Crowdfunding Marketing Campaign

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!

by Adam