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Starter Guide: How to Create a Contest Entry Form

By Brenda Barron Published April 12, 2021

Running a contest or a giveaway is a great way to boost engagement on your site and build brand awareness. With Gravity Forms, a versatile form plugin for WordPress, you can easily create contest entry forms for your website.

In this starter guide, we’ll take a look at how you can use Gravity Forms to design an effective contest entry form. We’ll also talk about how to enhance your form with extra fields, and how to integrate your contest entry form with an email marketing or CRM platform.

Let’s get started…

Why Run a Contest on Your WordPress Website

As mentioned earlier, running a competition on your website is a great way to boost engagement and build brand awareness. However, there are a few more reasons why you should consider running a contest:

• To grow your email list and generate qualified leads for your business
• Add a fun element to your brand
• Drive traffic to your website
• Or learn more about your followers and fans through their answers

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what makes an effective contest entry form and how to create one.

What Makes an Effective Contest Entry Form

An effective contest entry form shouldn’t be too long. If you make the form too long or ask too many questions, you risk visitors abandoning the form before they fill it out completely.

Since the goal is to generate entries for your contest, your contest entry form should ask for the following as the bare minimum:

• Contact information such as name and email address
• Physical address if you’re going to ship a physical item as a reward to the contest winner
• Contest entry rules so people know what’s required to win and when the contest takes place
• Checkbox so they can agree to the rules of your contest

How to Create a Contest Entry Form With Gravity Forms

Now that we’ve covered why you should run competitions on your website and what makes an effective contest entry form, let’s go through the steps of creating the form itself.

Step 1: Create a New Form

The first step is to create a new form. If you already have Gravity Forms, log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Forms > New Form. Give it a name, enter a description if you want, and press Create Form.

If you don’t have Gravity Forms installed, you’ll need to buy a license first and download the plugin to your computer. Log in to your WordPress website and go to Plugins > Add new > Upload. Press, Choose files and locate the zipped file you’ve downloaded. Then, click Install > Activate.

Once the plugin has been installed and activated, adhere to the instructions to register the plugin with Gravity Forms. Then, follow the steps described above to create the new form for your contest.

For more information on how to get started with our plugin, check out this video tutorial –  How to Install Gravity Forms on Your WordPress Website.

Step 2: Add Form Fields

Now it’s time to add fields to your form. Click on the Advanced Fields and add the Name and Email fields to your form. If you’re offering a physical item as a reward, be sure to also add the Address field.

If you want to display contest rules on your form and have the visitors agree to them, add the Consent field and then enter your contest rules. By default, this field is set up for a privacy policy but you can modify the text to include accepting the contest rules.

Depending on the type of contest you’re running, you might want to add extra fields to your form. For example, you could add checkboxes if the contestants need to correctly answer a question.

Or, you could add a file upload field if they need to submit a photo or any other type of document for their entry.

Lastly, don’t forget that you can also add a CAPTCHA field to prevent spam entries and ensure you’re getting legitimate entries.

Step 3: Enabling Form Restrictions

Contests are typically time-based. In other words, they have a set beginning and end time which is what makes them so effective for generating buzz and building interest.

With that said, you’ll need to enable some form restrictions to prevent visitors from entering the contest long after it has passed.

Start by going to your contest Form Settings and scroll down until you see the Restrictions section. For starters, you can limit the number of people who can enter the contest. This is a good option if you want to run a small-scale contest and make it even more exclusive.

You can also schedule a time when your form starts and stops being active to match the contest’s deadline. Tick the box to schedule the form and you’ll be able to enter the start and end date as well as customize the message that appears on the page where your contest form is located.

When you’re done, click Update Form Settings.

Step 4: Setup Form Confirmations And Notifications

Once you’ve created the form, go through the Form Confirmation settings to customize the confirmation message. You can also choose to redirect users to a page on your website after they have submitted the form.

To customize the confirmation message, click on the Form Settings tab. Then, edit the default confirmation or create a new confirmation message.

For more information on confirmation messages, check out these articles…

• How to… Configure a Custom Confirmation Message 
• How to… Redirect Users to a New Page or URL After Form Submission

Don’t forget to set up the form notifications. By default, you as the site admin will get notified on new form submissions. However, you can also create notifications for anyone else that needs to be notified of new contest entries as well as a user notification.

To set up a new notification, click on the Notifications tab. Then, click Add New and enter a name for the notification. If you’re sending it to someone else on your team, enter their email address in the Send to Email field.

If you’re sending it to the user who submitted the form, change the Send To type to Form Field and select the Email field from the dropdown.

You’ll then want to go through the other notification fields and add your name, email, subject, and message to go along with the notification.

For more information on creating notifications, have a read of this article – How to… Configure Custom Notifications.

Step 5: Integrating Contest Entry Form a CRM or Email Marketing Provider

Once your contest entry form is live and you start collecting entries, you’ll need a way to keep the contestants updated with any news or updates related to the contest. You’ll also want to send details of up-coming promotions and other marketing materials related to your business.

Gravity Forms integrates with a number of email marketing providers and CRMs so you can easily stay in touch with your contestants. These include services like Mailchimp and HubSpot.

For example, to integrate your contest entry form with HubSpot, go to Forms > Add-Ons and activate the HubSpot Add-On.

You will then need to authorize your HubSpot account with Gravity Forms and create a HubSpot feed for your form to enable form submission data to be sent to HubSpot.

For more information on HubSpot, and how to integrate it with your forms, check out this article – This Month’s Featured Add-On… HubSpot.

Final Thoughts on Creating a Content Entry Form

As you can see, creating a contest entry form with Gravity Forms is quick and easy. If you want to boost visitor engagement and build brand awareness for your business, a contest entry form is a great way to knock out two birds with one stone.

Are you ready to create a contest form for your website? Check out our pricing page and get Gravity Forms today.

Not a Gravity Forms customer yet? Give our free demo a try to see just how easy it is to create forms with our drag and drop form builder and integrate them with other services that your already business uses.