Guide to Selling Raffle Tickets in 2022 [10 Easy Tips]

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Looking for ways to sell raffle tickets online? Raffles are the second most popular fundraising method right after charity events.

Raffles not only help raise funds but also ensure that the audience thoroughly enjoys the event without making it feel transactional.

There are multiple components to a successful raffle, including:

  • Finding people interested in raffles

  • Setting up a seamless ticketing system

  • Marketing and promotion activities

Today, let’s talk about the most important component — how to sell raffle tickets online.

Setting up ticketing for your raffle

The first step to selling raffle tickets online is setting up the ticketing system. There are three ways you can do so:

1. Your website

Hosting your raffle ticketing system on your website is the fastest way to future-proof your marketing efforts. Here’s why:

  • Grow email lists: Every raffle attendee becomes part of your email list. No matter how the search and social media change, this list can be marketed when hosting new raffles.

  • More data: You get access to user journeys and preferences by diving into the analytics data. This also allows you to improve the navigation and experience on your site for a seamless ticketing experience.

  • Lower costs: Allowing people to purchase raffle tickets directly on your website can lead to lower costs than third-party ticketing systems. 

  • Full customizability: It’s easy to customize your raffle event landing pages to match the cause or theme of the event. 

If you have a Shopify website, use Evey to create fully customized tickets for your raffle.

Here’s how you do it:

1. After you install the app on your Shopify store, Evey presents you with a screen to create a new event.

2. Click Create event and set up the raffle event details including the event name, the dates, the ticket pricing, and the number of tickets available. Add the location so it’s added to the website. Once done, Save event.

3. Next, click on the Tickets tab and go to Customize.

4. Start designing your ticket with the simple drag-and-drop template designer. Edit the colors and the layout of the tickets as you prefer. You can also add a QR code that can be scanned at the raffle to confirm attendance. Evey offers free Android and iOS apps to scan tickets on site.

5. Once you’re done, click Save at the top right corner and then hit Exit.

Your ticket template is now created and it will be automatically sent to customers who purchase the concert tickets. 

Customized tickets give an overall exclusive feel to your raffle, something that’s difficult to achieve with ticketing platforms. However, these platforms cannot be completely disregarded.

2. Ticketing platforms

Ticketing platforms have one major advantage — audience. Their strong presence in the ticketing space gives you access to people who are browsing the site for new events. 

Listing your raffle event on these platforms can help you get discovered and build initial traction. Some of the major ticketing platforms include:

  • Eventbrite

  • Ticketmaster

  • RSVPify

These platforms boast substantial organic traffic. That gives you an opportunity to test different raffle images, titles, and ticket prices to see what converts best. You can then use the data to optimize your website. 

3. Social media

Facebook events is the perfect platform for discovering new events nearby. While you cannot directly sell the tickets here, redirecting traffic from Facebook to your ticketing page can be a good way to tap into a larger audience.

Go to the Facebook events page and create an event that links back to your ticket purchase page. But remember, only listing the raffle here will not result in traffic. Facebook events is only a discovery platform so you still need to promote your concert.

How to promote raffles and boost ticket sales

After setting up the ticketing platform, it’s time to move to the final phase of selling your raffle tickets — promotion. Raffles may have smaller audiences depending on what the fundraiser is for. Pair that with smaller marketing budgets, we

Different ways to sell raffle event tickets

1. Share on social media

Raffles or fundraisers are usually based on a cause which makes it easier to find people on social media to attend your event. Start with sharing details about the event and encourage people to share it with their friends. 

You can begin promoting your raffle two to three weeks in advance and create a theme around the event. Spend the time finding groups or communities on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter who would not see you share details about your event.

2. Use social validation

Few people are interested in being the first to try something new. So, displaying the number of people who have already RSVP’d for your raffle can increase trust and get more people to attend the event and contribute. 

Kate Darke regularly shares updates like the one above to keep people in the loop of how much amount has been donated. Try something similar to get more people to sell tickets to your raffles. 

3. Make the raffle fun to attend

Hosting a simple raffle may get people who are really interested in donating. But to give your event a mass appeal, try something different. 

In Mumbles, they hosted a raft race to collect money for the lifeboat. The event was exciting and had a purpose that went beyond just the race itself — improving sea safety for the citizens. 

Such events gather a larger crowd than you could with a simple raffle helping you raise more funds while making people feel part of the community and the cause. 

4. Run ads for specific locations

Since the raffle will happen at a particular location, it’s more profitable to run ads around those locations or time zones. This ensures that you are not wasting ad dollars on audiences who may be unable to attend the event. 

Facebook, Instagram, Google, and most ad networks will allow you to run the ad for specific locations and time zones. To get the most out of your advertisements, find platforms where your audience tends to be active and spend the majority of your ad dollars on those platforms.

5. Collaborate with influencers

An influencer or community admin talking about your raffle will convert at least 1% of the followers to buy your raffle tickets.

If an admin with 10,000 group members promotes your raffle, you can expect at least 100 people to buy the ticket. 

Get the same promotions from 5 communities or influencers, and you now have 500 potential customers for your event. 

This becomes a numbers game and you can continue to niche down to more locally relevant influencers and communities to gather more attendees to your fundraising event. 

6. Promote over emails

If you have an email list, send regular emails leading up to the raffle. You can send out a variety of promotional emails here. 

  • Introduction emails: These introduce the raffle and make your email list aware of it.

  • Agenda: You send out an email with the artists performing at the raffle or the agenda

  • Talk about the cause: Talk about why the cause needs funding and how your attendees will help the world. Discuss the positive impact that the event will have on the people. 

  • Speaker list: If you’re bringing speakers onboard, send an email out to introduce them. 

  • Nurture sequences: After someone buys tickets for your raffle, run an email series that thanks them for helping with the cause, shares details of the event and the impact they had by purchasing the single ticket and encourages them to purchase more tickets. You can use Evey to create fully custom tickets with QR codes for attendee tracking at the venue

If you don’t already have an email list to promote your raffle, you can run sponsored ads in other email newsletters. 

7. Affiliate marketers

Getting affiliates to promote your raffle is a win-win-win situation where:

  • the affiliates get a small commission for every fundraising event ticket sold

  • you get additional people to attend your event

  • interested donors find a cause they wish to donate to

Affiliates are paid out based on ticket sales, so you will not spend money unless someone purchases the ticket. This is another reason why you should onboard as many good affiliates as possible. 

You can recruit affiliates by searching the influencer marketing hub for influencers within your space. For example, if you’re hosting a fundraising raffle for cancer patients, find influencers who talk about cancer and its prevention.

Promotions from these influencers will impact more of your target audience than a generalized approach.

It also makes sense to have an affiliate page on your website that will allow interested affiliates to reach out to you and you can then assess and decide to take this further. 

8. Create unique and memorable hashtags

A unique hashtag lets you tap into the audience of your speakers and attendees. When they talk about your raffle using the hashtag, people who follow them will take notice, which, in turn, helps you get better visibility.

Here’s how the #SaveSoil hashtag has been used by thousands of people supporting the cause bringing great attention to it. 

Get creative with your hashtag as the purpose is to make it memorable. Create short hashtags that people can easily type out with their phone keyboards. 

9. Encourage active participation

Your hashtag and raffle page needs to be shared around and one way to do this is by engaging the community in some sort of activity. This can be done in the form of a competition, a challenge, or some activity that gets like-minded people together.

For instance, #SaveSoil encourages members to actively travel to across the state or country borders to promote the cause. Sadhguru, the person who initiated the cause, rode his bike from the United Kingdom to India, over a 30,000km journey. 

This encouraged many bikers and travel enthusiasts to actively participate in the cause and start promoting the cause. 

You too can find similarly relevant ways to get people actively participating and sharing the progress along with spreading the message of your cause with the world. 

10. Bring in noteworthy speakers

When people you care about speak at an event, you are likely to participate or at least spend the time to listen to them. That’s the same with raffle or fundraiser. If you can invite a celebrity (even if it’s someone popular within a small community), the word spreads fast within the community and a lot of their fans and followers will want to join the event too. 

The above is an excellent example of how people are willing to shell out money when the raffle event not only helps those in need but also offers immense value back. 

If you bring a celebrity to your event, it’s likely that fans will donate higher amounts to get noticed or to talk to the person after the event.  

Start selling out your raffle tickets

Promoting and selling raffle tickets requires effort. The marketing budget is lower while the funds you need to raise can be large. At such times, leveraging existing communities and influencers to help spread your word can be an extremely cost-effective way to sell more raffle tickets. 

You can also make the event feel more inclusive by creating custom banners, designs, and tickets. To create fully customized tickets and manage the members, try out Evey, the event ticketing and attendee management app for Shopify websites

It helps you create a seamless ticketing experience for a smooth purchase. Simply install the app, customize the tickets per your raffle, and set up your event page to start selling tickets. 

Whichever platform you use, remember this: Keep it easy for yourself and your audience to purchase and manage tickets.

Create a personalized ticketing experience for your raffle and start selling tickets easily. Install Evey Events today!

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