How I Run a Referral Contest That Brings In Real Leads (Not Just Entries)

Are you looking for a simple way to grow your audience without spending a ton on ads?

Running a referral contest has been one of the most effective strategies I’ve used to bring in qualified leads and grow faster. It encourages your fans to share your giveaway with others, which means more entries, more reach, and more potential customers.

Most referral contests reward only the person doing the referring. That makes sharing feel like asking a friend to enter a raffle, and the entries dry up the moment the contest ends.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to run a referral contest using RafflePress. You’ll learn how to set clear goals, offer the right prize, get people excited to share, and turn your giveaway into real business results.

What Is a Referral Contest?

A referral contest is a giveaway where people earn entries by sharing it with friends, so every entrant becomes a promoter. Each referral gives them more chances to win, which helps you reach new audiences faster.

Referral contests work because they spread by word of mouth instead of paid ads. The more people share your refer-a-friend giveaway, the more new people see your brand.

For example, say you want to promote your pet store. You’d target pet owners, and to enter, they’d share the contest with their friends, who then share it with their own circle.

That chain turns entrants into leads and potential customers. It also re-engages existing customers, turning them into brand advocates.

What Are the Different Types of Referral Contests?

There are three common types of referral contest, and the right one depends on whether you want broad reach or a smaller group of power-sharers. Here’s how each works, with a real example of a brand that runs it well.

• Random drawing: Everyone who refers at least one friend goes into a random draw. Morning Brew runs flash giveaway contests like this, putting both the referrer and the friend they refer into the drawing for a prize like a MacBook Pro. That second part matters, because it gives the friend a reason to care too.
• Most referrals wins: The person who brings in the most entries takes the prize. This favors a small group of motivated sharers over broad reach.
• Referral leaderboard: A public leaderboard ranks people by referrals, which sparks friendly competition. Tesla has run leaderboard contests with prizes ranging from a Semi test-track race to drawings for a Model 3, all decided by who referred the most buyers inside a set window.

You don’t need an enterprise budget to make any of these work. OptinMonster, a software brand, generated 3,500+ new users from a single giveaway run on its own site.

How to Run an Effective Referral Contest

Now that you know what a referral contest is, let’s run one for your business. Follow the steps below to get started.

Step 1: Determine Your Referral Contest Goals

Start by deciding why you want to run a referral contest and what outcome you want.

Without a clear goal, you won’t know who to target or how to get them to enter. You could end up with results that don’t actually help your business.

Your referral contest goals could be:

• Raise brand awareness
• Promote your customer referral program
• Grow your social media followers
• Increase your newsletter subscribers
• Attract more website traffic
• Promote a new product or service
• Engage your current customers

Once you know your goal, building the rest of your giveaway gets much easier.

Step 2: Find Your Target Audience

With your goal in place, find the audience who’ll help you share your referral link online.

Going back to the pet store example, you might find your most engaged people hang out on Instagram more than on X or Facebook. That tells you to make the contest appealing to Instagram users.

Think about where your audience spends time online and how you’ll reach them. The best way to find out is to check your social media analytics and see what content is popular with each group.

You can also look at demographic and interest reports in Google Analytics to see how specific audiences find your business.

Step 3: Decide How to Encourage Contest Referrals

With your goal and audience set, decide how to get those people to enter. If no one enters, no one refers their circle of friends.

The biggest incentive is the prize you offer. Your grand prize needs to be desirable enough to spur your audience into action (more on that in the next step).

You also need to decide how users enter. One way should always be to refer a friend, but the best giveaways offer several ways to participate with bonus entries.

For instance, the main entry could be a referral. A second entry could be to subscribe to your email newsletter, and a third could be to follow you on X for offers.

Want to spark friendly competition? Add a leaderboard that shows who’s referred the most friends, then offer separate rewards for the top referrers.

Step 4: Choose a Highly Desirable Prize

People won’t make much effort to enter if the prize isn’t something they actually want. Your prize should be desirable to your target audience, valuable, and high quality.

If the prize is popular enough, it can push your contest toward viral, generating new followers and entries along the way.

Some popular prize ideas include:

• Large cash prizes
• Free products or services
• Gift cards or certificates
• Events or holidays
• Branded swag

You can also browse this list of proven contest prize ideas for inspiration. Whatever you pick, keep it relevant to your brand so you attract the right entrants.

One change I’d push you toward is rewarding the friend, not just the referrer. When the person being referred also wins something, sharing feels like giving a gift instead of cashing in a favor.

That’s exactly why Morning Brew enters both people in its drawings.

I’d also add prize tiers. A grand prize plus a few runner-up rewards (or rewarding the top 3 or top 10 referrers) keeps more people engaged, because they don’t drop out the second they realize they can’t beat the leader.

Step 5: Write Your Referral Contest Rules

Next, plan out your giveaway rules. Clear rules keep your contest fair and give entrants everything they need to take part.

Here’s what to include in your giveaway rules:

• The minimum age of contestants
• Any location limits
• When the giveaway starts and ends
• How users can enter
• What the prize is
• How you’ll pick a winner

You should also state whether your referral contest is sponsored by or affiliated with anyone. For the full picture, see our guide on how to write giveaway rules like a pro.

Step 6: Build Your Referral Contest with RafflePress

The easiest way to build your contest is with a giveaway tool made for the job. RafflePress is a WordPress giveaway plugin that runs entirely inside your WordPress dashboard, with no embed code or separate platform to manage.

For a referral contest specifically, the ready-made Refer-a-Friend giveaway template sets up the viral sharing mechanic in a few clicks.

It fills your widget with 1-click entry actions to kick-start referrals. From there, you can add bonus entries to grow your followers and email list.

When you’re ready to publish, RafflePress gives you a standalone giveaway landing page on your own site. It strips out distractions so more visitors enter, and the entries stay on your domain instead of a third-party platform.

For the full setup, follow our step-by-step guide to building a viral refer-a-friend contest with RafflePress.

Note: You can try RafflePress for free, but the entry actions and integrations most referral contests rely on are part of the Pro version.

Step 7: Promote Your Referral Contest

After building your contest, promote it to your target audience so the entries start coming in. A contest no one sees won’t hit your goals.

The quickest way to promote it is to share it across your social networks, like Pinterest, Facebook, and X, and ask people to tag their friends in the comments.

You can also promote your giveaway by:

• Sending an email newsletter asking your list to enter and refer their network
• Adding a floating bar or popup to your website linking to your giveaway landing page
• Submitting your contest to giveaway directory websites
• Reaching out to influencers in your niche to share your contest with their network

Start promoting weeks before the contest goes live so you get entries and referrals from day one.

Some of the best referral ideas involve social gifting with discounts and coupons. If you’re using email to promote your giveaway, you can sweeten participation with a special offer.

To push your giveaway further, check out these contest promotion ideas.

Step 8: Draw a Referral Contest Winner

When your contest ends, you’ll need to choose a winner. The method depends on the type of contest you ran.

If you ran a referral contest with refer-a-friend entries plus a few bonus actions, the fairest method is a random draw. If your contest involves judged actions like uploading a photo or video, judge it yourself or ask users to vote.

RafflePress makes a random draw easy. When the contest ends, go to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.

You’ll see a list of everyone who entered and their total entries. Click Pick Winners, choose your options, and click Choose Winners Now.

The winner is highlighted at the top of the list, so you can click to email them the good news.

Step 9: Announce the Giveaway Winner

Once you’ve picked a winner, announce the end of your contest and the winner to everyone who took part. It helps you build a relationship with the new audience you gained and thanks them for joining in.

You can announce your winner on social media and invite everyone to future contests, or send a follow-up email thanking participants. For the details, see our guide on how to announce a giveaway winner.

This is a chance to keep your new audience engaging with your brand after the contest. Why not offer a small discount so the people who didn’t win aren’t left empty-handed?

Step 10: Analyze Your Referral Results

The last step is to analyze your results. This tells you how many referrals your contest got and how to improve the next one.

The easiest way to get this data is with MonsterInsights, a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It makes it quick to track referrals to your contest landing page, traffic, and other site activity.

All your data shows up in easy-to-read reports inside your WordPress dashboard, so you never have to leave your site to see results.

One thing I’d plan for before the contest even ends is keeping the referrals going afterward. Point entrants into an ongoing offer or your email list so the spike of new people doesn’t disappear with the winner announcement.

Frequently Asked Questions About Referral Contests

What is the difference between a referral contest, a sweepstakes, and a giveaway?

A giveaway is the umbrella term for any prize-based promotion. A sweepstakes picks a winner purely at random, so no skill or effort changes the odds.

A referral contest is a giveaway where entries are earned by sharing, so the more friends someone refers, the better their chances. It rewards action, not just luck.

How long should a referral contest run?

One to four weeks works for most referral contests. Shorter than a week and people don’t have time to refer their network; longer than a month and momentum drops because entrants assume they have plenty of time.

Two weeks is a safe default. Promote it for a week or two beforehand so you get entries from day one.

How do you stop people from cheating in a referral contest?

Use a giveaway tool with built-in fraud protection. RafflePress includes email verification, duplicate-entry detection, and reCAPTCHA, which catches the most common tricks like fake email signups and self-referrals.

Clear rules help too. State that bulk or fake entries are disqualified, so you have grounds to remove suspicious accounts before you draw a winner.

Do you need a separate referral program to run a referral contest?

No. A referral contest is a one-time, time-bound campaign with a prize, while a referral program is an always-on reward system. You can run a contest without a program in place.

That said, a contest pairs well with a program. The contest brings a spike of new referrers, and a standing program gives them a reason to keep sharing after it ends.

Start Your Referral Contest Today

A referral contest is one of the easiest ways to get your audience doing the sharing for you. Done right, it brings in high-quality leads and grows your business without paid ads.

With RafflePress, it takes a few clicks to set up a giveaway that gets people referring their friends, and you don’t need to write any code. Over 200,000 WordPress sites run their giveaways with it.

Get started with RafflePress today.

You may also find the following guides helpful:

• How to Create Custom Giveaway Images for Free
• How to Use Good Giveaway Copywriting to Drive Entries
• How to Use Contest SEO to Boost Your Website’s Rankings
• How to Use Contest Marketing to Grow Your Business
• Sweepstakes Definition Vs Contest Vs Lottery
• How To Pick A Winner For A Giveaway

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