Pre-Campaign: Build Email List & Buzz
Christopher Hawker
Lesson Info
13. Pre-Campaign: Build Email List & Buzz
Lessons
Class Introduction
07:56 2What is Crowdfunding?
32:23 3Is Crowdfunding Right for Me & My Project?
21:22 4How to Build & Manage a Team
12:23 5Choose a Crowdfunding Platform
11:44 6Create the Campaign Page
12:49 7Campaign Page Examples That Work
29:44 8Set the Campaign Timeline
08:18Determine the Perk Strategy
12:04 10Campaign Goal & Referral Strategy
11:31 11Produce a Campaign Video
02:23 12Campaign Videos That Work
46:59 13Pre-Campaign: Build Email List & Buzz
41:50 14Pre-Campaign: Social Media Strategy & PR
08:36 15Launch Your Campaign
07:57 16Live Campaign: PPC & Facebook Ads
12:08 17Live Campaign: Email Updates & Adjust Goals
18:32 18Post-Campaign: Workflow & Delivering Your Product
23:47 19Post Campaign: Obstacles & Backer Communication
07:01 20Your Crowdfunding Future
02:22Lesson Info
Pre-Campaign: Build Email List & Buzz
Next up, we're going to talk about pre campaign marketing, so, again, I referenced earlier that I call, I like to call crowdfunding building your rocket, and the campaign paid the rocket, and the video is the rocket engine. Well, the pre campaign marketing is the fuel for your rocket, and that, just like a rocket, the work you do before you hit the launch button has far more to do with this success the campaign than anything you can do after you hit the launch button, like, if you built an awesome rocket and given it plenty of fuel, you hit the button that launches that it takes off, and it goes to space. If you don't have enough fuel, it doesn't matter what you do after you hit the launch button. It's not going to go to space, it doesn't matter if you're built your rocket, and the rocket is not aerodynamic, and it doesn't have the right characteristics to be a rocket that can go to space, and you hit the launch button, even if you have tons of fuel it's gonna blow up on the launch pad...
, so in order to have success, you gotta have the great rock it, you've got to get the great engine, you gotta have plenty of fuel in order to hit escape philosophy, velocity, so again, if you can't take the time to build your pre campaign, then it's not even worth doing the campaign because this is the number one problem people have reference that the very first question chris asked me today was like what's the biggest obstacle in the biggest obstacle is like about the campaign like you know sucked it up and stood in front of the camera and made a video and I, you know did all this stuff and then I lost the campaign and our state three and I haven't got a single person took back my campaign yet. Well, you thought that all you had to do is build it and they will come and you made a tremendous number of errors in terms of like how these things work because like first and foremost you want to create energy at the beginning, the campaign that's going to drive it because how you do on the first day of the campaign in the first minutes of your campaign it is essential to your ultimate success because the momentum you create that first day is what carries you through the whole thirty plus days your campaign it's all created at the beginning so you don't want to launch two crickets you don't want to be like ok, here we go and then you throw it up there and then it's just like nothing's happening three people so now you've got no chance anyone who shows up is going to see that you've got no momentum that no one's interested how is that even possible you didn't even back your own campaign the first person back every one of my campaigns is me I'm like ok launched back the campaign why? Because it's my campaign and I want it's like I used to wait tables and we'd have a little tip her and I'd always put the first dollar in the picture and I know I felt like I was seating the tip jar and then the more tips will grow but here it's like the same thing it's like I just want to instantly make sure there's money there so no one shows up and sees it empty meanwhile how we generate the success the campaign primarily number one by far most valuable thing is an email list because an email list allows you to directly call people to action the list khun b a combination of people you already knew your network and then people you gather for the campaign first and most important list is your network so who are you going to call on the first hour people who you know are going to back your campaign because they know and love you it's your mom it's your dad it's your brother it's your friends your college roommate it's people you know in the business world it's people who know you why are they gonna back tip? Because they, like tip you know why? Well, unless tips been a taker, but he doesn't show up that way. I mean, I'm sure people love you. And so, like, if you go and ask for people said, hey, I'm gonna wrong to campaign, I'm super passionate about, and I'd like to ask for your support it's going to launch on this day in the way you can help me the most is by helping me in the first few hours. Can I count on north support and then you keep him informed so they know. Okay, here we are the day before and here we are today of here it is, we're live. Go now, please back the campaign and then you're smiling and dialing hey, joe, we're live can you know? Can you get it right now? Get on back to tim and thank you. All right. And then you make the next call. So, like, you're activating your own personal network, your own list. So first step going to read the campaign, start building your list. Who am I going to reach out to that I know? That I'm already in contact with there's going to support me because of our connection because I've helped them in the past and like if you haven't been helping people if like you're alone wolf now's a great time to start reaching out before your campaign launches start creating value for other people helping other people supporting them in their campaigns so that when it's your time to ask it's not like all you've ever done is asking you never contributed, so if you're a giver, then people will give back to you that's just like a law of attraction so like people who are generous received generosity back people who like love people get a lot of love back people who contribute to other campaigns get a lot back. You mentioned this earlier marines like there's a little tit for tat that goes on in the world and it's not people being like transactional it's just that like people like, oh here's someone who I'd always know I can count on of course they can count on me, so you've got to be willing to activate the networks they're starting today. So if you're thinking about starting campaign, start writing that list who's on your list of people are going to reach out to who I know I can count on and then maybe there's like a b list of people I'm not as connected to but aren't likely contributors or you know I have some pull with they at least know my name already and start doing that and then so you wanted then also grow your list and we'll talk about how you can grow your list here in a minute using pay per click advertising in particular and social but you've got no you start with this list that's made up initially of the people you're super connected with and then you want to grow it it is big as possible because that list is going to convert at some kind of a rate and then the rate that that list converts on is going to determine how much contributions you get, how many contributions you get, how much money that is and you want to hit that milestone of, like thirty five percent in the first forty eight hours. So you got this targeted like making sure that happens don't launch your campaign until you know you've got commitments from people you know or from a very conservative calculation of a conversion rate best on the size of the list don't even launched the campaign and you know you're going to get thirty five percent in the first two days otherwise you're wasting your time like I don't launch campaign unless I know it's gonna happen because I've gotten verbal commitments from people that yes, I'll back your campaign and take it at this level now of course you don't wantto back the campaign just because they love you you want himto also back the campaign because they want what you're offering and because you're offering a compelling offer and in fact what you give them is those early bird specials we talked about the early bird specials in the park structure well, the early bird specials are also how you reward to people on the list it's one of the ways to get people on the list but also how you reward your friends of family like look, the first day I need to show momentum and so going offer killer deals to people back the first day you're my family and offer you the best possible deal you're going to get on board and support me is going to be a win win, so then you've got to use that list, build the list, then you got to use the list meaning first you're in a warm the list by, you know, hitting him with some e mails that aren't yet to call the action but letting them know what's coming maybe giving him some inside scoop about what you know your process, you know, see little behind the scenes work, and then ultimately you're going to do a call to action. You could also use that list to refine your pitch because you can market that list you've got the list and you can, like, try different things on them or serve a them in order to get more information and feedback before you go alive with her campaign. So you're always trying to refine, refine your front using this variant testing we talked about, like on the videos? Well, now you can use your list to try different parts, your pitch or drive different perks. So the last piece is you want to build the buzz want to get people excited about the forthcoming thing and this and also includes social media, so everything you're doing is so that, like on launch day, you're not just like, ok were launched and no one knows but like there's, like a little bit of a frenzy, you know, people excited always gonna launch she's going to launch his hair comes and depending on the side, you know this matters if you're doing a ten thousand dollar campaign or five thousand dollars campaign or one hundred thousand dollars campaign or a million dollar campaign different scale, but if you've got ten friends super excited, you're going to create your new cd album, I guess they don't just see these anywhere you like your new album and you're super excited about it and you've got like your circle of ten friends excited, you're finally doing it and they're excited enough that you know they're going to back you a hundred bucks a piece and it's enough to get to the studio time so you know that's just is important you're using the same methodology just did a smaller scale then if you're doing a huge campaign we're trying to raise a million dollars for a new consumer electronics item so let's talk about building your list as we mentioned number one most valuable tool is your email list so the social media is important and valuable but the truth is you can't do very strong calls to action and especially with facebook anymore unless you're boosting their post people don't see stuff and even with boosted post there's so much noise that it's hard to get too much traction with calls to action on facebook however, what you can do is use facebook paper click adds to drive traffic to a landing page and then once used landing page landing page where else called squeeze pages a page that's very simple he's got one purpose and that purpose is to get someone's email address so we're trying to gather as many email addresses is possible and facebook ads or the currently the best way to get people there and I'll talk a little more about why facebook in a minute but what we're going to do but you know over arching vision is when you use a facebook ad oh and this is people who aren't in your personal member facebook ad to drive people to our landing pays to get their email address, that's the goal, and then we need enough email addresses, then we figure out what we make some assumptions about the conversion rate, so if I have one hundred email addresses, I think I'm going to convert five of them into a sale. That means I'm gonna get a five percent conversion rate, the average person is going to spend one hundred dollars, meaning if I get one hundred email addresses and he had five people in a hundred bucks five hundred dollars, so five, you know, she could do some math, the amazing list sizer. So the list sizer is a simple tool where we're trying to figure out how big of a list so I need and or how much money do we need to spend on my ads? So this may not be applicable to every campaign, so if you're just doing a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, you may not spend money on a pay per click advertising campaign. In order, grow the list, you may be able to rely exclusively on your personal network, which should convert at, like eighty percent because they're your friends and family, and you're taking the time to individually reach out to them with phone calls. Not with texts, even not with e mails. You may start there, but phone calls conversation works a thousand times better than any other medium. I promise you. Yes, mom. Yes. I need you to do this is a lot different than hey, mom, you know, texting so with phone calls. But if you're going for big numbers, if you're going for in large numbers or a bigger, you know goal, then you must, you know, most of the time, this is accomplished through list building using paper, click ads so let's, say this we have this builder set up in two different ways. We can either say how much we want to spend, or we can say what our target goal is, and then it copies. So you fill out these little tan cells and was just copy right over himself of the rate, and you can fill it out either way. So let's say that our target goal is fifty thousand dollars, which was their original goal on the carbon flyer. And we want to get thirty five percent of that in the first forty eight hours, which totals seventeen thousand five hundred dollars in contributions, so our goal is to get seventeen thousand five hundred dollars in contributions now, let's, their average person was going to spend one hundred dollars, on the campaign so the original you know, perks were like I think seventy nine dollars and then they went up to one hundred twenty nine dollars but you know there was a limited number at the lower cost so let's say that the average person over time would spend a hundred dollars it's an educated guess not a for sure thing and then we need to say ok, well, what is our conversion rate that's going to work and let's say we're going to convert at two percent now what's an email list converted it varies widely so it depends on many, many factors and those factors khun b how much is the product? Lower cost products might convert better than higher cost products it depends on the compelling this of the offer so if you've got a deal we're offering something that's the equivalent of sixty or seventy percent off it's maybe going to convert better than if they're getting ten percent off for twenty percent off. It depends on how carefully targeted the list is like maybe you built the list but you got people interested but they didn't turn out to be the people who were interested in buying they thought it was fascinating what they weren't buyers um you know it's just there's a lot of factors that can go into a typical list in general like out in the marketing world is like one to two percent conversion rate is considered like a standard conversion rate. We've gotten as high as twenty five percent conversion on these lists by having very well targeted lists and super compelling deal lt's so it's possible to get twenty five percent but it's just very conservatively go with two percent here on the carbon fire, and that could be high but let's, just for the sake of this model look, a two percent conversion rate and a cost per lead of a dollar then we're saying is we spent eight thousand seven hundred fifty dollars on ads in order to get seventeen thousand five hundred dollars and sales because that's going to lead at a dollar pieces can lead to eight thousand seven hundred fifty leads at a two percent conversion rate to one hundred seventy five people buying one hundred bucks for seventeen thousand five hundred dollars, which is thirty five percent of fifty thousand dollars did it so it's? Very simple or we could say, well, I've got a budget for ten thousand dollars because that's just what I budgeted for it and what I know is that's going to generate if I follow these assumptions than I can count on contributions of twenty thousand dollars according to my model, which means I could have my target goal of fifty seven thousand, so if I've already said about fifty I mean I want to adjust my goal but then I'm saying I'm gonna blow past thirty five being closer to forty percent better question susan, could you explain a little more on the estimated cost earline so estimated cost per lead ok, so facebook ads and we're gonna get into this a little more using facebook paper click ads but it cost per lead is ok, so if I'm using your facebook ad to drive people to the landing page and let's say they cost me ten cents a piece to drive to the landing page and I have a ten percent conversion rate at the landing page, that means I have to send ten people the landing page to get one of them to give up my email, their email address to us and to come up with the dollar that's just you're just estimating two guests right that's a guesstimate though as you go through, some of the parts were to talk about in just a second the variation testing on your landing pages then what you see is like you can dial this in. So like when we started campaign just for some data we typically find before we've done any refinement I have to get we might see a cost per lead meaning how much we have spent on ads get one email address between five and ten dollars per lead which is horrible, but very quickly, you could start dialing in seeing what messages, what images and what target audiences air working better, and then start dialing it in, and our target is always a dollar. So depending on the campaign with the average cost is in the conversion rate, like two dollars, might be fine, but ten dollars, is is not gonna work just based on, like, even if it if it cost you ten dollars, to get a lead, is also going to convert really low, because I could just tell you from our experience that ten dollars, is a very expensive lead we've gotten leads is close is low is, like thirty five cents, or even lower occasionally on certain ads with certain target markets, so you can have very dialed in target markets. And but you know what? Dollars inexpensive lead fifty cents israel chief, twenty five cents is like rock bottom, so that's a super league, but then you could see what if I'm getting these for, you know, fifty cents? How does that change my numbers? And then suddenly you're like, oh, my thirty five percent now is forty thousand dollars, and so that's a much better thing, so it's, like, if you can improve your conversion rate, it can have a dramatic or sir, your cost per lead that can have a dramatic impact on the value of your leads. Also, what if I can refine my campaign page and offer a good enough deal that I'm getting a three percent instead of a two percent conversion rate? So it doesn't sound like that big a difference, but it's actually a fifty percent improvement getting one hundred fifty percent of what you were getting before, and so it has dramatic impact on the amount of money you raised with those e mails, so things you can do to make minor tweaks and your conversion rate have could have significant impacts in the total amount of money you raised with that lead list and how valuable that lead list is here's. Another great thing about the list is after the campaign, you still have the list, and then once you actually start shipping products, you can go back to those original people who gave you their list. They may have chosen not to back the campaign because, again, they're like, do I really want away? You know, a year, and what if it never comes out? But they're going to convert at a higher rate and industry sort of average is about double the conversion rate for a live campaign over crowdfunding campaign, so crowdfunding campaigns typically convert and about half of a normal lead. So this is super valuable tool for figuring out how much I want a budget based on my you know, reasonable assumptions based on my particular campaign, so if I'm saying what I really need one hundred thousand dollars and you really need one hundred thousand dollars, you know, truth believe the leads they're going to cost me two and my conversion or it's going to be two percent, you know, we're being conservative, so man, I got to be I've got to be prepared to come up with thirty five grand if I want conservatively I hit my goal, which may seem like a lot of money and like, well, there's not going to be huge amount of profit left because I'm spending so much on ads here's a little secret that most people may not know a lot of the bigger campaigns you see that air doing like a million two million dollars are spending five hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars on facebook ads that's how they got there not all of them not all of them but some of them are dead how they're doing some of them just go wild viral, but a lot of them got that way as well they show this use momentum by driving it with facebook ads and then it picks up that viral things people whoa this thing's doing two million dollars then people jump on it's impossible for me to know which ones of those are though you can probably surmise to a certain spent about like the ones that you saw blasting it all the time on facebook if you happen to be in one of their target audience is so if you've seen a lot of facebook as then there's a good chance they're driving their sales using facebook ads but it's impossible to really know how much they're spending so you can't really know unless you were inside the campaign, but I know for a fact that some of the bigger campaigns you see may not have even made any money because of how much money was spent on advertising, but what they did is they demonstrated a huge amount of momentum to the marketplace this is going to pay off big time in the future, is they're trying to raise money from venture capitalists, etcetera, etcetera. So just because it doesn't make money doesn't mean it was a valuable wasn't a valuable investment, though it can create a situation where, you know, you know, you didn't make money on it, but you got fifty thousand backers to handle or whatever, so that can be its own challenge, so that is what we call the list sizer so facebook is currently by far the best venue to do this because you're showing something that doesn't exist already, so google is great for people who are searching for a solution to a problem. Typically they're having now my dog is peeing on my sofa, you know, how do I solve this problem? They're not looking for a solution a year from now, they're looking for a solution now, right in this moment, so google you can use to test like headlines and stuff to see which ones get to click through rates, but it's not necessarily going to be great for crowdfunding campaign itself. On the other hand, facebook is presenting products to people who might be interested based on their demographic and based on their preferences, as they've indicated. Facebook also allows you to create lookalike lists, so once you have one hundred e mails from people who are interested in the product, then you can go into facebook into those emails say, find me the one percent of people who are closest to these people, and those people are going to tend to convert. And then as you get people who are actually converting on the campaign and you get those email addresses now you're you know, what's indiegogo gives right away. So that's, one of the little advantages in the indy gogo side in that regard is now you can use indiegogo gives you those e mails you can put those into facebook of people who are actually back in your campaign and like find me more people like this because they're going to be more likely to back your campaign and then we use a tool called ad espresso with facebook ad espresso is a beautiful tool that allows you to do massive variation testing on different ads so you can put different graphics, different imagery along with different text and then it'll mixing matt simms, you can have like four different head texts and for different images, and then I'll give you sixteen different variations in a runoff sixteen and you'll give a budget to it and we'll drive most of the budget to the ones that are getting the best response. Once you figure out and again how much fifty, one hundred bucks, we'll give you a huge amount of information relative to none and then you could see oh, this one's not working at all, but this image is working pretty well let's find more images kind of like that and like start that is our new starting point and start refining that and also let's test different target audience is different look alike groups, and suddenly we might have started out at five dollars, but it's by using ad espresso and doing a lot of variation testing that we're able to really drive down and create a huge amount of refinement and get better variations on the ads that deliver better results to get the better cost of lead at express there's like forty seven dollars a month plus whatever you're spending on as I don't know if that was the exact figure but that's great so the next piece of it's like where you're standing those people while you're sending him to a landing page and the landing page as I mentioned is just the whole purpose of it is to get their email address and you're like saying something like sign up now to get the best deals on her product that's coming soon to kickstarter or indiegogo or just coming soon and give us your email address and sometimes we're offer an enticement give us your email address and when it a chance to win when this thing comes out so like not you know now maybe you're not getting quite a good equality of a lead because they're signing a because they want the potential for something free I haven't really come down on like a final decision you know I do both and we have like people who are coming and they're signs showing up and there's a variation of the landing page where they're just signing up in giving us their email address because of interest and we have other versions where they're signing up because they think they're going to get something out of it and you can also offer him something free, like going on a newsletter get behind the scenes look at what we're up to or we'll give you this free download on how to do something so there's different types advertisements you can offer and here's a couple of tools launch rock, which makes it really easy even if you're not sophisticated, you don't know anything about anything. You can create a launch rock page that'll collect email addresses for you super simple un bounce is a more sophisticated tool that allows you to do variation testing and I love variation testing over and over. It keeps coming up because it's such a powerful tool for finding out what's working based on data rather than guessing because, oh, it feels right to me well, maybe your great maybe you're right most of time, but the data will reflect that if that's the case, so on balance you can create different variations on the landing page. You, khun do huge differences and you can do minor differences. We initially when we create a landing page, we'll start off with significant changes like four pages, maybe that look very different with very different value properties and different colors, you know, different angles like here, you know, if we're doing the quickie today we so here's the, you know, smorgasbord, cornucopia of uses version of it here is the one that's really focusing on the convenience factor and here is one that's really focusing on supporting the little guy you know, whatever it is different variations seeing which one at that sort of course level is getting the best response and then once you're narrating okay, this cornucopia of uses is doing the best now let's get more granular and run variations on that one and see, you know which value you know which value proposition we're going to put first, which one of those converts most efficiently so it's a combination of your ad like how much the leads cost based on how effective the ads are and then also how affected the pages that converting the people who show up into people so it's like it's a multiple variable equation so you can't test every possibility so you're still using your gut you're still using your instincts to pick what variations they're testing because it's not like you contest of million of them you don't have an unlimited budget you don't have in a limited amount of time and just like um and on physics, your actual observation will start to change the things that you're observing over time so you know the ads will be seen by people and start to change their impression, so there might be racking the fact that they're just seeing different ads rather than that one ad is better than another so it's impossible to know so there's a limited number of variations you contest with your audience given all those constraints but that being said you definitely have the opportunity to try your best yes and several different things in here we can look at the cap off our bottle opener that we showed for very similar looking pages with slightly different variations one has an email box here and this one has an email box here this one doesn't you know like some of them show you know different things and minor variations and I can't remember which one of them but one of these for some reason performed like twice is well good as the other ones there's a something about it just like some combination of having the window there the color of the box I mean then later you can come in if you want to get granular enough and say like well what if we need this instead of joyner list it's you know you just sign up for newsletter that's when you know so there's like different words being used different colors, different sizes, different positions of the call to action as well as the proposition so you can start tweaking little things. Sometimes people find that little tiny tweaks suddenly have massive impacts like we changed it from sign up to act now and it doubled our sign ups and so we'll take advantage of that opportunity to do that kind of research in order to find out what's, you know, your best opportunity. So that's, the variation testing this is using unbound starts again is a low cost tour and fifty bucks a month, and it allows you to build the pages it's kind of at the same level is like the indy gogo or kickstarter campaign builder page like anyone could master it, it doesn't take a huge amount of skill, though of course, working with a graphic design professional, they may have more experience with making things aesthetically pleasing and understanding the rules of why some things look good what's, you know, hit these days and design, which can make a difference another thing you'll find as you do all these ads, however, like one thing to keep in mind is that people get tired of stuff like sometimes you change stuff in the reason why one gets a better result than another is just because you've changed it and it's like fresh and people may have seen the old add another singing new ad and it's fresh, and so that caused them to take action more than if it's just, you know more of the same ad, just beating him over the head with it, so now you've got your list. You've decided how big of a list you put your budget in and you're driving, the sales are sort of the conversions and you've got the big enough list. What are you going to do with that list? Well, depending on your scale, you may want to use une male tool now, if you're doing a smaller campaign and you're using most of personal list, you can use your own email account to send the e mails to the people on the list. But if you're using like gmail, I think one hundred people is the maximum on one email that you can send out. So if you're sitting out one mass email, I'm not sure what the number is now. We don't use email to do what we use a male chimp ourselves, but there's the's tools like male champion fusion, soft and constant contact, which are designed for you to do mass e mailings to people and there's rules around us so that you're not spam. They're designed also prevent people from spamming people so people get to opt into the email and know that they're going to be getting the e mails, not something they're getting unawares, and if too many people unsubscribe from your email list that I get flag than male chimp will cut you off so you can't do this anymore, too many people are complaining about your e mails and we don't want thinking oh gosh here's another male chimp and it's going to be garbage something I don't want so that's the idea I personally we've been using male chimp and it's been working great but I know other people whose infusion and constant contact to great effect and I think those were the great tools so we just happened use male chimp because someone signed us up for that a long time ago so what are you doing with your email list? Well first when people join on you want to send what we call warming e mails so you're on the list you're we'll call you cold when you show up we're going to send you and immediately and what these email programs like you do is set up auto responders you get on the list and right away you're going to get an e mails is thank you for sending a part for a list we're so excited to have you part of our team and to share with you this exciting project can't wait to you know share more with you stay tuned for more follow up e mails and then you could set him follow up e mails and the follow up e mails maybe an auto responder meaning like you can set up multiple e mails that are come out after that first email or you could just send out e mails to the list as you're ready to do it, and those auto responders could be based on data that can be based on a delay so, like ten days after they sign up or on, you know, january second or whatever you come up with. So those e mails in a crowd funding campaign, I think what's most valuable is to give people that inside peek of what's going on because, again, the springs back like bringing people in on the other side of the curtains they see behind the scenes, they understand what's going on, and they feel like they're part of it not, you know that they're backing some corporation, but they're like part of a gang of people crying and create something cool for the world, so you don't want to do too often because people will get annoyed you don't want to do to sell them, because then the list goes cold, so these air judgment calls but, you know, typically no more than once a week and maybe like every couple weeks, depending on how far out you are from your campaign is to keep closer to campaign, you can get a little closer together that would say never more often than once week, in my opinion, it's an opinion, then as you get closer to say, here we are, we're getting ready, so, you know, get your credit cards warmed up because it's coming and you know one week so usually about a week out we give people heads of one week from today is going to be the big day counting on your support I want to see you there ready to take action the best deals are going to be on that day and then the day before tomorrow's the day and then the day of we're live and so take action now do it to get the best deal and support us you know be a friend like let's do this together and we couldn't do it without you so thankful for your support assuming that they're going toe take advantage of the opportunity and then you can hit him hard now we have typically to email this people have jumped on an email is specific to that campaign than we've got our big email list that we've I got from people from past campaigns and from other things in her life will send those people at some point maybe a month out on email just one soft pitch that says, hey, we're going to have a campaign coming up jump onto our list not we're not going to be beating them over and over with the drum of like this campaign but like here's your chance to jump on the list where we're going to do that where we're going to be sending a weekly updates so weird trying to get people to jump from the main list into the smaller is to take advantage of past backers but don't want to abuse that list too much cause people be like feel span then again once the campaign goes live that's so typically with the two e mails to a list that's not like totally focused on that and you say hey we're live now if you're interested in backing here it is so soft and very little to people who haven't specifically signed up for that but for people who have signed up then way send him like one the day of maybe one the day after they maybe one a week later and about once a week we'll hit him up they can always unsubscribe if they want to stop getting the e mails but they signed up to be informed we're assuming they want to be informed they wouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to or if they we want to stop that khun just opt out so that's the main usage of the e mails and I'll show you a few examples in the second the other thing you can do with e mails once you get music into surveys you can you know need to survey the entire thing but you can do like a section you can do like a hundred e mails and we use surveymonkey and to say hey what color do you think we should use we think we're debating between yellow and green which do you like better and you can get information back or what price do you think we should offer this ad or which price would you choose fifty you know how much would you be willing to pay? Fifty, eighty, one hundred so there's different ways you can ask the same question and see what results you get to see if you can triangulate and by the way, if everyone's saying fifty dollars and you're going to be one hundred, you might be like maybe I should rethink my pricing or maybe there's something wrong always better to stop and quit and go ahead in the face and ignore data that says you should stop like maybe the date is wrong so I'm not saying you know that you should always believe the data and I could be wrong sometimes and maybe you shouldn't listen the data because you're smarter than the data but generally speaking, I think the date is not going to lie if people are saying they want to pay fifty dollars and you're asking several different ways and that's the information that's coming out, they're not lying to you they may be saying, well, this is what they may be saying, well, you know, it's, this is what I want to pay sure it might be a hundred bucks I want to pay fifty at the end of the day, you wanted to take action. If it ends up being a hundred bucks, they're probably not going to take action. So even though you might be like, man, I'm so committed to this ever invested all this money, well, you're still only a fraction of the way there. If you quit now, you're going to be way ahead than if you go through the whole campaign and then fail. You can also use the emails for campaign communication there's, an update tool in kickstarter and indiegogo, where you could do an update and goes out to everyone. You don't always have to use that update tool, because if used the update now it the permanent record on your campaign, and for some reason, there might be reasons want to communicate with people outside of that channel. Also, you can individually communicate with people or groups of those people you might know they might be from different parts in there might be different communications, you know, want to communicate with everyone, but you want to focus on these folks so you can use it for campaign communication, and then the future marketing of other products or this product wants is out so it's not just for the campaign it's got value beyond the end of your life campaign and here's a few examples of some e mails that we've created here for the carbon fire, this is the, like warming the list, right? You know, first auto responded that people would get when they signed up, and then here's, the next one where, you know, this is a myth, you know, not the immediate auto responder, but an email that people would get sort of midway through here is making a special offer once the campaign was launching, and this may have been like the launch day email like, hey, we're launching and here's some special offers and then here's a survey we used to help us learn about the price or whatever on a product that wasn't, this one wasn't doing great. We're like, well, what's going on, so we went to people who had come to the campaign but chose enough to back it. Why didn't you back? It was the price to hire of this and that everything always, always, always reason why people don't back campaign who came price too high, so just just, you know, so and also you just you noticed they look nice again, like everything else you know, you want to look nice, but you don't want to profession, you know, too slick, so like going for something that looks professional, that was professionally done because your credibility so that people are going to believe that you will be able to follow through on your campaign promises, but you don't want to you know to us like that you look like a big corporation a because you're not in b you know, because it says, well, then why do I need to back you and it's not authentic? So before you launch your campaign we call testing the waters the split testing and refining your messaging so as we're doing all these variation tests, then you're refining your pitch. So the great thing about this is as your refining your pitch as you're using this variation testing too, figure out what messaging is working best, which messaging and imagery is converting most efficiently in tow leads and which, you know, value proposition is most interesting, you know, interesting to your potential backers, you're still collecting e mails and those emails were going to convert at some rate so it's a marketing dispense that you're using this goes back to that sort of focus group two point oh, you're refining your pitch in order to get the best results, finding out what consumers are most interested in about your product and how you best communicate the value to them such that they take action at the same time you're getting email addresses that are going to concrete lee return revenue to you to offset the expense and generating that information so if you just hire a focus group which is money out fifty grand boom and then you get the information back now you're getting spending fifty grand money out and then maybe you're getting fifty grand back so like when we talked to corporations were actually talking to marketing department that's who we're talking to this marketing expenses is like a focus group but in addition to what you normally get from a focus group and all this other amazing insight but it's valuable for you too if you're creating whatever it is an event or a product of your own or recording you're able to get feedback from people allows you to deliver more of what they want unless of course they don't so that is the list building any questions about the list building I know there was a lot of interest on the list building chris from the online people yeah I think you covered all of it we just had like one sort of general question maybe you could just reiterate how do you make sure your e mails don't go to spam this particular persons using male chimp and he just quick you touched on a little bit but final points on avoiding span avoiding span I mean I guess don't be spam be authentic be riel like the people who were showing up should be people who have opted in because they want to be involved in what you're up to so they signed up for a list, they're looking for it. If it doesn't show up, they might check their spam filter, but generally we haven't had a lot of problem with our e mails ending up in spam filters based on what we've been doing. But, you know, most authentically don't be spam, and you won't end up there the one that came up joe, ask this question. When do you get the email list of contributors from both kickstarter and indiegogo when the campaign is in process, they said you may have mentioned earlier, so when somebody does donate or they fund your campaign, do you get access to their email and in the go go, you do ok as they back the campaign and kick starter, you get the e mails after the campaign, so if you fund so if you fund, then you have to, you have to get it in order to be in communication with your backers, so then you get it afterwards, but you don't get it until after the campaign has successfully funded so on kick started the way you communicate with your backers is who? The update.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Dyan deNapoli
Really helpful class for anyone planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign! Christopher was a great presenter (very comfortable and relaxed), and he clearly knew the topic extremely well. His presentation was very thorough and well thought out. One thing I would've like to have seen is more questions taken from the virtual audience. There were quite a few on the thread, but the moderator only passed along a few of them to Christopher to answer. Another thing that would have been very helpful is advice about creating successful crowdfunding campaigns that are for projects or experiences or ideas, rather than for physical products (which this class was focused on). Maybe Christopher can do a short crowdfunding part II class?? But I still give this class an A+!
Elizabeth Best
This was very helpful. I feel like it answered so many of my questions. It made me realize what a huge commitment crowdfunding is! As an entrepreneur I can see how this video saves trident a lot of time on calls and emails explaining what needs to be done. Great idea! I am amazed at how much technology is involved and online or social media marketing. I better develop a stronger team with millennials who know how to make it happen. Thank you.
a Creativelive Student
I was fortunate to be part of the live audience for this course. It was truly amazing! Chris does a great job of providing tactical and strategic insight behind crowdfunding campaigns. One of my favorite tools was the spreadsheet he has developed to determine crowdfunding goals. I also think Chris is a very humble, knowledgeable guy who genuinely wants you to succeed in your crowdfunding efforts. I highly recommend this course of anyone who is serious about crowdfunding.