One campaign I worked with successfully funded their $25,000 Kickstarter goal in only 10 minutes.
Think about that for a second.
Only 10 minutes to raise $25,000.
They ended up raising $189,513 at the end of their 30-day campaign.
Today, we’re going to reverse engineer how campaigns like this did the preparation beforehand to raise $25,000 in 10 minutes and absolutely crush their crowdfunding goal.
The part we’re focusing on today is the landing page where campaigners actually get the PERMISSION to talk to those interested in the product. This is where you build a clear, well-designed landing page that gives people the opportunity to opt-in.
There are lots of ways to build permission and trust. If you’ve been writing a well-read blog for years or have a robust email list, you already have permission. But most crowdfunding creators don’t have that. They’re usually new founders going to market with new product ideas.
If you haven’t built that permission already, a well-designed landing page is the best way to do it.
The reason campaign was fully funded in 10 minutes is that they started building permission four months before they launched and they designed a great landing page to build permission.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a specific form of a website that is deliberately created to help convert visitors to your site into leads. It must have a means for capturing an email address.
In crowdfunding, landing pages are an intricate part of the crowdfunding launch preparation for huge Day One success.
As you’ve probably heard, Day One success is critical in a crowdfunding launch since it sets the tone for the rest of the campaign.
The landing page is of vital importance in the crowdfunding launch system since it is the place where we collect the emails that drive that success for Day One.
It’s the connection point between advertising that gets people interested and the email marketing that nurtures the audience to our time of pre-order.
The process for building a great landing page
There’s a very particular process to go through to build a great landing page.
We wanted to build a base of people that we had permission to notify when the campaign launched.
Our process:
Plan: Start early (ideally, months before launch). Do the research and get the positioning down.
Build: Build a great landing page that explains the product and allows you to collect emails from interested people.
Launch: Launch the landing page to the world.
Promote: Send traffic to the landing page by promoting it in various ways and in various channels. Test what works and what doesn’t and repeat what works well.
What’s on a landing page?
Imagine you walk into a random shop on the side of the road. You go in and find a sign that says that they sell sandwiches and the step-by-step process you need to order a sandwich. There are pictures of different sandwiches and additional information about what goes in each of them.
Why did we just go through this imagination exercise?
Answer: because a landing page is just taking that sandwich shop experience and putting it online.
The landing page is someone’s first touchpoint to your brand and your product.
By coming to the landing page, they need to know:
- The brand
- What the product is
- What the product does
- The benefit they’ll receive from the product
Critical foundations for a landing page
Here are the things you need to do before you build a landing page:
1. Conduct market research
With research, you’ll uncover information about competitors and what the market for this product is currently like.
You’ll identify information like what type of images are typical in this product category. If every competitor in the pet-product industry is showing images of the product with a Pomeranian, then you definitely should include that in your product repertoire.
By looking at different websites and instances, you’ll uncover information that helps determine color choices and web color palettes. This is surprisingly important. In the medical industry, for example, you’ll notice that a lot of hospitals employ the color green (probably to signify health and wellbeing). Anything jarring like red (reminiscent of blood) is rarely employed in web or logo design.
When conducting market research, keep in mind the things that are commonalities and must-haves for your particular product category.
2. Understand your audience
This is one of the key items on this list that you need to have done before you just throw up a landing page.
From our market research, you’ll have already formulated an idea of what type of person might be interested in this product.
You’ll need to drill down further and get to their likes, dislikes, preferences, tones, voice — find the core of their being and formulate a persona.
Having this chiseled out will help you make crucial web decisions.
3. Brainstorm product positioning
The way you position a product means how that product will be viewed to the world.
A projector that has an integrated sound system can be anything from an all-in-one projector to the ultimate home theater system. That’s a world apart, isn’t it?
You can see that the way we’ve positioned those two products will make the product “appear” back into the consumer mind differently. That product will be “sticky” in a different way.
Do we want people to think of the product as a projector? Or do we want people to think of the product as a home theater system?
The answer to this requires a lot of testing (more on this below). For now, be sure to brainstorm a few different ways to position the product since some might work better than others.
4. Take product images (lifestyle images too if you can swing it)
Images help to bring the product to life.
Sure you can use things like lo-fi images taken from your iPhone, but that won’t do the product justice.
Invest in taking professional studio photos that thoroughly showcase the product in its best light and lifestyle shots that fully show the extent of its use.
This helps those who are interested actually envision how they will use the product and how this product can fit into their life.
Key elements of a successful landing page
Every successful landing page has a few core components that we’ll go through.
1. Hero section
80% of people who come to a landing page do not scroll down past the hero section.
What?!
That number is insane, but all too true.
This just means that the most important information must be located in the hero section of your landing page.
The section must be simple and clear to grabs viewers’ interest and tell them exactly what to expect. You have about 3 seconds (maybe less) to compel them to keep reading. Clarity is critical.
Include a clear picture of the product, the brand name, the product name, the positioning statement, the email capture segment, a simple reason why people should leave you their email now and a call-to-action.
As we mentioned before, the way to build up that Day One success is by gathering those emails and sending interested people to your crowdfunding page at launch. You need their emails.
Usually, campaigners use a special discount offer to incentivize people to leave their email, something like “sign up for up to 48% off when we launch”.
It’s a win-win situation in this case – as a campaigner you’ll have more people who pre-order your product on the first day and as a backer, you’ll get a special discount offer for the product.
By creating a good hero section, you’ve already won half the battle.
Below is a great example of a hero section. It’s clear and has all the components you need without all the frills.
You’re spending all of this time, effort and money driving people to the landing page to collect emails, make it count.
2. Show the features
Another important part of a landing page is the features that are actually on your product.
From conversations with people as the product is being built, you’ll hopefully have answers as to which features are the most important to people.
To go back to the all-in-one projector example — Is it the true 1080p resolution? Is it the integrated speakers? Is it being able to quickly cast anything from your phone or computer through the projector? Is it that it’s lightweight and portable?
Make sure that these features are there on the landing page in a quick snapshot.
This example is from another campaign, Park & Diamond, that created a collapsible baseball cap that substitutes for a bike helmet.
Campaigners usually pair these feature snapshots with related iconography.
3. Show the core benefits
The top 3-4 benefits should be apparent with your product.
As the creator, you know how it will enhance your life, people who are new to the product and brand ecosystem do not know this information yet. Make it apparent to them.
Yes, the product has keystone correction, but what this actually means is that the user can set the projector at any angle of the room and still be able to project a clear image on the flat wall.
Sure the product has an app that controls the projection, but what it really means is that the user never has to go around looking for the remote, they can just open the app on their phone and control the projector from anywhere.
Hydrow is a project that combines live workouts and indoor rowing. They’ve clearly outlined the benefits of using their machine below.
4. Gallery of lifestyle images (optional)
The gallery of lifestyle images is to showcase how this product actually integrates into the home experience.
What type of people use the product, how do these people feel while using the product and where these people use the product.
Website metrics you need to care about
Similar to anything else, there are metrics that you need to measure for a landing page. There are metrics like:
- Engagement: Bounce Rate, Duration
- Audience: demographics, interests, device
- Content: mostly visited page, landing/exit page, HOTJAR to identify
a specific section within a page - Source: organic & paid traffic
- Conversion: e-commerce conversion rate, order value, attribution, funnel
And so much more. The one thing we’re most concerned about for our landing page is the conversion rate. This is defined as how many people come to the landing page and actually submit their email address.
Conversion rate (CR%) = # of people who submit their email address / # of people who come to the landing page
With any landing page that you build, the higher the number the better.
For a crowdfunding campaign with a very targeted audience group, you’d aim for about a 30% conversion rate.
If it’s lower than that, consider further optimization through A/B testing factors on your landing page.
Tracking performance on a landing page
No matter what type of website you build, landing page or otherwise, the most important item to include is a Google Analytics script.
This one script alone is able to track users on your site and provide you with invaluable data.
The other types of tracking pixels you’ll need on a landing page are advertising pixels and depends on the type of advertising you choose to run.
For many campaigners, Facebook is an obvious choice since the platform provides access to a huge potential audience that can be customized.
Compared to other ad platforms like Google Ads, the Facebook advertising platform is also much easier to use for someone who is just starting out with advertising.
A/B testing to create the ultimate landing page
Digital marketers often talk about “A/B testing” and “optimization”.
Simply put, A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better. If you find that a new option makes people convert better than the original option, then you optimize your campaign page (i.e. make it better) by changing the old into the new.
There are countless experiments that you can run on your landing page.
These experiments should be run separately/individually from one another. Running multiple experiments at once makes it difficult to separate the effects of the tests; you won’t know if experiment 1 or experiment 2 is affecting the results.
The factors that will make the most difference is the positioning statement and image in the hero section of your page.
What to do now
As you move towards launching your crowdfunding campaign, make sure that you have your marketing pieces, like this landing page, ready to go.
Start months ahead of time and build the perfect landing page to communicate your project to the right groups. Collect emails to gain permission to let potential backers know when you launch.
If you’re still not sure how to get started with your landing page, I’ve created a Crowdfunding Starter Kit to help you. It’s a free online video course that will tell you the exact tool you need to use and how to set it up. Access it here.
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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!
