Written by Oleg Domansky, domansky.oleg@gmail.com
Spoiler alert: if you haven’t run a crowdfunding campaign and do not plan to – this story would probably be a waste of time for you.
Having read dozens of articles on how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, I realized most of them have something in common. THEY ARE USELESS. Just think, how many times you’ve read about the importance of ‘building your email list upfront’, about ‘utilizing your social media’ and ‘having a quality video’? In my opinion, trying to employ such unquestionable and, at the same time, vague instructions when working on your campaign would be a crowdfunding equivalent of planning your career based on advices of a Life Coach.
That’s why I decided to share a handful of very small, yet concrete and actionable techniques we used when raising over $160,000 for Jammy Guitar on Indiegogo.
1. Set-up your Google Analytics and Facebook/Adwords pixels
Indiegogo platform provides pretty limited opportunities for analytics and retargeting, but it should satisfy the necessity if you setup your pixels and connect your Google Analytics, BEFORE the campaign:
Fields for GA Tracking ID and Conversion Pixel ID in the Campaign Editor
2. Get featured by Indiegogo!
Here is the weekly breakdown of our funds’ sources:
40% of our revenue came from Indiegogo visitors
Here, organic Indiegogo audience brought the biggest chunk of our revenue. That happened because our campaign got featured several times on the platform’s homepage and in Indiegogo newsletter. So, how do you do that?
- Try to make connections with the Indiegogo team (it’s fairly simple these days, considering they have a booth at the majority of consumer electronics trade shows in the US)
- Get a promotional package. This is an informal agreement containing conditions like “Indiegogo provides at least 2 spots in our newsletters after you’ve raised $X”
- Make sure you’re maximizing your Gogo factor. If you haven’t heard it before, Gogo factor is an algorithm that helps Indiegogo to determine whether a campaign should appear on their homepage, in search results and other heavy traffic places (additionally to the promotional package you get). An analogy would be Google Page Rank, where the factors would be amount of funds raised, campaign page views, view time, number of comments, updates frequency etc.
- Offer free shipment in your retargeting ads
Indiegogo calculates the shipping cost only on the check-out page, which might be a real bummer for a hesitating prospect. We saw that in a form of 60% drop-out rate from that page:
Our Facebook retargeting ads shown to those drop-outs and offering free shipment yielded 3.6x lower CAC than regular retargeting ads:
An ad with a link to a secret perk shown to our retargeting list on FB
3. Make the most out of your email list
Don’t think about your launch email as a big single splash, send follow-ups. We’ve sent 6 additional campaigns to the same email list after the “launch” email and they’ve yielded 54% of the total funds generated from this channel.
Breakdown of the revenue % generated from 7 email campaigns
4. Pitch FB-communities with your crowdfunding videos
There are a bunch of gadget/crowdfunding-focused communities with an enormous reach and great engagement (e.g., Techinsider, Fatherly, YOO). Just direct message them on Facebook and don’t forget to ask to include the link to your campaign in the video description.
We’ve got more than 3 million views absolutely for free.
Jammy appearances on the popular Facebook communities.
5. Survey your first backers for better targeting and messaging
You’ll obviously get lower cost and higher click-through-rate when showing your ads to the right demographics and with the right messaging inside.
Besides, it helps to better understand the expected use-cases for your product and imply the right visuals in your ads:
Sample from the survey we’ve ran across the backers and the resulting FB-ad.
Indiegogo campaign editor tool doesn’t provide a lot of flexibility, but there is still a way to use the momentum of your potential backer being the most excited (instead of forcing him to scroll all the way up to the perks section and lose that excitement on the way).
Custom CTA button in the middle of our crowdfunding page
To do this, just embed a custom link to an image of the button in your campaign editor:
Use your campaign directory and the id of your most popular perk.
Conclusion
There is no freaking conclusion, just go and try these ideas for your campaign!
