Step by Step Instant Win Contest Guide

What goals do you want to achieve with your contest?
Instant Win contests are a good choice for any promotion where you want to give away more than one prize; whether the prizes are the same, or you have a variety of items to give away. If you’re looking to gather leads or other general information about your audience, an Instant Win contest will help you collect that valuable data.

What entry requirements should you include?

You can ask for as little as a name and email address, or you can get a lot more in-depth and ask for other pieces of info like demographic information or birthdate. Our Form Widget help doc goes over all the different types of fields you can use when setting up your form.

Here’s how to quickly set up a landing page using ShortStack’s Instant Win Giveaway template: 

1. Log into your ShortStack account.
2. Click on the blue Campaign button at the top of the Dashboard to start a new campaign.
3. The Template Gallery will open. In the search bar in the top right corner, type instant win.
4. Hover over the single result and click the blue Use This Template button. You can also click here to get started with this template.
5. Add a name and any tags for your campaign in the fields provided.
6. Your campaign will now open in the Builder.
   
   Note: The template doesn’t automatically have the instant win feature enabled; we’ll tackle setting that up in the next step.
7. You’ll see that this template is organized into two main containers: the Giveaway Container and the Giveaway Over Container. To start, you’ll want to edit the visibility of each of these to correspond to your contest dates. For each, click on the container in the Edit Widgets Panel on the left, then click the Edit icon (the pencil).
8. In the widget settings pop up, click Visibility on the left.
9. In the visibility section, you’ll change the dates during which your container will be visible. Set this for both containers.
10. Click Save & Exit to close the pop up when you’re done editing.
11. Within the Giveaway Container, you’ll see two other containers — one named Winner Container and one named Non-Winner Container. Each contains an Image Widget, Rich Text Widget, and Share Widget. These containers include the messages that display to your winners and non-winners. Use the Builder to swap out the images and customize the text.
12. Further down, in the Giveaway Over container, update the message that displays when the giveaway is over.

13. If you want to add fields to your form, you’ll need to access the Form Designer. Click on your new Form Widget, highlighting it, then click the Design Form icon in the top left corner.

14. Make any needed changes to your form, then click Save & Exit. For more information on setting up your form, check out our Form Designer help doc.

15. From there, you’ll use the Builder to change the text and design of your landing page. When you’re ready to publish, click Publish Campaign at the top.

Follow these steps to set up Instant Win in your Form widget:

1. In the Builder, you’ll need to access the Form Designer. Click on your Form Widget, highlighting it, then click the Design Form icon in the top left corner.
2. Once you have the Form Designer open, click on the Instant Win tab at the top.
3. Then, on the right, you'll see the settings for instant win. Set the Enable Instant Win toggle to Yes to activate instant win on your form.
4. Once you've clicked the checkbox to activate instant win, there are specific settings that you'll want to adjust for your contest:
   1. If you’re on the Agency Plan or higher, you can set the Use Unique Codes List for Prizes toggle to Yes which opens a prompt allowing you to upload a list of unique codes to automatically divvy out to each of your winners. These can be coupon codes, prize names, or just internal codes used for your own tracking purposes.
   2. Update the Total Prizes Awarded field — this is the total number of prizes that you'll be giving away during the course of the Instant Win contest. The system will disperse these prizes and spread out the winners so that the prizes aren't all given away right at the beginning or end of your contest.
      

      NOTE: Codes/prizes are randomly timestamped so that no one will know exactly when a prize is available. This makes prize distribution fair to everyone who enters the contest.

   3. Set the Start date and End date of the instant win portion of your contest; these dates should correspond with the visibility settings you established in Step 1 of this guide.

   4. Set the Time Zone for the contest using the dropdown. By default, the time zone will be set to the time zone established in your account settings. However, if you'd like to change the time zone (for example, if you're building a contest for a client in a different area), you'd change that using this dropdown.

   5. When you export your entries, each entrant who won will be marked with a special label — set that label using the Winning entry label field. By default, the platform sets that label to "winner," but you can customize it to any label you'd like. We highly recommend using a unique label, as it makes finding your winners extremely easy when the contest is over.

5. Once you’ve got all the instant win settings tweaked to your liking, click the Save & Exit button at the bottom of the popup.
6. If you’ve published previous to setting up instant win, you’ll want to click the Publish Changes button in the top right of the Builder to push your changes to the live campaign.

Your Website
Leverage your website traffic to drive visitors to your contest. You can even embed your contest in your website so that everything is in one place.

End your contest

1. Log into your ShortStack account.
2. Open your contest in the Builder.
3. Click on the blue banner icon in the top right corner to open the Publication Panel.
4. Click the trash can icon to the right of the publication name to unpublish the campaign.

You’ll receive a notification when the system is done selecting your winner.
To see your winner(s), simply type the label you selected for your winners into the Label field in the top-left of the Entries Manager.

Then, reach out to your winner using a direct message on Twitter or Instagram or by email (if the winner came from a form) to get more information from them so you can distribute your prize.

Note: ShortStack makes it easy to send out a scheduled email to all the entrants in the contest you just ended. Check out the How to Set Up Automated Emails video on our YouTube channel for more information.