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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Do you want to run a giveaway to grow your list?
An email giveaway is an easy way to get more subscribers by offering the chance to win a prize. To take part, users need to sign up with their email address, which helps grow your subscriber list.
We’ve run many email giveaways over the years, which have grown our list impressively. Today, we’ll use that knowledge to show you how to do the same for your email list in WordPress.
How to Grow Your Email List with Giveaways:
Running an email giveaway has several benefits besides being a quick way to increase your subscribers. Here’s what we’ve learned in our experience running them:
According to OptinMonster, checking their email is the first thing people do every day. In fact, 58% of users check their email before social media or the news.
If that isn’t enough proof, check out how Agile’ grew their client’s email List by 52% with giveaways.
As you can see, running a giveaway can have massive potential to boost business awareness and increase product revenue.
You can’t build a giveaway to grow your email list without first taking some necessary steps. So follow the steps below to get started and run a successful contest.
Successful giveaways don’t happen by accident. Before you start building your contest, take some time to plan your strategy.
Ask yourself questions like:
Once you have this information, you’ll have a better idea of how a giveaway can help grow your business.
Your target audience is a group of people most likely interested in your business. These are the people you ultimately want to buy your products or services, so defining them is essential.
The easiest way to define your target audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents your ideal customer and includes details of the personality, lifestyle, and interests that inform their buying decisions.
Include the following details in your buyer persona:
For example, if I was creating a persona for a new budgeting app, I might write something like this:
You’ll better understand who your ideal audience is with the above information. That will help with targeting your email giveaway to the right people online.
The next thing you’ll need to run a giveaway email campaign is an email marketing service provider. An email service provider is a company that lets you collect email addresses (email list), so you can send your list email campaigns that promote your business and, of course, your giveaway newsletter.
When you run your giveaway, you’ll connect to your email service provider, so anyone who subscribes as a result of entering will end up on your list. It’s one of the easiest ways to start building an email list, and most tools come with email automation to help with your business growth.
For example, you can create a:
Here’s a list of the best email marketing services for small businesses to help you decide which platform is right to build your email list with.
Once you’ve defined your ideal audience and picked an email marketing service, you’ll need a powerful contest builder to help run your giveaway.
While there are many options to choose from, RafflePress is my favorite. It’s one of the best giveaway plugins for WordPress users to grow their email list, site traffic, and social media followers.
RafflePress makes it easy to create and run a successful giveaway. It includes everything you need to skyrocket your email subscribers.
Plus, it integrates with the most popular email marketing providers, so you can create your email giveaway quickly and without hassle.
Later in this guide, I’ll walk you through setting up RafflePress and using it to launch a giveaway that attracts email subscribers.
Before you start, get your copy of RafflePress here so you have everything you need to get up and running.
With your target audience, email marketing service, and giveaway builder in place, your next step is to choose a prize that resonates with your audience.
If you don’t have a great prize, people won’t put in the effort to enter your giveaway. So make sure you pick a prize that will attract a lot of attention.
Your prize should also be relevant to your brand and audience. Otherwise, people will not be interested enough in your brand to stay.
So, it’s a delicate balance between making the prize desirable enough to draw in an audience and relevant enough to create genuine interest in your business.
Here are a few prize ideas I’ve curated to get you started:
For even more inspiration, check out our list of contest prize ideas.
The next step is to create rules and logistics that will keep the contest fair.
Usually, you’d start with figuring out the type of contest you’ll run, such as running a simple contest where people only have to enter to win.
Since you already know you want to do a giveaway to grow your email list, it’s clear that you’ll require participants to subscribe to your email list in return for a giveaway entry.
You’ll also need to include the following details in your giveaway rules:
For help with this step, see our complete guide on writing giveaway rules.
After planning your contest, choosing a prize, and setting out your rules, it’s time to build your email giveaway.
To create your giveaway, click here to get started with RafflePress. Then, follow these instructions to install a WordPress plugin on your website.
Once you’ve installed and activated RafflePress, hover your mouse over the RafflePress logo and click Add New to create a new giveaway.
Upon clicking, you’re taken to a page where you can enter your contest name and choose a giveaway template.
First, enter your giveaway name. For example, if your prize is a Nintendo Switch, you can name your giveaway “Nintendo Switch Giveaway.”
Next, choose your giveaway template. RafflePress has several pre-made contest templates designed to reach specific giveaway goals. Since you want to grow your email list quickly, you’ll need that particular template.
So hover your mouse over the Grow Your Email List template and click Use This Template.
After heading to the giveaway builder, the builder automatically comes with an entry method to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you click the Join an Email Newsletter entry method, you’ll see several options on the left-hand side of the builder. That includes a place to enter a new label, the number of entries people get from that action, and whether that option is mandatory.
The most important features are the Select an Integration dropdown box and the Optin Confirmation Checkbox.
The integration dropdown lets you choose from several popular email newsletter services to connect to. At the same time, the optin confirmation box is a way to ensure that people subscribing to your newsletter give you permission to add them to your list and send them emails.
The email marketing services you can integrate with RafflePress include:
You can also enter an HTML web form and connect to Zapier. This allows integration with tons of other apps and services. You can learn how to collect emails with Zapier in our documentation here.
To connect to an email marketing service like MailChimp, choose from the dropdown list and click the orange connect button. You’ll be asked to log in to your email service provider. Then, follow the on-screen prompts to connect your account.
Click Get Lists to find your existing email lists, and select the appropriate list from the dropdown when you’re connected. Then, when you’re done, click Save Integration Details.
Next, you should add your giveaway prize details, design your giveaway landing page, and publish your contest on your website.
I’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating an online contest here. So refer to the steps there to finish setting up your giveaway.
Once your email giveaway is published, you can’t just wait for people to enter. You need to actively promote it to spread the word and generate excitement.
Contest promotion is an essential part of any good contest marketing strategy. It will help your giveaway go viral, grow your audience, and generate many email subscribers.
The easiest promotion method is sharing your giveaway across your social media channels and asking people to tag a friend in the comments to increase exposure further.
You can also promote your giveaway in the following ways:
Remember to start promoting your giveaway weeks before you go live to drive tons of traffic from the day you launch.
Check out our list of contest promotion ideas for even more help making your giveaway go viral.
When your giveaway has ended, you’ll need to draw a winner. The fairest way to choose a winner for your email list giveaway is to pick a winner randomly.
With RafflePress, it’s easy to pick a winner. At the end of your giveaway, navigate to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.
The next page shows you how many people entered and how many entries they have. To choose a random winner, click Pick Winner, select your options, and then click Choose Winners Now.
The winner is instantly highlighted, making it easy to email them with great news about their win.
You can learn more ways to pick a winner of a giveaway in this article.
Let’s not forget that after the end of your giveaway, you’ll have a list of new leads for your business. If you let them sit on your list without further interaction, those leads will go cold and unsubscribe, undoing all your hard work.
To keep your new audience engaged with your brand, follow up with an email after the giveaway, thanking them for entering and inviting them to join again in the future.
You could also offer participants a commiseration prize, such as a discount on their next purchase, to help build a relationship and convert them into paying customers.
Lastly, it’s a smart move to analyze the results of your email giveaway to see if you were successful in meeting your goals. Since your goal is to grow your email list fast, you can measure your results by calculating how many new subscribers you gained from running your giveaway vs. the size of your list before.
You can also use a WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights to track contest landing page visits, referral traffic, eCommerce traffic, and other website activity.
With smart dashboard reports, you can see the results within your WordPress dashboard, removing the need to access a different website like Google Analytics.
Analyzing your traffic, you can see which contest promotion strategies drove the most traffic to your giveaway page. Then, you can use those insights to make improvements on future giveaways.
You can learn more in this detailed MonsterInsights review.
Need another example of successfully growing an email list with giveaway marketing? Here’s how Smash Balloon grew its email list by 3,584 subscribers with a giveaway contest.
You can do a Mailchimp giveaway easily with RafflePress. Just add the Join an Email Newsletter action and choose Mailchimp from the dropdown list of email integrations.
To create a giveaway email message, start with a catchy subject line that will grab the reader’s attention.
Then, in the email body, explain what the giveaway is and how to enter.
Include a clear image of the prize and create a sense of urgency by letting readers know how long the giveaway is running. You should also make it easy for people to sign up by including a clear call to action.
The easiest way to run a competition in an email is to create a giveaway landing page and link it from your email newsletter. Then, readers can click the link to enter your contest.
There you have it!
Now that you know how to do a giveaway to grow your email list, get started with running a contest!
It will help you develop relationships with your ideal audience, but you’ll also skyrocket your email list, generate laser-targeted leads, and attract new customers to grow your business.
You might also find the following guide helpful in ensuring users actually get your emails: How to Fix WordPress Not Sending Email
And don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips to grow your business.
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