What is the difference between a raffle and a sweepstakes

A game is any promotion in which a winner is selected as the outcome. It can be a game of skill or a game of chance. For example, a contest is a game of skill while a sweepstakes is a game of chance. This allows the courts to determine whether luck or skill is the most important aspect in the selection of a winner.

A sweepstakes is a promotional drawing in which prizes are given away to participants. There is no purchase required to enter and the sweepstakes winners are selected at random from a pool of all of the eligible entrants.

A contest is also a promotional drawing in which prizes are given away. However, there is one major difference: skill. Participants in a contests are judged by their entries according to a pre-defined set of criteria. Winners are selected at random. And compared to a contest being a game of skill, sweepstakes are a game of chance. The winner must be selected at random — for example, using a service like Random.

A lottery is a means of raising money by selling numbered tickets and giving prizes to the holders of numbers drawn at random. The winner is chosen at random, like in a sweepstakes, but entrants have to pay to play unlike a sweepstakes. A lottery is essentially a game of luck that has an entry fee. Every state has strict laws barring private lotteries, however, and most lotteries for promotion of a business are going to be illegal lotteries.

Sweepstakes must differentiate themselves from lotteries in order to stay within the law. Click here to get started. And for a good reason, too: they are a convenient and cost-efficient tool which holds a major traffic and conversion growth potential for small and mid-size businesses.

For businesses, on the other hand, the smart marketing tools entail better visibility, scores of potential new customers, significant traffic and conversion increase, and notable lead database growth. As a rule, giveaway is a blanket term used for any marketing campaign within which free merchandise is offered to potential or existing customers.

Although it may seem as one of the least profitable advertising tools, giveaways actually hold immense value for branding and lead generation, which is why more and more growth-minded businesses use them to increase their competitiveness on the market.

In digital marketing, giveaways are slightly different from contests and raffles which offer a chance for the participants to take smart prizes home, but also require partakers to take a certain action before they can claim their trophy.

There are quite a few benefits your business can scoop from running an online giveaway, and they include easy lead generation, network growth, long-term marketing savings, and better product exposure in the public. Giveaways are a go-to marketing tool for easy lead generation and increasing the number of email subscribers.

In this sense, giveaways function like hooks since they entice customers to make a purchase, and as such can be highly lucrative. For instance, Costco managed to boost their sales for certain products by as many as percent with the help of free samples.

Giveaways are a great way to grow your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram communities, and they can help your business double or triple its follower crowd over night.

On top of that, cleverly designed giveaways can help boost follower engagement on social networks and win over new followers by increased likes, shares, and comments. On top of that, the costs of running a giveaway are predictable, which allows you to custom-tailor your long-term marketing strategy and budget plans. If you want to generate lots of buzz even before your business rolls out a new product, it would be a clever move to run a pre-launch giveaway. Successful brands know it already , so you can take their word for it.

In this sense, a raffle resembles a lottery, but the key difference is that lotteries can yield a non-winning result, whereas raffles always have a winner. Namely, all purchased tickets participate in the final draw and the winner is randomly selected from a pool of tickets.