following and having Something like raffle press to handle The technical parts of the giveaway made It super easy these are just some tips We've learned for running successful Giveaways by following these guidelines You can use giveaways to effectively Grow your audience build your brand and A achieve your WordPress goals and Remember giveaways are all about giving Back to your community and building Relationships so have fun with it and be Creative
