As an exhibitor, raffles give you the opportunity to attract audiences, interact with potential customers, and generate new business leads. Organizing a raffle not only brings more foot traffic to your booth, but also gives you a fun, interactive way to highlight your products or services. By offering your own products, branded giveaways, or related items as prizes, you can increase your company’s visibility, develop meaningful relationships, and gather quality leads that result in a worthwhile trade show experience. Keep reading for our expert advice on how to run a raffle, along with a free trade show raffle template to help get you started.

Table of Contents:

• 5 Benefits of Organizing a Raffle
• Tips for Planning Your Raffle
• Download Our Trade Show Raffle Template
• How to Evaluate Your Raffle’s Performance
• Partner with Cardinal Expo Today

5 Benefits of Organizing a Raffle

Trade show exhibitors find raffles valuable for a number of reasons. Some of the advantages of holding raffles include:

1. Bringing In Foot Traffic: Passersby can be attracted to your booth if they see there’s a raffle or contest. In fact, 62% of people share contests with another person to encourage them to participate as well. Getting people into your booth means more face time with potential customers.
2. Increasing Engagement: People are often thrilled by the idea of possibly winning a prize, and this excitement can lead them to stick around your booth to interact with your products and services.
3. Generating Leads: Since participants are sharing their contact information for the raffle, you can follow up with those contacts later on.
4. Raising Brand Exposure: Drawing crowds to your raffle can make your exhibit more noticeable to other conference attendees. An exciting raffle can cement your brand in visitors’ memories even after the show.
5. Generating Positive Brand Associations: A raffle is fun and engaging. Such positive feelings raise the likelihood that individuals will recall and will feel attached to your company. Almost half (46%) of people would rather purchase from a brand they trust, even if it’s more expensive.

Tips for Planning Your Raffle

Of course, planning in advance is the key to any trade show activity, including raffles. Proper planning will enable you to select prizes that your target market is most interested in. This will, in turn, ensure that there is maximum participation in your raffle.

By preparing in advance, you also gain time to promote your raffle before the trade show through press releases, social media, and other means, thereby raising anticipation and encouraging users to stop by your booth. Early planning gives you the chance to put everything in place so your raffle runs smoothly, from entry forms and collection boxes to prizes and personnel who are trained to handle your raffle efficiently.

Download Our Trade Show Raffle Template

A thorough questionnaire and checklist can help ensure that your raffle is organized and effective. Check out our trade show raffle template below to get started! Click here to download the template.

How to Evaluate Your Raffle’s Performance

At the end of the day, the reason to organize a raffle is to achieve your business objectives. Whether you’re just looking to drum up brand awareness or actually increase sales, you need to be able to evaluate the success of your raffle.

The easiest way to measure the ROI of your trade show raffle is to collect the right data from the beginning, with your key performance indicators (KPIs) already in mind. Check the cost of running the raffle against the profit it produces, while considering any other objectives you may have had besides revenue.

Below, we’ve outlined the steps you can take to evaluate your next raffle.

1. Determine Your Goals

In order to evaluate your success, you need to know what success means to you. If you’ve used our trade show raffle template, you can take a look at what you wrote and use it to clearly define your goals. Common goals include:

• X number of people entered into the raffle
• X% increase in visitors to your booth
• X total leads generated from the raffle
• X sales made during or after the event
• X total revenue from sales during or after the event

2. Calculate the Total Cost

A major factor in deciding whether a raffle or other trade show expenditure is worth it is understanding its cost. Log these costs as you go to make it easier to evaluate them afterward. Common costs associated with a raffle include:

• Prizes
• Advertising
• Promotional signage
• Exhibit adjustments
• Extra on-site staff
• Sign-up software

In addition to these more obvious costs, consider the cost of your staff’s time preparing and running the raffle.

3. Calculate Revenue Earned

If profit is your goal, then you’ll need to know if the revenue earned from the raffle outweighs its costs. Depending on your products and sales cycle, you may want to consider on-site sales and sales made following the trade show. Common revenue-related metrics include:

• Total sales revenue
• Average revenue per lead
• Lead conversion rate

4. Calculate Your ROI

With the information you’ve gathered previously, you’re ready to determine your ROI. Use the following formula: ROI = Net Profit / Total Cost.

5. Assess Qualitative Factors

Take into consideration additional factors which may not neatly fit into your calculations of profit, cost, and ROI, but still speak to the successes or failures of the raffle. This can be especially useful for planning raffles in the future. Common examples include:

• What users thought about the raffle
• Whether users had a positive, negative, or neutral experience
• What went well with the raffle
• What could have been improved with the raffle

When possible, gather feedback directly from participants as well as from staff who worked the booth.

6. Judge Your Success

To judge the overall success of your raffle, consider your findings from the previous steps. Weigh whether you met your goals, what the ROI was, and what you learned from the experience. If your prizes weren’t enticing, your promotion fell flat, or the process to participate was confusing, then you may want to try a raffle again in the future even if this one did not produce the results you were looking for.

7. Learn for the Future

Finally, if you are going to host a raffle again in the future, make a plan to implement the knowledge learned from this raffle’s performance. The key to making the most of a raffle is not just in generating leads or revenue, but also learning from the experience so the next one performs even better.

Partner with Cardinal Expo Today

With the right planning and experience, raffles can increase your booth’s visibility, engagement, and leads. But it takes time to put together an effective raffle, not to mention everything else an exhibitor needs to do before, during, and after a show. Our trade show raffle template is just the beginning.

At Cardinal Expo, we can take every aspect of your trade show booth’s management off your hands. We have decades of experience designing, fabricating, shipping, installing, deconstructing, and storing exhibits for companies across industries. Our team also assists with paperwork and coordinating third-party show services, including electrical, Internet, rigging, material handling, drayage, and more.

Make the most of your time by focusing on what you do best while we handle your booth. Contact us today by calling 504-930-3545 or by filling out the form below to discuss how we can design and manage your exhibit.