With the summer coming to a definitive middle, we’re starting to get into the summer sales period. But when the weather is good, and everyone is at the beach eating ice cream and learning how to look like they might be surfing, sales might go down a bit.
So how can you foster engagement with your audience in this sunniest of seasons? Three words: online raffle games. Everybody likes some dopamine hits in the afternoon, and who doesn’t love shopping? Raffles are almost as fun as personality quizzes!
But there’s more. Raffles can also help increase your engagement, which includes your customers’ participation and interaction with your brand and your products. Your marketing officers have many tools under their belt that they can wield at times of both low and high interest in your brand, and the raffle is one such tool.
But first…
What Is a Raffle?
Put simply, a raffle is a type of competition. The organizer distributes tickets to people (these can be bought or free to the individuals). Each ticket can win a prize. At a specific moment in time, the winning ticket numbers are drawn randomly from a container of sorts. Then, the winning ticket holders are notified that they have won whatever prize they are entitled to.
There are a lot of raffle-like competitions on social media where, instead of purchasing tickets, the public can ‘like’, comment, and share posts to gain an entry into the raffle. A fun raffle brings joy and the chance to find out more about your audience, as well as fostering a sense of community, even online.
How to Create an Online Raffle?
Raffles are fairly straightforward to organize. This is especially true of online raffles. They don’t require anyone to physically show up and buy a ticket in person, or receive the prize at a specific time and place necessarily (though this option does exist).
Top Tips for Organizing Your Raffle:
Decide whether your raffle will be a live online event, or whether you will simply inform the entrants that have won after the draw. This will inform the platform you will choose for hosting your raffle.
Decide which platform you will use to host your raffle. If your main point of contact with your audience is Instagram, then it makes sense to host it there. You can advertise it, sell tickets, and show the winners in a live video all through that platform. This is also a chance to increase your Instagram followers.
Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2023, ranked by number of monthly active users
You can also create an online event that people can attend remotely using a platform like Discord or Slack. This is a distraction-free option, unlike social media sites that vie for your attention with ads and other profiles. This is an option for creating a more exclusive and intimate experience.
Enable messaging as an option. This will allow participants to actively participate and feel more engaged. This is also a way for you to communicate with your participants.
Decide what the rules of the raffle are, and communicate them clearly with your audience. How to purchase tickets, how to find out if you’ve won, and how to receive the prize should all be crystal clear. You can convey the rules through stories, posts, in your bio, and more. Even if you have already communicated the rules half a dozen times, repeat them half a dozen more.
Create Branded Forms to Organize Your Contest
Use free templates
Don’t change or decide the rules on the fly. Have a rule in case someone wins multiple raffles ahead of time (can someone win multiple times or are they disqualified from more prizes after the first win?).
Choose your prizes! You can add more prizes as your raffle gathers momentum. You could include your summer sale bestsellers to really get the enthusiasm underway. You could offer something customized for the winner. You could offer a selection of varied prizes to appeal to a broad range of participants, including things like a payroll software subscription for small business owners.
There is no limit on how many prizes to include, but it’s a good idea to offer a super special top prize to add excitement.
Include all the details of your raffle: how long it will last, what the prizes are, and how people can participate. Then, make sure to send out reminders regularly.
Use a calendar for reminders. If your raffle is a week-long, you should send out daily reminders. If it’s a month-long, then twice a week is probably fine. Some companies will pump out reminders every day to get engagement going.
Decide how people can enter the raffle. Do they need to buy a ticket? Should they like, comment, and follow you on social media?
Have a theme, for funsies and user engagement. Your theme could be the beach, with prizes such as a surfboard, wetsuit, bikini, glamping stay, and more. Something in line with the summer would work best! Tap into the mood of the moment.
Clever Ways to Use Raffles for Your Brand
To make the most out of your raffle, you can use it to boost some aspects of your brand that make it great and unique. Let’s find out which ones.
Showcase Your Customer Service
First of all, you want to be as active as possible during the raffle. You should be involved in the conversation, respond to any questions and comments, and use this opportunity to showcase your brand values. You can do this by showing great customer support and being friendly. You could even hire remote workers to take on the raffle and add to your marketing team.
Share Your Values
You should also show that the raffle is fair, and a part of this is keeping track of every entry and doing a live video where you reveal the winners. You should also make sure that your winners are contactable so that they don’t miss out on their prizes. There’s nothing worse than entering a raffle only to never find out who won what.
Add Your Personal Touch
As well as displaying your values as a fair company that has great customer service, a raffle is also a great chance to create a fun bridge between your brand and the customer. Instead of a faceless brand with only profit as a motive, you can humanize your company by having a member of staff conduct the raffle on video.
Use Your Raffle to Add to Your Marketing
Your raffle is also a great opportunity to build upon your marketing efforts in a number of ways that we will delve into below!
Repurpose Raffle Content
A huge way that your raffle can help you out is by generating plenty of content for your brand. Depending on the terms of your raffle, an entry could include using certain hashtags and posting pictures with your product. This is great content that you can reshare for future use. Videos of winners enjoying their prizes is also marketing gold.
Posts such as these can be transformed into Stories and Reels.
Promote Partnerships
Raffles offer a great chance to share and announce partnerships with other brands, influencers, or creators. Discounts, free subscriptions, and products from your partners can be included in the prizes. The raffle theme should also have something to do with your partner’s domain.
If you offer clothing and your partner offers camping equipment, that’s a great combo for a raffle, since those can easily be combined in a photoshoot and prize bundles.
Learn More About Your Customers
Raffles are a great opportunity to gain insight into your customers, their interests, their habits, and their values. The data you gather can form the basis of new research and marketing efforts.
Raffles = Engagement = Sales
Raffles are a great way to foster engagement, and consequently increase sales this summer. We hope that the tips above will help you in creating the best raffle possible for your brand.
The key things to remember are that: a) raffles are a marketing opportunity right now, and b) they help you gather insight into your customers for future marketing endeavors. At a time when everyone is busy hitting beaches, going to amusement parks, and reading romance novels, a raffle is a great way to catch your audience’s attention and make your marketing fun.
Your raffle also doesn’t have to include paid tickets. People love getting free stuff, so simply asking for likes to increase your visibility on social media can be worth much more than the value of your prizes.
