Over the past few months, you’ve given feedback on how we can help you run giveaways and sweepstakes. We’re excited to announce that Rafflecopter is out of private beta. We’d like to take a moment and describe all the new features this new widget has and how you might take advantage of it!
New Awesome Functionality
First, the new widget will no longer rely on cookies to remember you! You’ve brought to our attention that tracking users based on cookies was confusing. We couldn’t agree more! Deleting cookies meant the Rafflecopter form would appear to think you hadn’t entered the giveaway yet. That meant entrants who deleted cookies would come back to do a daily tweet and the form wouldn’t let them past w/o completing the mandatory entry option first.
To fix this, we’re introducing a sign-in system where you can log in through Facebook or email. Similar to the old Rafflecopter widget, users who choose to sign in with their name and email address will be prompted for this information once the widget loads. However, the difference now is that the widget will ask for this information once only as opposed to once per entry on every single giveaway. You’ll only have to sign into Rafflecopter once ever. After that, Rafflecopter will remember you when you visit another giveaway with Rafflecopter.
We’re also really excited to announce that folks can now sign in using Facebook connect. When someone signs in with Facebook, they’ll be asked for permission from Facebook which will give the person running the giveaway access to their name and email address so they can be notified if they’ve won. Finally, signing in w/ Facebook gives you the ability to edit your previous entries (in case you enter too fast and press enter before you’re done!).
What this means is that you can enter giveaways from your different devices from different computers and different locations without worrying about cookies or entry forms not remembering you. Even better, here’s a scenario: if you want to log in with Facebook from home to enter giveaways but you go to the office and enter a giveaway from work (don’t tell the boss!) but they don’t allow access to Facebook, as long as you use the same email address as your Facebook account, Rafflecopter will see that your email address is connected and still remembers what giveaways you’ve entered.
Finally, when you enter a giveaway with the new widget for the first time, you’ll only be shown mandatory entry options. If there are any optional entry options, they’ll appear only after the mandatory entry options have been completed.
Last but not least, the previous version of Rafflecopter only let you have one widget load on a page. However, the new Rafflecopter allows you to have more than one Rafflecopter widget per page!
But Wait… There’s More
The new version of Rafflecopter will be released and available for everyone this week. The process of creating giveaways in the Rafflecopter dashboard has been improved upon as well, but we’ll let you check it out on your own watch. In the meantime, we can’t think of a better way than to demonstrate the new widget by running a giveaway. Try out the new Rafflecopter below! For this giveaway, we’ll choose ten folks at random to be mailed a handful of stickers. If you have any questions about the new giveaway, feel free to leave a comment on this blog post and we’ll do our best to respond quickly :)
