Crowdfunding is about finding the right people online and getting them to contribute to your crowdfunding page. Most will click away without a second thought, but some will turn into a sale. When looking for the right people, you want to be able to connect with them via email (because email marketing is NOT DEAD). Here’s how (and why you should) build your email list:
The formula for success is pretty simple:
- Find more people online
- Direct them to your page
- Increase the conversion on your page
- Rinse and repeat.
How do you find people online?
The 4-Step Funnel To Quickly Build A Crowdfunding Email List
Paid advertising is a great way to generate interested leads for your project. Especially if you don’t have fans yet. There are a few ways to do paid ads, but the best for those just starting out is definitely Facebook for the biggest ROI.
You can easily build this 4-step funnel by following these steps:
1. Properly targeted FB Ads gets the user to click through to a landing page
2. The landing page shows more features, pictures, and credibility indicators
3. User signs up to email list on the landing page
4. Email marketing begins on the campaign to get people HYPED about our launch
These steps are straightforward and very powerful.
While some crowdfunding agencies and consultants build their entire business on creating this 4-step funnel for you, this is actually something you can do yourself!
1. Build a high-converting landing page to capture email addresses
A landing page is a simple website that serves only one purpose: to have a place to convert online traffic them into email signups.
That’s it.
Keep your page simple with high-quality images, concise language, credibility factors and a reason for the person to join your email list NOW.
The most important part of your landing page is that it has ONLY ONE CALL TO ACTION: to sign up for your email list.
Adding more links, buttons, options, etc will only reduce your conversion rate. And really, a high conversion rate is the name of the game when it comes to building an effective email list.
If you need help creating a landing page, I’ve created a free video course to take you through the entire process.
2. Set up an email marketing platform to store email addresses.
Use an established platform like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Drip, or an infinite number of other platforms.
For the many campaigns that I advise on and help run, I recommend to use Mailchimp for a few reasons:
- It’s incredibly simple to set up
- It’s very easy to design templates on
- You can build more complicated send rules
- The platform is optimized to send effectively into inboxes
3. Setup Facebook ads
Building Facebook ads is a HUGE topic so now here it is broken down into the most simple terms.
Get good images
Get a product image that is clear and compelling with minimal text on it (preferably none at all). Facebook has a “20% rule” where images with more than 20% text will not run on the ad platform.
They’ve even made a handy dandy tool for you to check the percentage of text on your page.
Pro tip: find an image that gets people to stop scrolling on their news feed and look at your content. It can be something shocking. It can be something provocative. It can be something totally different than is usually on Facebook. Get creative here!
Write good copy
The name of the game with Facebook is to get people to click, click and click.
Grab attention and encourage clicks by writing emotionally-charged language. For example, write “I’ll NEVER be able to pack 3 weeks of clothes into a carry-on bag, is there ANYTHING I can do?!”. This is much better than “Here’s how to pack 3 weeks of clothes into a bag. “
Lead first with the problem as that’s what will get people to click to your landing page.
Find good audiences
Now to figure out the target of the ads. There are two ways to go about doing this:
- Creating relevant audiences yourself on Facebook. By now you’ve researched your target audience some. From this, you have some thought about what their interests will be, their age range, where they live and so on. Create this as a saved audience in your ad platform and voila!
- There’s another way to do this that requires you to spend some upfront cash. There are services out there that provide names and email addresses for backers of products in different categories. You can pay for these lists and upload them as a custom audience to run ads to them.
Pro tip: I would NOT recommend sending emails directly to these lists that you purchase because you will undoubtedly be marked as spam and that is NO FUN to try to get unlisted as spam. A service like Krowdster is able to provide you with the emails you need for this.
When ads targeted at that list stop being effective, create a lookalike audience, to those who have opted into your email list.
Facebook’s algorithm will take your super-targeted email list and go out to search for others that have the same characteristics, all by itself!
Point all of these ads at your landing page, and you’re set.
Test out a few different ads at $50 or so a day.
Determine which combination of images and sales language is most effective before scaling up your spend for more emails.
4. Get people HYPED about your launch with email marketing
What do you do with all these people on your email list?
Well, it’s time to get them HYPED up about your launch!
Usually email open and click rates decline the more you email people, but that’s where an effective email marketing strategy comes in. Use the weeks before launch to build interest and, more importantly, rapport.
What should you write about in your emails?
Get them EXCITED for you to launch so that they’re ready to whip out that credit card when you start taking pre-orders.
- Tell these backers the story of your product
- Get them familiar with your team
- Show them some testimonials of people actually using it
There it is, the easy 4-step process you need to build our email list FAST.
Now, you might be wondering: how many emails do I actually need for my launch?
You’ll need enough people on your email list so that you can fund 30% of your campaign within 24 hours.
I call this the 30% Rule and it’s the golden rule to use when you’re launching so that you can CRUSH that campaign.
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We’re here to help you crush your crowdfunding campaign and fund your dream. Our team has helped creators successfully launch and raise over $13 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We’re so excited to help you on this journey to launch!
