How to make an online raffle

Are raffles really the best lead generation tool?

Are you planning on running a raffle, giveaway, contest, or sweepstake? Learn from our best practice examples of how to set up and organize an online contest and get the maximum number of leads and the highest engagement rates.

Contests or raffles are the most effective ways to collect leads and engage your audience with your brand. We analyzed the best-performing Riddles, identifying those that generated over 100,000 leads. The top five best-performing Riddles of all time, generating over 1,600,000 leads, promoted a sweepstake. 

Since you often only need one valuable prize for one lucky winner, running a sweepstake is often the most cost-effective way to generate leads. The prize does not even have to be very expensive. Something hard to get, like a signed jersey from an athlete or a VIP pass to an event, will drive more leads than giving away an iPad or an Apple Watch.

Why a quiz contest works

Quizzes are inherently engaging, whether they take the form of a pub quiz, a game of Trivial Pursuit with friends, a music quiz on the radio, or online. People like proving their knowledge; introducing a contest only enhances this experience. By setting a specific threshold for successful entries (such as ‘Score 90% or better to be entered to win!’), you create an irresistible challenge. One such example is BBC Radio 2’s daily ‘End of Days’ contest – the listener who answers the most questions correctly gets to have their favorite song played.

It is human nature for people to want to enter contests to test their skills. Therefore, they are happy to fill out your lead form to participate. An added benefit is that participants are more likely to provide accurate information if they need to share real details to win the prize.

Contest formats

These are the most commonly used formats when setting up a contest:

• Inbound email
• Social comment and share
• Simple form
• Quiz
• Predictor
• Leaderboard

Let’s look at each of these and the pros and cons of using a specific format.

Format	Pros	Cons
Inbound email	Asking the participants to send an email is the simplest form of a raffle. Besides setting up an email inbox, no setup is needed.	Participants will hesitate to send an email. Also, the emails must be manually processed as they will often not follow a standard format. This format provides no challenge to the participant.
Social comment	If the primary goal of the sweepstake is to increase social interactions and reach, this is the best format for you.	There is no way to reuse the data from the sweepstakes, as no email addresses or user data are collected. Valid shares are also difficult to track, and comments need to be moderated.
Simple form	It’s easy to set up. Create a form asking for your name and email, and maybe add one quiz question in a free text field.	It is not engaging for the user and is often considered too unchallenging.
Quiz	Highly engaging and competitive for the user. Quizzes also have higher form completion rates than stand-alone forms.	A quiz takes more time to build, and you need to find a good balance between making it easy enough for all users to finish yet difficult enough to make it interesting.
Predictor	A predictor can be created in under a minute. Essentially, you ask your users to predict an outcome, such as the result of a sports event or whether it will rain on a certain date.	You need to actively enter the actual outcome once the event has happened, which takes a bit more planning. You also need to check your local regulations to see if a predictor combined with a raffle counts as betting.
Leaderboard	A leaderboard can be added to a predictor, a quiz, or even quizzes or leaderboards. Leaderboards are highly competitive and provide instant feedback to the contestants. They will encourage players to try multiple times and increase engagement.	Leaderboards need a certain number of participants to be fun. For the first 5 to 10 people, the leaderboard might be boring. Only run them if you expect more than ten people to enter the competition, making it challenging to get into the top 3.

Required steps to set up a raffle

Any raffle or contest you run will require participants to agree to a set of legal documents in order to enter. The details will vary based on your local jurisdiction, but in most countries contestants will need to approve the raffle terms and allow you to use the data they provide for further marketing campaigns.

The easiest way to get the contestants’ consent is to add a checkbox to your contest form that includes links to the raffle terms and conditions and your privacy policy.

Follow this easy guide to set that up on Riddle.com, and grab our legal templates below to complete your setup.

To set up a contest on Riddle.com, you will need these three essential elements:

1. A Riddle with a form. This can be a quiz, a simple form, or a score predictor.
2. A page on your website with your terms and conditions and privacy statements that you can link to from a checkbox in your Riddle form.
3. You should have a thank you page on your website for people to land on after they confirm their contest entry in the double opt-in email.
4. Choose how to store the contest entries. The default setting is to store them directly in your Riddle account from where you can download them in Excel or CSV format. You can also send contest entries to your email marketing tool (e.g. AWeber, MailChimp, or our Zapier app) for future marketing. Alternatively, save leads to any Google Spreadsheet using our Google integration.

The Riddle

Building the Riddle is the easy part. Decide on the format and add a form to collect names and emails from all contest entrants. Check our help guides to learn the basics (https://www.riddle.com/help/getting-started/first-steps) on setting up Riddles and forms.

Suggested formats

Quiz

Use a quiz to challenge your users and give them a sense of achievement when they enter your contest. 

Predictor

Fast and easy to build. Ask your users to predict the outcome of an event like a sports game.

Form

Maybe all you need to run your contest is data from the user. You can use Riddle.com to build a simple entry form collecting all the necessary information. You can also add free text entry fields if you want to ask your users to write down their thoughts, suggestions, or opinions to enter your contest, such as “Tell us why you liked our hotel and who you will bring along next time you visit us”.

Add a leaderboard

Leaderboards are available in every Riddle.com plan. Adding a leaderboard to your contest adds a fun element that will entice players to enter. The addictive factor of leaderboards is what made pinball machines famous in the 1970s and 1980s, and they still work today. Leaderboards can be added to quizzes and predictors, and in our Enterprise plan you can even run a leaderboard for a whole series of quizzes or a season of predictors. 

Ending a contest

Riddle.com allows you to set a closing date, which is handy for contests and raffles. Enter the date and time when your competition will end, and the Riddle will be closed for further entries. Learn how to set an opening and closing date for your Riddle here.(https://www.riddle.com/help/settings/general-settings#riddle-open-closed)

Picking a winner

Picking a winner in a raffle usually involves downloading all entries into an Excel sheet and then using the random functions of Excel to find a winner. Or to blindly scroll down on the screen and put your finger on a winner, which, to be honest, is probably the most commonly used method.

Riddle’s quiz maker makes this task significantly easier. You will find a “Pick a winner (Raffle)” option on the publish screen of your Riddle. You can set conditions for winning and consider excluding people from your company by filtering out your corporate email domain. Riddle will then automatically draw a winner based on these conditions. You can learn more about this feature in our Riddle Help documentation.

Other ideas for running a quiz contest

• Up the difficulty (and adrenaline) with a timer. Timers also prevent the “Google Factor” – users won’t have time to look up answers they don’t know. You can use Riddle.com’s timer function to set a time limit for either or both:
  • Overall quiz length: ‘45 seconds to answer 8 questions’
  • Individual questions: ‘5 seconds per question’ or ‘7 seconds for #1, 5 seconds for #2…’This is brilliant for ramping up the difficulty of your quiz. It is a bit like Jeopardy, starting easy and ending with the most difficult questions.
• Delay showing answers.Riddle.com normally gives immediate feedback after each question. You can choose to show answers only at the end of the quiz after the entry form. As a result, you’ll get more entries, especially if only people who score X correctly are eligible. This way, even people who didn’t score enough to qualify will enter; they won’t see their score until after the contest entry form.
• Add CTA buttons or custom result pages. You can personalize who sees your contest form or other content.
  • Call to action buttons: After the last question, successful quiz takers will see a button that leads to an entry form on your site.
  • Custom result pages: At the end of the quiz, people will automatically be sent to a page on your site to enter.
• Create a leaderboard. You can use Riddle.com’s new leaderboard feature to rank your users based on their performance in quizzes or predictors. Leaderboards tap into the competitive nature of individuals, encouraging them to participate more actively to see their name at the top. The desire to maintain or improve one’s position on the leaderboard can lead to repeat participation, ensuring sustained engagement over time.
• Create a live quiz contest to engage an audience in real time.
• Run an online raffle and get the maximum number of leads and the highest engagement rates.

Summary

Required pages on your website

• Contest page where you add the Riddle embed code for your quiz, form, or predictor
• A form inside your Riddle with a checkbox to have the contestant accept your terms
• Terms and Conditions page
• Newsletter double opt-in confirmation page (in case you want to use Riddle’s double opt-in feature)

Text suggestions for the legal pages and forms

To help you set up your online contest or raffle, we have prepared a full set of legal templates in English and German. Use them at your own risk and please have your own lawyer review them.