RafflePress

We’ve been doing 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. It was our biggest ever!

So, what’s the secret to running a successful contest? Honestly, it’s all about finding the right giveaway plugin.

Not sure where to start? No worries! In this RafflePress review I’m putting a popular plugin to the test. I’ll be checking out its features, support, and pricing – basically, everything you need to decide if RafflePress is the perfect WordPress giveaway plugin for you.

RafflePress Review: Why Use It in WordPress?

Let’s start from the top: RafflePress is a popular WordPress giveaway and contest plugin that can run all kinds of competitions.

One of the coolest things is that it hooks up with all the big social media platforms – Facebook, X/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 everyone who enters your giveaway to your email list.

To make things even easier, RafflePress has a library of templates for all the most popular giveaways. Want to grow your email list? There’s a template for that. Want more TikTok followers? Yep, there’s a template for that too! YouTube channel? RafflePress has you covered.

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… the list goes on!

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 so you can create simple competitions with ease. It also has essential actions that can get you more engagement across the major social media platforms.

But if you want the really good stuff, then you’ll need to upgrade to the premium RafflePress plugin – we’re talking about email marketing integrations, giveaway landing pages, social logins, and much more.

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

There are tons of WordPress giveaway plugins out there, but do they really have the features you need to run a successful, viral contest?

In this RafflePress review, I’m diving deep. I’ll be checking out its features, seeing what their support is like, researching their pricing, and everything else you need to know.

So, is RafflePress the right giveaway plugin for you? Let’s find, in this detailed RafflePress review.

1. Professionally-Designed Giveaway Templates

Let’s be honest, creating a contest from scratch can be daunting, especially if you’ve never done it before. But guess what? RafflePress makes it easy!

It has built-in templates that can help you create a giveaway within minutes, without any previous experience.

Seriously, they have templates for everything – like getting more Facebook engagement. So, if that’s your goal, just pick the ‘Grow Your Facebook Following’ template and you’re off to a flying start!

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 – everything you need!

And the best part? You can customize everything. Add your own content, login methods, and actions… basically, make it the perfect 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’re never starting from a blank page.

2. Drag and Drop Editor

RafflePress has this awesome dra-and-drop builder, which means you can create viral contests without needing to code or hire a WordPress developer. Seriously, it’s that easy!

After choosing a template, RafflePress opens that design ready for you to edit. Just click on the heading area to change the title and description – make sure it’s attention-grabbing!

Adding a picture of the prize is always a good idea too, right? Gets people excited!

With RafflePress, you can add this picture with just a few clicks.

Then, you can set the start and end dates for your giveaway in the left-hand menu.

This kind of automated workflow is great for making sure everything runs smoothly, even when you’re busy.

Depending on the template, RafflePress might already have some entry actions set up. But you can always add more!

Giving people options is key. 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. I’ve found that more ways to enter, often leads to more entries.

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

Just select the ‘Actions’ tab and you’ll see all the different ways people can enter – leaving a comment, subscribing to your RSS feed, visiting your Instagram, you name it.

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. It’s all up to you!

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.

Once 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 giveaway’s 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… the possibilities are pretty much endless!

3. Allow 1-Click Entries for Your Participants

Making your giveaway easy to enter is crucial if you want lots of people to participate. That said, no RafflePress review would be complete without talking about their awesome 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.

Want to make things even quicker? Then you can enable Facebook login in the settings, which adds a ‘Login with Facebook’ button.

If someone’s already logged into Facebook, they can enter your giveaway with just a couple of clicks.

And get this – visitors can perform almost every giveaway action with just one click.

You can add these super easy entry options for Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, Pinterest, you name it. Less friction, more entries!

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. But getting people to subscribe isn’t always easy.

That’s where RafflePress comes in. They have a “Grow Your Email List” template just ready and waiting to go.

They also have a ‘Join an Email Newsletter’ action you can add to any giveaway. Even better, this action has a ‘Trigger on Sign Up’ setting that automatically adds everyone who enters to your email list.

Here, RafflePress integrates with all the best email providers, such as Mailchimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact. So, you can easily connect RafflePress to your current email service.

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

Just pick your email marketing service in the left-hand menu, and RafflePress will walk you through the setup. Once it’s connected, RafflePress automatically grabs those email addresses and adds them to your list. Easy peasy!

(We also have a great guide on growing your email list by 150% with giveaways – check it out!)

If you’re using RafflePress to collect leads, then you’ll want to check that the participant’s email address is genuine. And if you’re planning to contact the winner by email, verification is even more important.

Thankfully, 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 someone doesn’t confirm, their entry will still show up in your dashboard, but it’ll be marked as unverified. When you’re picking a winner, you can easily filter out all the unverified entries.

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, I 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, which is super important for staying compliant with GDPR and other data privacy laws.

5. Boost Your Social Media Followers

Do you want to create a more effective content plan? Getting more social media followers is a fantastic way to do it!

Think about it: when people follow you on social media, you can show them your latest blogs, products, sales, and other important content. This encourages them to visit your website, which will increase your blog traffic and get more eyes on your content.

Plus, a big follower count is awesome 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

Want to get your brand in front of more people? Social media engagement is key!

Think about it: 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 the giveaway themselves.

With that in mind, RafflePress has lots of actions that are designed to get engagement across all the major social media platforms. They have ‘Share on Facebook,’ ‘Share on Linkedin’ actions – the works!

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

Now, these actions don’t guarantee likes, comments, and shares, but they get people to your social media pages, where there’s a much better chance they’ll engage with your content.

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.

They also have a “Refer a Friend – Viral” action you can add to any giveaway.

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 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 about people trying to game the system, you can set a limit on how many entries someone can get through referrals.

This keeps things fair while still encouraging sharing

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 takes care of this for you.

No need to write everything from scratch. In the settings, just enter some info about the sponsor (that’s usually you or your company, but sometimes you might 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 then uses this info to create some basic rules for you.

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 X/Twitter. But this built-in generator gives you a huge head start and saves you a ton of time.

8. Protect Your Giveaway Against Spam Entries

Spam bots are a real pain, especially when they try to crash your giveaway! While competition spam may be less noticeable than comment spam and contact form spam, it can still cause problems. In fact, if you’re not careful, then bots can fill out your forms with fake info and mess up your whole campaign.

Plus, most email services charge based on how many subscribers you have. You definitely don’t want to pay for a bunch of bot subscribers!

To help you out, RafflePress offers multiple ways to protect your contest against spam. Like we talked about, you can enable email verification to make sure people are using real 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. So, you can block fraud signups without making it harder for real people to enter.

By the way, we have a great guide on adding reCAPTCHA to WordPress, if you want to learn more.

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. Super simple!

Another option is using a 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.

We also have a guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress if you need it.

Another option is to create a landing page. This shows only the giveaway, with no other distractions like sidebars or navigational menus. It’s perfect for sharing on social media, in emails, forums – everywhere!

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. It couldn’t be easier!

10. Manage and View Giveaway Entries in One Place

Okay, so you’ve launched your giveaway – now what? You need a way to keep track of all those 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 your 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 those insights to make your future giveaways even better.

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. Like, if you run a WordPress development agency or marketing agency and need to share the data with clients.

No problem! RafflePress lets you export all the users and entries as a CSV file with just one click.

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

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

Once your giveaway ends, RafflePress shows a ‘Needs Winner’ link next to that contest.

Just click it, and tell RafflePress how many winners you need.

If you’ve enabled email verification (which is a great idea!) then RafflePress can automatically filter out all those unverified email addresses. This makes sure you’re not accidentally picking a spam entry as the winner.

Especially if you’re planning to contact the winner by email, filtering out unverified addresses is a must.

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’re in luck! RafflePress lets you easily add tracking scripts to your giveaways. This means you can see how many people visit the giveaway page, how long they stay, and how many actually enter.

You can then track your whole 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, like the Meta retargeting pixel. This is great for running ads and bringing people back to your website after they’ve entered.

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 like to figure things out on your own, then RafflePress has detailed online documentation that you can access at any time of the day or night. This was my go-to resource when writing this RafflePress review.

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.

And the best part? 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

Want a free giveaway plugin? Then you can grab RafflePress Lite from the WordPress repository.

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

Let’s break down your options:

• 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 (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 lets you create landing giveaway pages.
• Ultimate. With this $499.50 lifetime license, you can use RafflePress on as many websites as you want, forever. That’s fantastic value for money!

How WPBeginner Uses RafflePress

At WPBeginner, we use RafflePress to run all our competitions including our 15th birthday giveaway celebration.

As part of this contest, we gave away premium plugins worth over $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 26,000+ participants.

RafflePress Review: Is it Worth It?

After looking at all the features in this RafflePress review, I’m confident that it’s the best contest and giveaway plugin for WordPress. It’s got everything you need to create any kind of contest with tons of different ways to enter.

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.

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.

Looking to create a viral giveaway? 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 an amazing deal. It allows you to use RafflePress on an unlimited number of websites, including client sites, for as long as you want.

I 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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