Congratulations, you’ve successfully funded your crowdfunding campaign!
Crowdfunding is not a simple feat so be proud of what you’ve accomplished.
After all the caffeine, sleepless nights, backer interactions, live demos, logistic nightmares, and SO MUCH MORE – YOU DID IT!
However, before you sleep for three days straight, here are three things you need to handle right away.
1. Recover failed credit card charges
This step only applies if you’re using Kickstarter for your campaign.
On this platform, the end of your campaign is when your backers actually get charged. Some of these credit card charges will not go through (for various reasons).
An average of 3% of your pledges will fail to go through, meaning that you’ll fail to receive about 3% of your funding amount. That’s a huge number. Especially when you have to take into account all the other charges and fees associated with running a crowdfunding campaign.
Start off your post-campaign efforts strong by using these two strategies to recover failed pledges on your campaign.
2. Communicate with your backers
Once a campaign reaches its end date – backers get a notification that the campaign was successfully funded and they’ll start wondering “what now?”
Say “Thank you”
Yes, it’s basic.
But if you forget to say thanks, backers WILL notice.
By this time, you’ve convinced a whole lot of people on the internet to give you money for something they might get.
Make sure to thank them for helping bring it to life. They deserve it.
Let backers know the right location to contact you
Trying to manage customer service across Facebook, YouTube, Email, Instagram, Twitter, comments on your campaign page, and anything else will get overwhelming VERY quickly.
With all these channels, you’re also more likely to miss solving people’s problems. That’s a complete no-no.
You want to get in front of any customer service issues that might arise before things get out of hand.
Choose one official channel to dedicate to answering questions. Be sure to tell everyone and use that as the one-and-only “Official Way To Contact the Campaign”.
If a backer messages you on another platform, let them know to forward their message on to this channel to get their issue resolved.
This will help minimize the number of miscommunications and forgotten customer service issues you’ll have to manage because there’s only one place that your campaign will use as a place of record.
3. Set expectations
Seasoned crowdfunding backers understand that most of what they’ll be doing now is waiting. BUT, not all backers understand this about crowdfunding.
Oftentimes you’ll see backers immediately getting irritated that they haven’t received their product, service, game, app, etc. yet.
But you can’t blame these backers.
A lot of people back crowdfunding campaigns without truly understanding what it entails. Ruh roh.
They think of it just like an eCommerce store. The majority of other online transactions are clear and easily understood (think buying on Amazon.com, it’s clear, easy and you know exactly when you’ll be getting that item you bought). Crowdfunding isn’t really one of them.
Most backers are left in the dark after a campaign ends. It’s now up to you to educate as many backers as you can in detail about what will be happening next. Some questions that will be running through their minds:
- Do they need to email you their address?
- When can they expect their product?
- When’s the deadline?
- What happens if I miss it?
- How do I update my preferences?
Let backers know what to expect from you, when to expect it, and what they need to do.
Answer top-of-mind questions early or else you’ll soon begin drowning in customer service hell trying to answer all of these questions to everyone.
4. Set up post-campaign pre-sale channels
No matter how much you message and market your campaign, you’ll still get stragglers and late arrivals to your page asking to give you money.
Go back to edit your campaign page so that it’s as easy as possible for these people to give you money!
This is important because of how highly crowdfunding pages rank on search engine results. You’ve spent a lot of effort and time getting people to your crowdfunding page. Often, the completed crowdfunding page will out-rank your own product website for quite some time.
Updating your campaign is an effective way at directing traffic to someplace where you can monetize it.
If you’re using Indiegogo, you can simply go back to “edit” a campaign and include a new call to action button at the top of your campaign page. On Kickstarter, Spotlight is a great feature that lets you edit your campaign page after successfully funding.
Change your campaign’s call to action button to head to your company’s landing page to either capture a presale, or to capture an email to notify potential customers of when presales will open up.
Post-campaign sales isn’t something to shrug off lightly.
Campaigns can raise significant funds after a campaign closes, sometimes as much as 50-75% in extra pledges happen after a campaign ends.
That’s a lot of dollars.
Of course these are only the first four things you should immediately do after successfully crowdfunding a product.
There’s still a whole world of logistics and fulfillment to navigate through to get from successful campaign to product delivered!
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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!
