Running an Email Marketing Campaign for Your Crowdfunding Project? Don’t Forget these Basics!

An email marketing campaign can be effective in more ways than one. And when it comes to crowdfunding, it’s all too often an underutilised tool. Perhaps a reason for this is that founders don't feel they have a substantial subscription base for email marketing to be cost-effective, or that they think this strategy is more suitable for businesses and brands that already have existing and past customers.

However, the truth is that emails are just another way for you to stay connected with your potential investors, partners and whoever else is part of your world.

You don’t need to be selling or promoting anything at all. Some of the best email marketing campaigns are designed to educate and entertain people, giving them useful snippets of information so that they can stay involved in the brand's narrative.

That’s what it’s all about — staying in the minds of your audience and giving them something meaningful and useful so that they keep strengthening their positive opinion of you and what you’re doing.

Based on our experience as a leading crowdfunding marketing agency in the UK, here are a few other things to keep in mind when considering your email marketing for crowdfunding strategy.

1. Build a Targeted Email List (It Doesn’t have to be Huge)

Highly qualified email lists are better than huge ones containing too many people that don’t care about you or your brand. If you start with a small group, that’s completely fine. You can use this as a base and employ various tactics to grow it.

The best way to build a targeted email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers. This guarantees that people will already be interested in who you are. As 80% of people will leave your site for good after just one visit, even if they like the look of who you are, it’s important to capture their details before they’re gone.

Exit-intent popups are perfect for converting those abandoning visitors into subscribers and fans. After all, many might be in a rush or looking for something slightly different. By giving them a way to stay connected, you could also be doing them a favour.

2. Know Your Goals

Different businesses and brands will have different aims for their email campaigns. Therefore, before you go borrowing any templates or styles, define what it is you want to achieve.

For example, you may be very familiar with email newsletters from fashion or shopping sites like Amazon, but your goal is completely different to theirs as a crowdfunder, so you won’t want to replicate their product-focused campaigns.

Instead, focus on nurturing your leads and potential investors with engaging information about your project, what your values are, and what you’ve been achieving recently. This could be news of any developments or updates from your industry. You could consider giving people insights into your team or letting people know about your crowdfunding milestones.

Always keep in mind the main action you want subscribers to take, such as signing up for an event, following you on social media, or spreading the word to others.

3. Choose the Right Email Type

There are a few key email types.

  • Promotional emails talk about offers and sales
  • Relational emails give subscribers something you’ve promised, like a weekly newsletter, a free gift, access to the user-only media asset, or other relevant information they can use
  • Transactional emails include things like subscriber signup confirmations, welcome messages, order or purchase confirmations and acknowledgements

4. Know Your Audience

Write emails based on what you know about your audience. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to make some educated guesses but do your best to base your strategy on real data and insights. Google Analytics and your social media profiles might be able to help you get a better picture of your audience's demographics.

5. Find Tools to Help You

The days of manually executing an email campaign are long gone. Today, the best approach is to find a reliable tool or platform that can help you build great emails and send them out to a curated list, all with minimal stress and time wastage. Look for features like:

  • Easy campaign creation and automation, including templates
  • Ways to segment your audience
  • Integrations with the software you already use
  • Performance insights

6. Craft Your Subject Line

The subject line plays a crucial role in getting people to open and click your emails. It has to get attention so people actually want to read on. Most subject lines range from 41 to 50 characters and simply tell people what they can expect to read inside the email.

7. Craft Great Emails

In terms of length, think more pamphlet or print advertisement than blog or article length. Also, keep in mind that it’s not the kind of email you would write to a friend or colleague. You're going to need a combination of visuals and text, not long essay-like prose that will immediately turn readers off.

Remember to do these things:

  • Always offer value to readers
  • Avoid pitching your offer too early
  • Address subscribers by name
  • Personalized emails based on user needs and expectations
  • Be human and try to make an emotional connection
  • Choose a CTA that reflects what you want people to do when they’ve read your email

8. Focus on Design

If your emails look terrible, it doesn't matter what your text says. This will reflect badly on you and your crowdfunding project and can actually do more damage than simply not sending out any emails at all.

Also, with more people reading emails on mobile devices, make sure your content is 100% optimized for this. You can easily find great and responsive email templates on platforms like Mailchimp.

9. Test and Track

Like all good marketing campaigns, you should be testing everything to make sure your output is as good as it can be. This means creating different versions of a design, layout, marketing copy, subject lines and CTAs. You can also consider testing between different segments to see who responds better.

Monitor things like open rates, clicks, unsubscribes and forwards. And remember, it’s better for email marketing open and click rates to have fewer active subscribers than large numbers of inactive ones.

Building a Crowdfunding Marketing Campaign?

If you’re looking for new ways to engage your audience and build followers, consider working with a leading crowdfunding marketing agency in the UK that can help you tailor your marketing activities to grow a bigger and stronger base of followers. Get in touch for more tips and advice!


Why You Need to Build a Powerful Online Community for Your Brand

Whether you’re launching a niche product or something you hope will cater to the masses, the benefits of building an online community for your crowdfunding project are undeniable.

Digital communities can turn the initial curiosity of potential customers into a long-term love affair, with loyal followers even promoting your brand to others. And often, the community you first establish will last far beyond the launch of your first products and can form the foundation of future digital marketing campaigns.

Among the many benefits, such as driving traffic to your website and helping you retain customers, online communities also allow you to stay up-to-date with the thoughts and opinions of your fans so that you can adapt your products to be more relevant and user-focused.

What is an Online Community?

An online community is essentially a group of individuals joined by common interests, opinions, and goals, who meet in a virtual space, like a social media platform.

For example, one of the simplest communities you can build is a private group on Facebook. However, depending on your brand and business goals, your online community might be best suited to another platform or channel like LinkedIn. Some online community platforms include:

  • Facebook Groups
  • LinkedIn
  • Disciple
  • Hivebrite
  • BuddyBoss
  • Mighty Networks
  • Circle
  • Tribe

Your community might be an open forum where anyone can come and share their views and opinion, or an invite-only space where entrants are vetted first.

For brands who want to establish a community before or during the launch of a new product or service, an online community often includes a mix of customers, partners, and employees who are brought together in one place to share developments, news, ideas and establish a stronger emotional connection between members and the brand.

This initiative could be led by your crowdfunding marketing agency, by yourself, or even by a chosen follower in some instances, who are willing to lead the group thanks to their simple love of your brand.

What Happens in Online Communities?

Whatever your platform of choice, the major activity that should be taking place within your online community is the development of a meaningful connection between an individual and the brand, as well as between member individuals. A few things that encourage this are:

  • Discussions on topics relating to the brand, product or community theme
  • Direct feedback and opinion sharing about product elements (especially useful during the testing and development stage of new products)
  • Sharing of interesting content that relates to the community (videos, articles, personal reflections etc.)
  • Fan based projects and artworks (you can set up a competition where fans develop artwork for the brand for the chance of winning a prize and having their work published)
  • Sharing of industry news
  • Useful advice and tips for group members

Why Are Online Communities Important?

When launching a crowdfunding project, there are several unique ways your community can benefit you.

  • Communities can attract new followers to your brand who will eventually turn into paying customers when your product or project is launched
  • It’s a cheap way to gather market research data from real people without commissioning interviews or surveys
  • Creating a strong connection between people at an early stage will often inspire long-term loyalty ad individuals may become your greatest advocates
  • When partners or investors see the scale of your community they are more likely to believe in your project and get on board
  • Online communities are a direct way to communicate with your customers, which can support sales inquiries and other activities
  • Running an online community lets you be seen as a leader in your space and you’ll have the chance to shape the conversion as you go
  • Having a regular dialogue with your community helps you stay up-to-date and improve your products

Investing In Your Community

Whether you plan to handle the growth and management of an online community yourself or seek help from a crowdfunding marketing agency, this activity is far more than just a social media strategy that can improve your brand awareness potential.

Successful online communities can be a vital tool when developing your product pre-launch and can give you a deeper insight into the mindset of your customers.

If you want to learn more about how you can promote your Kickstarter with community building or other marketing initiatives, get in touch with us at Wow Your Crowd.


How to Use Social Media to Create Awareness and Attract Interest in your Crowdfunding Campaign

One of the fundamental aspects of a successful crowdfunding campaign is to build an audience of followers before you launch. These followers will be your advocates and will support your campaign when you are live. They are the lifeblood to your campaign success and your business goals. But how can you build an audience of raving fans and followers? That’s where social media comes into play. A solid social strategy can be the difference between a successful crowdfunding campaign and a campaign that fails.

If you want to use social media to build your audience then you can get help from your crowdfunding marketing agency or you can manage the campaign yourself. Here are some tips and advice on what you need to know and do.

How can you use social media for your campaign?

If you already have a presence on social media then continue to build and promote your channels. If you are starting from scratch then choose a platform that suits you and also is where your target market is located. Posting regular updates is the key to building a following. Be consistent, post each day and nurture a relationship with your fans. This will lay the foundation for converting them into backers and paying customers.

What social media platforms can use for your campaign.

Facebook

Facebook is the world’s No1 social media platform, with 7 billion users. It is recommended you have some kind of presence on this platform as most target markets can be found here. Bear in mind most ages group on Facebook are 30+, (whereas younger age groups are on social platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok). Set up a Facebook business page to represent your business or product. You can also set up a private ‘community group. Both are great ways to build a following and spread the news about your product and crowdfunding campaign. Most successful crowdfunding campaigns use Facebook Ad campaigns to advertise the campaign and build a database of leads.

Twitter

Twitter is a great platform to find supporters, journalists and people of influence who are interested in your niche and may want to write about what you are doing. Building an audience can be done quickly when posting regular content and by using certain hacks to find people who have an interest in your topic.

Instagram

Instagram is great for sharing images of your products and behind the scenes of your campaign. Instagram (owned by Facebook) has a young and old audience and includes great features like Instagram ‘Stories’, where you can upload short recorded videos. These are really handy for posting quick content to capture a moment and let your audience know about it.

LinkedIn

Is the social media site for business, predominantly B2B and is a great way to search for prospective investors to support your equity crowdfunding campaign.

Pinterest

Pinterest is not often viewed as a social media platform but it really is and is a great way to source traffic and leads for your campaign. Similar to Instagram, you can post images and video. Pinterest is a great way to build up visual content related to your topic using other peoples imagery. Pinterest has a very big ‘female’ following.

Your Social media Strategy

It can be important to use different social media platforms to connect with your audience. It’s likely your audience is spread out across multiple platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In etc. So, it’s critical that you publish relevant material and syndicate across the platforms in order to reach as big an audience as possible. Use syndication software like ‘Buffer’ to automate sending the posts out each day.

Pro tip - keep your branding the same across all of your social channels, so the public can easily recognise you.

Content Creation Strategy

In order to market your campaign effectively develop an effective social campaign that engages with your audience and gets them to interact with your brand. The content you share should be insightful, entertaining, educational and most importantly well presented. Start by sharing useful industry-related information, news about your product or cause and share stories about your team and the obstacles you have faced during developing your product.

Here are the goals of your content creation strategy:

•Increase awareness and engagement with your target audience
•Drive traffic to capture leads interested in your crowdfunding campaign
•Create a buzz and galvanise support for your project

Create Specific Hashtag

Pro tip - create a hashtag that is unique to your crowdfunding campaign and use it in all social media articles and posts. By doing this people can quickly find all discussions surrounding your campaign and access more content about your campaign which they may not have seen.

Pre Launch Posting Schedule

You should keep in mind these points when creating a social post schedule for your Pre-Launch

•Create a schedule that outlines, at minimum, a plan for two weeks. Ideally, it’s better to create a social media plan for the whole duration of your Pre-launch campaign.
•Aim for 5 posts a day, sent out across all social channels
•Schedule three posts in the day and two posts in the evening.
•Mix up post content use images, text and video
•Share stories on Facebook or Instagram.

Monitor Results

Track your social media campaign’s results. Analysis of each post to gain better awareness of what content receives more interest. Check for shares and feedback and access interaction. Search for mentions and retweets on each social platform. See what is working and getting the best engagement. Then create more of this content and share it with your audience.

Conclusion

Social media is an important part of promoting your crowdfunding campaign. When implemented correctly it is incredibly effective at building a following and buzz around your project. Concentrate on developing content that resonates with your target audience. Create, test and repeat. Build awareness and in the process a community of followers who love your idea. If you need any support, as an experienced crowdfunding marketing agency we can help. Get in touch with us today and let’s crowdfund your BIG idea.


Wowyourcrowd - Crowdfunding Marketing Agency

The foundations to any product launch or crowdfunding campaign is built upon a well defined ‘communications plan’. Your ‘comms plan’ outlines a number of key areas about your product and forms the strategy for which your campaign will follow. With this blog, Wowyourcrowd will help you to develop your campaign’s strategy.

When launching a new product or running a campaign for a new offer, It’s vital that you have a strategy and create a plan before you start any marketing. This holds true for any type of marketing, for example, whether you are using social media, print, TV, or picking up the phone to call people. The companies that achieve great results from their marketing efforts do so because they leave no stone unturned in their quest to achieve their marketing goal. They put in place a strategy, which is based on research and analysis, and then stick to it across the campaign, testing and measuring as they see results come in. Improving their campaign as they move forward.

We at wowyourcrowd have experienced that when using Facebook to launch your product and boost your crowdfunding campaign is no different, you’ll need a strategy in place and follow it to a tee. Your marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or require you to spend too much time creating it. It can simply be a few slides from a presentation or a document that includes the following:

  • Your Product Positioning Statement
  • Your Target Market – and the different Ideal Customer Personas.
  • List the Value your product provides users.

Your product positioning statement - is a one liner, your elevator pitch, which clearly explains in a nutshell what your product is, what it does, who it helps and the benefits it provides. The 1 liner shouldn’t be longer than a paragraph and be deliverable in 15 – 30 seconds – the amount of time you would have in an elevator lift! The positioning statement will be used as the foundation to all of your marketing and sales messaging now and in the future.

Your target market - clearly defines who your key customers are likely to be. For example you are selling a new ebike – so the overall target market is white and ethnic males from 25 – 55 years old, who live in major cities and enjoy cycling. This target market although is slightly defined it is still very broad, with a wide range of different types of personalities. So, we need to funnel down more and go more niche by creating Ideal Customer Personas from the target market. A well-thought out buyer persona can really help you find that type of person on Facebook due to the platform’s extensive collection of personalised data on users.

Try to visualise your ideal user, you can give each persona you create a name, note what job they have, where they live, how much they earn, what are their interests, what do they like, dislike, their life experiences, education, family etc.
By creating a number of personas it is not just a good way to take advantage of Facebook’s excellent targeting system (and not waste your ad spend budget targeting the wrong people) but it also makes it a lot easier to create and write marketing content to target that particular type of user.

For example you are selling an ebike and an example of your ideal persona is:
David, 55 years old, Lives in London, is an IT Director who earns 60k a year. He Is married and father of two children who have now left home. David enjoys cycling at weekends as a hobby and cycles to work in the week. He’s a fan of the Tour de France and likes motorcycles. He used to ride a motorcycle but struggled to park it in central London so stopped.

How do you get the right information to create a buying persona? Research competitor companies, speak to your target market in focus group meetings, find out about them and then build your personas.

This will take a bit of work but understanding this is the type of person who will be best suited to buying your ebike makes it so much easier to target them on Facebook and get the sale rather than go after people who will never be suited to your product offer. Its worth the work!

Understanding the ‘value’ your product provides users is vital if you want to make the sale and out muscle your competition. Value is formed from 2 areas the ‘features’ of your product and the benefits the user receives when they use the product. Benefits come in two forms – physical benefits and emotional benefits.

We at wowyourcrowd believe that when launching your product or crowdfunding campaign your crowdfunding marketing agency will require information about your product. So use the information outlined above to create a strong ‘comms plan’ and form the strategy for your campaign.