Marketing·
Some raffles create one happy person and a hundred quiet disappointments, and that feeling sticks to the brand that ran it. So here is a different design: everyone wins, and the spin only decides which prize you get.
How it works
A customer scans the QR code and the game opens on their phone. A short survey is built into the game, and answering it is how you play. When they finish, the screen shows which prize they won, and they pick it up at the counter.
Giving everyone a prize is only half of this design. The questions inside the game are the other half, and they end up being worth more than the gifts. That part has a post of its own.
Why people actually scan
Everyone at a trade show wants contact details, and everyone walking the floor knows it. That is why the sign-up sheet sits untouched. People are not protecting their email address. They are protecting themselves from the months of email and texts that usually follow.
A prize changes the trade. Instead of “give us your details and we will be in touch,” it becomes “answer a few questions, and here is something to take home.” One side of that exchange is immediate and real, which is what makes people willing to stand on the other side of it.
Some businesses hand out a gift for signing up at all, and that works too. Putting a game around it does two more things: it holds people at the booth a little longer, and it sends you home with answers you can use, not just a list of addresses.
What kind of prize
The prizes do not need to be expensive. They just need to be genuinely nice, because most people will receive one of them.
Get that wrong and the damage runs backwards. If what they receive feels like nothing, the questions they just answered feel like wasted time.
Add a few mid-tier items above the small ones, and one or two big prizes. Put the big ones on display where people can see them from across the aisle, and leave the small gifts unannounced, so what you get stays a surprise.
None of this is secrecy. If anyone asks what the prizes are, of course you tell them. The only thing held back is which one they will get.
Your own product does double work as a prize, because it is a gift and a trial at the same time. A service works the same way: a free grooming session, a class, an hour of your time. And it does not have to sit at the small end. A basket of your products, or a full service package, makes an excellent top prize, and whoever wins it gets to try everything you offer at once.
Sometimes the product itself cannot be the gift. Nobody gives away a refrigerator as a sample. When I ran the raffle for Pawhalo, we gave things that go with cat litter and that a cat owner keeps using: a litter scoop, a deshedding glove, a teaser wand, a pet hair comb, a feeding mat. All of them were good quality, and all of them were useful to exactly the brand’s target customers.
Set up the back end
The experience on the screen is only as good as the prize list sitting behind it.
Every prize goes into the back end with an exact quantity. The wheel can only award what is actually in stock, and each win subtracts one from the count. When an item runs out, it stops appearing.
That one rule makes two things impossible. Nobody wins a prize that does not exist, and nobody is told afterward that the good one they just won is gone.
“Sorry, we ran out of that” is worse than never having offered it.
So count the stock before the doors open.
I built one of these QR codes for LA Preferred and their brand Pawhalo at SuperZoo, the pet industry trade show in Las Vegas. Visitors scanned the code at the booth, answered a few questions, spun, and picked up the gift the screen showed them.
Where to put the code
Anywhere someone is already standing still. A trade show booth, a table tent, the counter by the register, a shelf talker beside the product, the back of a receipt, an insert in the packaging, a sign in the window.
The shelf talker deserves its own mention if you sell through stores. Leave the prizes with the retailer and let shoppers collect them at checkout. The shopper plays while standing in front of your product, the store gets a reason to keep the display up, and you hear from people who are shopping the category at that moment.
At an event, “everyone wins” is a much stronger thing to say out loud than “enter our raffle.” It stops people who would have walked past.
Check the rules before you run it
In the United States a promotion becomes an illegal lottery when three things are true at once: there is a prize, chance decides who wins, and entering costs something. Remove any one of the three and it is not a lottery. This design already removes the third one. Entry is free, nothing has to be bought, and everyone wins.
Registration is a separate question, and it turns on the total value of all the prizes, not the value of any one of them.
Florida and New York require registration once that total goes over $5,000, and both also require a bond or a trust account for the full prize amount. Rhode Island’s line is $500, but only for promotions run inside a retail establishment.
Those numbers are easier to reach than they sound. Five hundred gifts at ten dollars each is five thousand dollars. So add up the whole pool before you decide where to run it.
Rules differ by state and they change. Every raffle has to be run against the rules that apply to it.
Everyone wins
You end the show with a room full of people who got something and left in a good mood.
And you go home with their answers, which is the half that keeps paying.
If you want one of these built for your next show, that is the work I do: the game, the question bank, and the prize inventory sitting behind it.