In the early days of the crowdfunding industry, there weren’t any proven or verified strategies to go about actually marketing a new Kickstarter launch.
Thankfully, the “wild west” days of crowdfunding have transformed into a growing industry that has rewarded entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, and backers.
Now, there is a step-by-step process for launching a campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I cover this process comprehensively in my online course, the Complete Crowdfunding System. I also talk about this in my book, The Kickstarter Launch Formula.
Today, I want to share with you a very small part of that system. Put simply, you gotta gather email addresses before you go live with your project.
This email list will serve as the initial “crowd” that you’ll market to, resulting in:
- A boost of traffic
- Instant funding
- Raving fans that rope in super backers.
The video that I put together for you today shows you how to go about getting these email addresses and how other successful crowdfunders have accomplished this task.
What did you think of the video?
Cleared things up a bit, didn’t it?
I guarantee you that if you start to research some of the more successful campaigns out there on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you’ll discover that they all have a email marketing strategy.
This is the “holy grail” for getting traction within the first week of your campaign. As we all know, the first week can literally make or break your fundraising project.
Why do you need email subscribers?
A lot of marketers that are new to crowdfunding are confused… why emails? Isn’t social media more important than email marketing?
You’d think that right? With all of these media stories about campaigns that have gone viral on social media, who wouldn’t!
Actually, email is the #1 sales channel for digital and physical products, along with how many backers discover that a crowdfunding campaign is live. According to McKinsey, the average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.
It makes complete sense. Social media is great. I have a entire module in my course devoted just to social media. However, the conversion rates aren’t as good.
When you post a Facebook update, not everyone is going to see that update because of the Facebook algorithm. The same goes for Instagram. With Twitter, not everyone is going to see your message as well.
This means that while you may have 10,000 social media followers, only a small fraction of them will actually consume your updates, react to them, or click through and discover your campaign.
The conversion rates for email are much better! You can instantly get hundreds and of people clicking through to discover your project.
Email is the best way to direct a river of traffic to one specific link.
What tools can help you do this?
I talk about some of the tools in the video. From speaking with my course students, one of the most commonly mentioned difficulties is setting up the pre-launch landing page for an upcoming Kickstarter project.
It’s hard because there are many elements at play. You need:
- Compelling copywriting
- High quality images
- A video that teases the product
- Email capture fucntionality
- An attractive page design
That’s a lot of things to cover and putting together the actual functionality to capture email addresses will quickly frustrate you and make your head spin.
That’s why I recommend software like Leadpages to make this all easier. Leadpages is a software tool that lets you choose from and customize a variety of landing page templates.
I actually use these guys for my own lead capture pages, like this one. That’s the main reason that I recommend them. They have worked well for me and my business.
I also mention some other tips and tools on the video, so if you haven’t already, go and have a watch!
Is this hard? How do I get traffic?
Thankfully, it’s not as difficult as you might think to build an email list. This is simply another problem that needs to be solved.
I talk at length about how to do this effectively on this blog and in my book, The Kickstarter Launch Formula.
You’re sure to get a great ROI on the time that you spend building your email list. The real question is… how do you do it? How do you drive traffic to an offer?
There are many different ways to do this, including:
- Facebook ads
- Starting a blog
- Organic social media traffic
- Live events
- And much more.
You’re either going to be spending TIME or MONEY to drive traffic. For example, writing a blog article will take up time. Running a Facebook advertisement will cost money.
I would recommend setting aside a $1,000 – $5,000 budget for advertising your crowdfunding campaign. This number is going to vary depending on your fundraising goal.
When you watch this video, you’ll see step-by-step how to get emails for your launch. I think you’re gonna love it!
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Most of the information that I put out is free, and when it’s premium, it’s for good reason (it will get you results faster).
