How to Do a Back to School Giveaway to Boost Traffic & Sales

Running a back to school giveaway is one of the fastest ways to get attention, build your email list, and drive sales during one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.

I’ve helped launch everything from school supply raffles to gift card giveaways for local shops and online stores. The pattern is always the same: the right prize and the right entry method make the difference between a giveaway that flops and one that brings in real results.

This guide walks you through how to plan, set up, and promote a back to school giveaway that actually works. No developer needed, no expensive tools required.

TL;DR: A successful back to school giveaway needs 3 things: the right prize, a clear goal, and smart entry methods. Use a giveaway plugin like RafflePress to set it up quickly on WordPress, then promote it through your website, email list, and social media. Track the results to see what works, and what to tweak next time.

Quick Steps to Run a Back to School Giveaway:

Step	What to Do
1	Pick a prize that appeals to students or parents
2	Set goals like sales, signups, or traffic
3	Choose entry methods that match your goals
4	Create a giveaway page using RafflePress or SeedProd
5	Promote your giveaway via email, social media, and popups
6	Announce the winner and measure your results

Let’s get started.

Before You Begin

Before you start building your giveaway, make sure you have the following in place:

• A WordPress website to host your giveaway
• The RafflePress plugin installed and activated
• A prize decided (school supplies, gift cards, or a service relevant to your audience)
• An email list or social media following to kick off promotion

How Do You Plan a Back to School Giveaway?

Careful planning is essential for a successful giveaway. This involves selecting the right prize, setting clear rules, and developing a robust promotional strategy to reach your target audience.

Let’s look at each part of the planning process to ensure you’re on the right track.

Pick the Right Prize

What’s a giveaway without a prize? The right prize can attract the right audience and generate enough excitement to potentially go viral.

Make your giveaway prize relevant and enticing to your ideal audience. Consider free school supplies that are essential to starting the new school year, such as:

• Free haircuts
• Back to school backpack
• School bookbag giveaway
• Free food
• Fun activities
• Gift cards
• High school stress ball
• Budget lunch bags

You can even offer to donate to a local nonprofit or food truck for kids experiencing homelessness or who are on a low income. Gestures like this are a great way to give back to your local community while growing your business.

Set Clear Giveaway Goals

Once you know what prize to offer, consider what you hope to achieve with your back to school giveaway. Setting clear and measurable goals is critical to determine your giveaway’s success and guide your strategies and tactics.

Before launching your giveaway, outline what you want to achieve. Your objectives could be increasing brand visibility, boosting sales, growing your email list, or improving customer engagement.

Make your goals specific and measurable. If your goal is to increase sales, specify a target percentage or dollar amount. If you want to grow your email list, set a specific number of new subscribers you wish to acquire.

Here are some back to school giveaway ideas to help you out.

This brings us to choosing the right entry methods for your giveaway, which we’ll explain next.

Choose Entry Methods That Match Your Goals

Your giveaway entry methods are the tasks users should complete for the chance to win your grand prize. These entry methods should align with your giveaway goals. However, each goal may require a different strategy.

Let’s look at a few examples.

• To boost sales, think of ways to convert participants into customers. For instance, you might offer a back to school supply discount to those who didn’t win.

• If growing your email list is your goal, ask participants to sign up for your newsletter to enter the giveaway.

• To boost website traffic, consider methods to draw people to your site, like sharing your back 2 school giveaway on social media or partnering with influencers.
• If you want more social media followers, you can ask participants to follow your social media profiles.
• To collect user-generated content, ask users to submit an image of their back to school bash or first-day-of-school snaps.

Write Simple, Legal Giveaway Rules

Transparency is key in any giveaway, so setting clear rules is essential for managing expectations and keeping your giveaway fair. Clearly state the start and end dates for your back to school giveaway, how to enter, eligibility criteria, and how you’ll select and notify the winners.

You should also ensure your giveaway complies with all local laws and social media platform rules to avoid any legal ramifications.

Pro tip: later in this guide, we’ll share a super easy way to generate giveaway rules automatically. For more information, see our guide on how to write giveaway rules like a pro.

When should you run your back to school giveaway? The optimal launch window is late July through mid-August, ending before the first week of school starts. Running your giveaway for 2 to 3 weeks gives you time to build momentum without losing urgency. Launch too early and the back-to-school energy hasn’t kicked in. Launch too late and families are already in school-mode and less likely to engage.

With your giveaway plan in place, it’s showtime. Now you can start building your giveaway to promote to your target audience.

Build and Launch Your Giveaway

The easiest way to run a giveaway is using a giveaway tool designed specifically for that job. They make setting up and running your giveaway promotion a breeze and include essential actions to help meet your giveaway goals.

RafflePress is a WordPress plugin that lets you create, manage, and embed giveaways directly in your WordPress dashboard, no code required. It is purpose-built for running contests and giveaways, which makes it different from general-purpose form or landing page plugins.

Everything is handled inside your WordPress dashboard. You can get started quickly with a goal-based giveaway template, then customize your giveaway widget using the drag-and-drop builder.

That includes adding your prize details, images, giveaway duration, description, and more.

RafflePress also has countless 1-click entry actions to meet your campaign’s goals, including:

• Social media following
• Social sharing
• Automatic entry
• Newsletter subscription
• Image submission
• Podcast subscription
• Page visiting
• Invent your own

The most effective is the Refer-a-Friend action – a viral loop incentivizing users to refer others to your giveaway for more chances to win. It works by encouraging real people to share your giveaway with friends.

But that’s not all. RafflePress also lets you generate giveaway rules automatically. Simply answer a few questions, and it’ll create rules for you and display them on your giveaway widget.

To help you get started, follow this guide on creating a giveaway in WordPress using RafflePress.

Publish Your Giveaway Page

After setting up your giveaway widget, you’ll need somewhere to display it so users can enter. With RafflePress, you can publish your back to school giveaway in any blog post, page, or widget-ready area with the RafflePress WordPress block or shortcode.

Alternatively, you can use the built-in giveaway landing page feature. Simply give your page a slug in the settings panel, and the plugin will create an instant distraction-free landing page on your WordPress site – no code required!

Another way to create a giveaway page is by using a drag-and-drop page builder. That way, you can add more customizations to your page, such as testimonials, videos, slideshows, and more, to boost entries.

SeedProd is our top choice for this. It’s the best WordPress website and page builder, with over 1 million users.

This user-friendly plugin has a dedicated RafflePress block, allowing you to add your giveaway to a custom page with a few clicks.

Promote Your Back to School Giveaway

Promote your giveaway across at least three channels: send an announcement email to your list on launch day, post daily to your most active social platform for the first three days, and add a popup or banner to your website homepage. Most giveaway traffic comes in the first 48 hours, so front-load your promotion.

Here are some popular giveaway promotion methods you can use:

• Add popups and banners to your website linking to your giveaway page.
• Send email newsletters announcing the giveaway launch.
• Broadcast your free back to school giveaway on social media.
• Partner with influencers and other businesses to increase your giveaway’s reach.
• Send push notifications to remind your subscribers to enter.
• Write a blog post or guest post on other influential websites.

You could even pin up a flyer in your local community center. The goal is to attract as many high-quality leads as possible.

Announce and Contact the Winner

Let’s not forget the moment everyone waits for – the winner announcement.

When your back to school giveaway ends, you’ll need to select and announce the winner to your audience. For this, ensuring the selection process is fair, transparent, and follows any legal requirements is crucial.

Ideally, you should have defined the selection process before launching. However, here are some popular ways to draw a giveaway winner.

If your giveaway involves a random draw, you can use RafflePress’s random winner picker to ensure a fair selection process. Simply enter your criteria, and it’ll randomly select a winner from the list of entrants.

Alternatively, you can judge the winner yourself for creative giveaways like video or photo contests. Again, communicate the criteria clearly to build trust and keep participants engaged.

After choosing the winner, plan a creative and engaging winner announcement to maintain excitement even after the giveaway ends. Be prompt and enthusiastic in your announcement, and congratulate the winner publicly.

Once you’ve announced the winner, follow up to arrange prize delivery. This is also an excellent opportunity to ask for feedback about your giveaway.

Measure Your Results and Learn What Worked

It’s tempting to stop here. However, one more task needs your attention – the results.

Monitor your giveaway metrics to measure its success.

One of the easiest ways to track your results is with MonsterInsights. It’s a WordPress plugin that shows your Google Analytics data right inside your dashboard. You’ll be able to see traffic, conversions, and engagement in just a few clicks.

Look at engagement levels. Are more people visiting your site? Are they interacting with your brand more on social media? Are these increased interactions leading to more sales?

Compare your metrics to the goals you initially set for your giveaway to see if your campaign succeeded. If it didn’t go as planned, you can use this information to improve your next giveaway campaign.

What Mistakes Should You Avoid With a Back to School Giveaway?

Even a well-planned giveaway can fall flat if you hit one of these common traps. Here’s what to watch out for:

• Picking a prize your audience doesn’t actually want. A generic gift card works, but a prize tied to back-to-school needs (school supplies, tutoring sessions, a backpack) will draw higher-quality entrants who are genuinely interested in your brand.
• Skipping a clear end date. Giveaways without deadlines lose urgency fast. Set an end date upfront and include it everywhere: your giveaway widget, your emails, and your social posts.
• Not announcing the winner publicly. Skipping the winner announcement damages trust and makes future entrants hesitant. Post the winner’s name (with their permission) on social media and send a follow-up email to all participants.
• Forgetting to email your list. Your email subscribers are your warmest audience. If you only promote on social media and skip email, you’re leaving your best potential entrants out of the loop.
• Starting too close to the first day of school. If your giveaway ends the same week school starts, families are already overwhelmed with last-minute prep. Aim to wrap up at least a week before school begins so the prize is still useful.

Next Steps

Back to school giveaways can be a goldmine for boosting your brand’s visibility, traffic, and sales. With careful planning, execution, and analysis, your giveaway can easily take your business growth to the next level.

Related Guides

• How to Use Email Marketing to Promote Your Contest
• How to Create a High-Converting Giveaway Funnel
• Contest Metrics That Matter (and How I Track Them)

Ready to run a back to school giveaway of your own?

Get started with RafflePress today!

Note: RafflePress is made for WordPress websites and doesn’t work with other website platforms.

Back to School Giveaway FAQs

How do I track the results of my giveaway?

Track metrics like website traffic, email signups, social engagement, and sales. Tools like MonsterInsights make it easy to view these in your WordPress dashboard.

What if my giveaway doesn’t achieve the desired results?

Use it as a chance to learn. Look at your traffic, conversions, and entries to see where people dropped off. Then tweak your next campaign. Try adjusting the prize, entry methods, or promotional strategy.

Do I need to write legal rules for a back to school giveaway?

Yes, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Your rules should cover eligibility, how to enter, the prize, and the end date. RafflePress has a built-in giveaway rules generator that creates a template you can customize.

How long should a back to school giveaway run?

Two to three weeks works well for most back to school giveaways. Long enough to build momentum, short enough to keep urgency high. Launch in late July or early August so entries peak before the first week of school.

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