Email is the highest leverage owned channel a competition website has, and most operators run it badly or not at all. Six flows cover the bulk of the revenue: welcome, draw reminders, last chance, winner announcements, win-back, and abandoned entry recovery. Platform choice matters more than most operators expect: one operator we support upgraded to around £45 a month, sent a single campaign, and had burned 75% of the monthly send allowance. This guide covers the flows, the Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign decision, and why Nera Marketing recommends keeping SMS on a separate provider entirely.

What email marketing does for a competition website

Email is the channel you own. Meta ads rent reach at rising CPMs and organic social is throttled, but a consented email list sends for a fixed monthly fee no matter how often draws close. For a business running weekly draws, that maths compounds fast.

Competition websites also have something most ecommerce brands would kill for: a natural sending rhythm. Every draw close, every winner announcement, every new competition launch, and every instant win is a legitimate reason to email. Operators never have to invent a reason to be in the inbox. The calendar writes itself.

The list also grows without effort if the site is built right. Every paid entry is a checkout, and every checkout is a consent opportunity. A competition site processing a few thousand entries a month builds a marketing list at a pace most retailers only manage with paid lead ads.

The six flows every competition operator needs

Set up these six automated flows before sending a single manual campaign. Flows run on triggers, so they earn revenue around the clock while the operator runs the business.

Flow	Trigger	The job it does
Welcome series	First entry or signup	Explain the draws calendar, the free entry route, and what happens after a win
Draw reminder	24 to 48 hours before close	Bring entrants back before the deadline
Last chance	Final hours, or 90% of tickets sold	Honest scarcity with real numbers
Winner announcement	Draw result	Proof and trust, plus the strongest reactivation moment there is
Win-back	30 to 60 days inactive	Bring lapsed players back, often with site credit
Abandoned entry recovery	Checkout abandoned	Recover entries that stalled at payment

Two of these deserve emphasis. Winner announcements are the single most engaged message a competition business sends. On the push notification side we see the same pattern: winner announcements are the top performing message type by a factor of five. The moment of the draw is the moment players care, and a live draw plus a same-night winner email is the strongest one-two an operator can run.

Abandoned entry recovery is the flow with the most direct money in it. We covered the full picture in our guide to reducing abandoned entries; the email component is a timely reminder with a clear link straight back to the entry page.

Transactional and marketing email are different systems

One rule before any platform decision: ticket confirmations, winner notifications, and payment receipts never go through your marketing platform. They run on a dedicated transactional stack, and marketing runs on Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign. We wrote the full argument, the sending setup, and the 99% inbox benchmark in our guide to email deliverability for competition websites. Get those sending foundations right first, because no flow strategy survives landing in spam.

The legal line matters too. Transactional email sends because the player bought a ticket. Marketing email needs explicit opt-in consent under PECR, the UK’s electronic marketing rules, and the ICO’s direct marketing guidance is the reference. Keeping the two streams on separate systems keeps that boundary auditable.

Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign: choosing the email platform

We recommend both, for different operators. There is no single right answer, and we have watched clients thrive and struggle on each, so this is the honest split.

	Klaviyo	ActiveCampaign
WooCommerce fit	Native integration, we wire it into every build with consent syncing from checkout	Solid integration, slightly more setup
Pricing behaviour	Climbs quickly as the list and send volume grow	Fairer curve as the list grows
Support	Self-serve at typical operator tiers	Stronger human support, and our referral comes with a named account manager
Best for	Launch stage, operators who want flows working on day one	Growing lists, operators who feel the Klaviyo bill

Klaviyo is the default at launch. The WooCommerce integration is the deepest available, which is why our builds ship with it connected and consent capture already flowing. The caveat is the pricing curve. The real example from the top of this article was a Klaviyo plan: around £45 a month, one campaign sent, 75% of the monthly allowance gone, with the SMS add-on still unpriced on top. Klaviyo is not a bad platform. It is a platform whose bill needs watching as the list grows.

ActiveCampaign is where we point operators when the pricing or the support model starts to bite. The pricing curve is kinder to growing lists, the human support is materially better, and when we make the introduction the operator deals with a named account manager rather than a ticket queue. The operator signs up directly and owns the account, the data, and the billing relationship from day one, which matches how we handle everything else.

Switching is not a drama. When one of our operators told us they could not get along with Klaviyo, we made the introduction the same day and they moved to ActiveCampaign with their list intact. The platforms matter less than the flows, and the flows move with you.

Why SMS should live outside your email platform

Do not buy SMS as an add-on to your email platform. Bundled SMS credits are the expensive way to send texts, and they inflate an email bill that is already climbing with list growth. A dedicated SMS provider charges less per message, and your email plan stays lean because it only does email.

We partner with Quick SMS for exactly this reason, and we introduce clients directly the same way we do with ActiveCampaign. SMS earns its place on a competition site for the moments that cannot wait for an inbox: draw starting on live in ten minutes, last tickets remaining, winner announced. Open rates on SMS make email look slow, which is why it belongs on the urgent moments and email carries everything else.

Two practicalities to plan for. UK sender ID registration takes lead time, so sort it before the first campaign rather than the week you need it. And PECR applies to SMS exactly as it applies to email: explicit opt-in consent, captured and recorded, before a single marketing text goes out.

Push notifications complete the stack

If you run a mobile app, push is the third owned channel, and its numbers are worth seeing: winner announcement pushes reach 1.55% click-through and deliver to effectively the whole install base within minutes. We published the full data, including the send-type table, in our guide to mobile apps for competition websites.

The honest sequencing: email comes first. A new operator’s push reach was 54 app users in month one while their email list was already in the hundreds, because every checkout feeds the list. Push compounds as installs grow, and the competition app build makes sense once there is a repeat player base worth reaching. Until then, email and SMS carry the load.

Consent at entry: the setup most operators miss

The cheapest list growth in this industry is a consent tick at checkout, synced to the marketing platform automatically. Most operators bolt on popups later. The better pattern is wiring consent capture into the entry flow from day one, so every paying entrant makes a clear choice and the platform records it.

This is how we set up every build: the marketing consent field sits in the WooCommerce checkout, and the platform integration picks up the order data and the consent state together. When a compliance question comes later, and in this industry it does, the operator can show exactly when and how every contact opted in. A list built this way also performs better, because everyone on it is a paying player who chose to hear about draws, not a cold subscriber from a popup.

The same consent architecture is what lets an operator add SMS later without re-permissioning: capture email and SMS consent separately at checkout, and each channel stands on its own legal footing.

How Nera Marketing sets up email marketing on every build

Every competition site we ship leaves with the email foundations done: the transactional stack separated and configured, the Klaviyo integration connected with consent syncing from checkout on the Nera Engine platform, and the sending domain set up properly so campaigns authenticate from day one.

From there the operator chooses the marketing platform, and we make the introductions rather than resell. Klaviyo connected as standard, ActiveCampaign referral with a named account manager when it fits better, Quick SMS for the text channel. The operator contracts directly with each provider and owns every account, every list, and every piece of consent data outright. That is the same ownership position as the bespoke competition websites themselves: no lock-in, nothing held hostage, and a marketing stack the operator can take anywhere.

What good looks like after ninety days is a rhythm: flows running on triggers, one or two manual campaigns a week tied to draw moments, SMS reserved for the urgent hours, and a list that grows with every single entry sold.