**BackerKit will be reviewing select Kickstarter campaign pages live on October 14th at 10 AM PT. Submit your project here for a chance to have our team advise you on everything from project images and copy to reward tier structure and stretch goals!**

A Kickstarter campaign page is a potent tool in your marketing arsenal — it’s an important sales pitch for your crowdfunding campaign. Yet many don’t live up to their full potential: they’re disorganized, distracting, or fail to grab readers’ attention. Check out the six tips below, and find out how to make a strong impression with your Kickstarter page.

Get to the point

Project pages should deliver key points quickly and simply, rather than befuddle backers with unnecessary information. The best ones craft a compelling narrative. Your campaign page is an opportunity to highlight your project’s unique selling proposition. The title and subheading should instantly give a clear picture of what your project is about.

In the Story section of your page, explain your product and what makes it unique in the first two sentences. 

To avoid the TL;DR trap, keep things short, simple, and scannable. Also, consider breaking up lengthy text with subheads, bullet points, images, infographics, and animated GIFs (such as the two examples above from Peak Design’s Mobile Kickstarter campaign.) 

Nobody wants to read a gigantic wall of text. When you edit your text for the first time, force yourself to remove 50% of the words. You’ll be amazed by how quickly you can find adjectives or entire sentences to delete when you give yourself a word count limit.

Editing and re-editing the elements of your campaign page can take time, so make sure you’re not leaving it all until the last minute. On Kickstarter’s Campus forums, project creators say the entire planning process — figuring out what copy to write and which images to include, writing a script and filming the video — can last anywhere between a day and several months. Jean Wu, project creator of the Que Bottle says it took about a week for herself and her partner to put the page together. “It took a little more than a week to get all the graphics, video, and write all the words.”

Similarly, Redshift Sports’ Erik de Brun took a hands-on approach to the Shockstop Kickstarter campaign page design. “We wear all the hats. We’re lucky enough to have an interest in graphic design, writing copy, and producing video. We feel there’s an authenticity in us putting those pages together ourselves. We spend a lot of time trying to get it right. ” He says project creators can successfully outsource these duties to marketing agencies or freelancers, but the team “felt strongly about creating all the campaign material so that they were speaking with their own voice.”

Lights, camera, action

Kickstarter strongly encourages its project creators to upload a video as part of their campaign page. It’s an integral marketing asset for any crowdfunding campaign, but making a video can seem scary for the camera-shy. Keep in mind that your campaign video doesn’t need to be a work of art, but it should convey the purpose and intent of your project and what value it can bring to backers. It should be short: a running time of 1.5 to four minutes will satisfy those with the shortest of attention spans. For more guidance, check out Kickstarter’s guide to video best practices for tips, tricks, and advice.

Project creators don’t necessarily need to invest in expensive, high-tech equipment to make a video. Here’s a checklist of items you’ll need: 

• A smartphone or webcam: Obviously. If you’d like slicker production values, a camcorder is a safe bet.
• Someone to hold the camera: Rope in a friend with video skills or someone with steady hands, or consider hiring a videographer. 
• A film-ready space: Present your product (and yourself) in the best possible light, literally and figuratively. An ideal film space should be clutter-free and visually appealing, and have plenty of natural light.
• Your product: Make sure it’s functioning and ready to go.
• A script: This is your chance to sell your product and promote its appeal to backers. A script will help you consolidate your talking points. Write it out, edit it, memorize it.
• You: It’s nice to see the human behind the project! Be genuine and boost your emotional connection with your backers.

“The importance of having a good Kickstarter video is that you can use the video as the asset for your page in terms of photos and GIFs,” Podo Labs’ Eddie Lee says. “That way, you don’t have to do extra photography and you also have a unified look across the assets.” It’s as easy as grabbing a screencap of the relevant images and uploading them to your campaign page.

Once you have your video, you’ll want to select an attention-grabbing thumbnail image. This is an image that potential backers will immediately see on your page and anytime you share your video on social media, on your landing page, on Facebook Ads, in the press, through email, and so on. Pick a clear image of your product and if you use text make sure it’s legible.

As your campaign progresses, you’ll be able to update your thumbnail to call out any project milestones like hitting your funding goal or let people know that your campaign is ending soon. The thumbnail for the OYO NOVA Gym was updated with the exciting news that the project had become the “number one most-funded fitness product in Kickstarter history.”

Say it with images

Selecting high-quality, high-resolution images will make a campaign page shine. The more striking the image, the better. If you’re sharing your campaign page on social media, the image will often be the first thing your networks will see. If you’re not sure about sizes and accepted file types, Kickstarter offers its project creators some technical specs. It recommends that project images are 1024×576 pixels (an aspect ratio of 16:9), and that the file type is a JPEG, PNG, GIF, or BMP. Images may be no larger than 50 MB.

Use images as a way to convey information simply and more memorably. Identify areas where you can replace text with images. Pictures are more interesting and keep readers engaged. 

Remember to have a few images on your page that show the product in context. This photo from the Tiny Treehouse’s Kickstarter campaign page shows the DIY model in a planter to demonstrate how the product can be used.

GIFs bring your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign page to life

Creators can level up by using animated GIFs to demonstrate product features. Moving images keep readers interested and are great at showing people what your product can do. 

These GIFs from the Gravgrip Kickstarter campaign page clearly and simply show the benefits of the camera stabilizer. 

If you’re handy with Photoshop, making an animated GIF from a collection of images is a simple process; if not, there are plenty of online tools like GIFMaker or Makeagif that can make animations for you.

Keep in mind that having great images may also help you earn press coverage. Blogs need high-quality images to accompany their write-ups. Having high-resolution product shots will make it easier for the press to put together stories.

Highlight press coverage on your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign page

Speaking of press, make sure to highlight any press coverage that you’ve earned on the campaign page. If you’re doing a tech project product launch, then your audience will instantly recognize the Gizmodo, Mashable, and CNET logos, and having those press mentions will add credibility to your project.

Having the funding amount, and backer count metrics on display turns the campaign into a movement that gains speed as you add more backers and external validation from the press.

Take a look at how the Evie Blender’s Indiegogo campaign collates its press coverage on its site.

For tabletop Kickstarter projects, you can use reviews or previews of your game in the same way.

The Kickstarter campaign page for Return to Dark Tower includes review excerpts from trusted names in the games industry. 

Consumers trust word-of-mouth marketing more than they trust brands, so it’s important to include that element of social proof on your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign page to demonstrate the benefits of your product.

Be creative with your content

Yichuan Wang, one of the project creators behind tabletop horror game Deep Madness, believes an editorial calendar helps to maintain regular communications with backers.

Wang says his marketing strategy focused on ensuring each post (whether on social media, the campaign page, or on the project creator’s website) had a clearly defined purpose and was published in a timely fashion.

“Each of our posts is carefully prepared. Attractive content is more likely to seize the attention of users,” Wang says. Rather than flood backers with promotional material, Wang advocates a more considered approach. “We regularly released a little bit of content each time — like a few photos of models or an illustration.”

In addition, Wang says that an injection of creativity or personality can make traditional updates more compelling for backers. “A highlight of our campaign was our team of professional writers,” he says. “In our updates, we abandoned the traditional informational messages, and instead wrote a lot of exciting content about the world in each post. Each update was a bit like a short story or a small slice from a novel.  That was a lot of fun for us, and our backers seemed to really enjoy that, too.”

You don’t need to be a professional content creator to be creative

Lynn Johnson, the creator of the Turtle Hat, adopted a quirky, idiosyncratic approach to storytelling on his campaign page. Johnson’s lack of fancy graphics is more than made up for with his sense of humor. The simplicity of Johnson’s story allows backers to see the person behind the project, and his project’s tagline — “You cannot take yourself too seriously with a turtle on your head” — neatly encapsulates what makes his project so unique. It’s authentic, creative — and it paid off.

Keep your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign page fresh

A crowdfunding campaign page is often a work in progress. Podo Labs’ Eddie Lee says campaign pages can always be improved throughout the campaign. Sometimes more copy or different information would be added, or a total refresh of the page’s elements would be in order. “We tended to keep revising it,” he says. “In the first two weeks, there’s not much press about the product, people don’t know what it is,” Lee says. Potential backers are in “complete exploration mode”, so the page is tailored to that experience.

In the final two weeks of the campaign, he says, visitors are more likely to be acquainted with your product. “Maybe they’ve come to the page before and they haven’t decided whether to back the campaign, or they’ve read everything about it in the press article,” Lee says. “So you can do different things in the final two weeks, such as move the rewards higher up on the page above the description, so they start seeing prices and options faster.”

In the final week of Podo Labs’ campaign for the Jack, its Kickstarter campaign page underwent a total redesign. “When you see the comments and questions on the page, you get a sense of what people didn’t understand, as well as what mattered to them the most,” Lee says. Initially, there was confusion over how the product worked. “We had some diagrams that we thought explained exactly what it did, but people would still ask: ‘How does this work’?” In response, the team went back to the drawing board, redesigning the diagrams and experimenting with how instructions were displayed. As a result, Lee says, “we re-prioritized and made things more clear.” And even if things look pretty good, Lee warns against complacency. “The color or font selection could always be more perfect”.

Are you preparing your campaign page? Join us for a live presentation on October 14th where we will be reviewing Kickstarter pages. You can submit your project for a chance to have your page reviewed during the presentation or tune in for design tips.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in 2017. It has been updated for relevance and accuracy.

The post Kickstarter Campaign Page Design Secrets appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

You’ve exceeded your funding goal, run a successful Kickstarter campaign, and have decided to set up a pre-order store or late-pledge page. Now what?

Pre-orders are an integral part of BackerKit’s offering to project creators, but as BackerKit Product Manager Dan Goldenberg notes, project creators “often forget to promote them” once their project is live in BackerKit. “It’s not as if once you build a pre-order store, people will just show up,” he says.

While some Kickstarter projects are able to harness their brand power to drive sales, most won’t have that luxury. Goldenberg says it only takes a little effort to reap large rewards. “We’ve found the people who perform the best in terms of pre-order sales really get a lot of people visiting it.”

The most effective methods included embedding BackerKit’s pre-order store widget on personal websites, running Facebook ad campaigns, and sending out targeted email campaigns.

Feeling overwhelmed? Here are simple steps you can take to make your pre-order store a success.

Before you launch your Kickstarter campaign, set up your pre-order store page

You’ll want your pre-order store to be ready right as you end your campaign so you can continue to collect the information of people who are interested in what you’re offering and connect with those “late backers.”

When you set up your pre-order store, make sure that all your items are clearly named and accompanied by high-quality images and accurate descriptions.

BackerKit’s image gallery lets you upload multiple images for each item, which lets you display an item from multiple angles or highlight all variations of an item to make it easier for backers to make their selections.

This helps to make your products as appealing as possible to backers.

Our help center has more information on how to set up pre-orders.

Pick your items

Ideally, your pre-order store should offer items that are enticing for both your earliest supporters as well as latecomers to your campaign.

Project creators can differentiate between Kickstarter pre-order backers and original backers by offering slightly different pricing for pre-order rewards, or shipping those pre-order rewards only after the original backer rewards have shipped.

This approach allows you to give your most fervent backers preferential treatment while keeping your project open to the crowdfunding community.

Kickstarter creators should customize their pre-order store to fit branding

Branding is a powerful promotional tool — it tells people who you are. To help tell your story, your BackerKit pre-order store can be personalized to accurately reflect your brand. Kickstarter creators can personalize a pre-order store by customizing the project title, logo, color scheme, and call-to-action buttons to their specifications.  

Include Kickstarter FAQs in your pre-order store

Shipping fees, products specifications, taxes, and other information included in your Kickstarter FAQ should be added to your pre-order store. This will save you from having to field these questions multiple times.

Link your pre-order store

Post the link on Kickstarter Spotlight, your website, social media, forum and communities you are on, and embed it on your home page. Share it often!

After you’ve launched

Gather email addresses

Kickstarter backers will often browse a pre-order store but may not make a purchase straight away. Sometimes, they might require more information about the product.

To solve this problem, we’ve introduced the ability for creators to collect email addresses from customers using our mailing list tool.

The mailing list feature has an opt-in form that allows project creators to collect email addresses from prospective customers.

Project creators can use their mailing list to highlight special offers. You could do this by splitting your list into two sets of people: folks who pledged, and folks who didn’t.

Send marketing emails

Stuck for ideas on how to write a great marketing email? It’s easy as ABC.

A. Send messages to your existing Kickstarter backers, telling them their friends can pre-order your product here. Make sure to include a link to your store

B. Send messages to people on your list who didn’t back your project. You can do this by using BackerKit’s coupon codes to offer an exclusive discount.

C. Promote any new accessories, options or colorways through an email campaign.

Make sure to highlight specific products that are available for sale and consider including a promotion, such as a limited-time discount, to increase the sense of urgency. You can do this through coupon codes, which we’ll talk about later.

If the email has a prominent call-to-action – a ‘ Buy Now’ button, for instance – it will ensure customers have an easy way to visit your store.

Once you’ve split your mailing list, it’s time to start crafting your message. To folks who pledged, be sure to thank them for pledging to your campaign, and tell them they can forward this email to a friend to give them a discount off your product. You should also include a quick reminder that they should not place a pre-order until they’ve received their post-campaign survey. Doing this prevents duplicate orders. 

To folks who didn’t pledge, we recommend writing a message that will spur them into taking action. Letting them know that this is the final chance to receive a discount on your product creates a sense of exclusivity and scarcity and increases the likelihood that they will convert into sales.

Use coupon codes

Coupon codes can be used to entice new customers with discounts, offload inventory, and reward repeat customers. They’re an easy, useful e-commerce tool.

For project creators, they can be a simple, effective way to compel backers to buy their products by giving them an attractive discount.

“We know that one of the big Kickstarter tropes is providing a discount off retail, and we want to keep that going forward,” Goldenberg says.

Coupon codes give project creators the ability to provide flat-price discounts off add-ons and pre-order items, and are easily tracked.

Project creators can create individual codes for different mediums: one for promotions on a podcast, and another for an email marketing campaign. (If you’d like to learn more, this explains how coupon codes work in more detail.)

Fun things you can do with coupon codes: celebrate survey day with a $5 discount off add-ons, run promotions for your pre-order store through email and other marketing channels, give repeat customers a special offer.

Continue to market your product

Marketing your product doesn’t end once your campaign does.

Is holiday season approaching? Consider offering customers a discount with BackerKit’s coupon codes, and make sure you email them to let them know. If you’re making an appearance at an event or conference, an email can help spread the word.

Notifying your customers of new product milestones or project updates is a great way to keep them engaged in your campaign.

Some of the most successful pre-order store campaigns on BackerKit include Formbox, which embedded BackerKit’s pre-order widget on its website and ran paid ads directing visitors to the site, helping it amass $192,256 in pre-order sales, and Friday the 13th, which made $1.37 million in pre-order sales on BackerKit – more money than it had made in its initial crowdfunding campaign.

The lesson? Marketing your pre-order store is an ongoing effort. The more you hustle, the more likely you are to reap big rewards. Even a little bit of promotion can go a long way in raising awareness of your pre-order offerings.

Many creators have enjoyed success running Facebook ad campaigns to increase the visibility of their pre-order store. Although if you choose this option, you must have a strong audience targeting to achieve a lower cost per acquisition, as well as higher click-through rates and conversion rates.

You can learn more about marketing strategies for Kickstarter campaign pre-order stores here. Creators planning to launch Kickstarter campaigns soon can reach out to us with any questions by clicking the link below.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in 2017. It has been updated for relevance and accuracy.

The post Kickstarter Pre-Order Store Success: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Our first Facebook ad experiment gave us a lot of great data about what to expect from Facebook advertising but it also left us with several questions about what’s the best way to structure and measure performance.

Khierstyn Ross, host of the BackerKit sponsored Crowdfunding Uncut podcast, reached out to us asking for suggestions about future show topics right when we were in the middle of running our Facebook experiment. We immediately put together a list of questions and problems we encountered that had us flummoxed.

Ross incorporated several of our questions into her latest podcast, an in-depth interview with Facebook marketing strategist Rachel Pedersen covering the tactical aspects of launching and running a Facebook ad campaign for Kickstarter.

We’ve highlighted a few of our questions and included Pedersen’s answers here.

Ads with lots of likes and comments perform better. What’s the best time to boost a post when you might get more traction with it based on having social proof already?

Pedersen: This is something I do with a lot of my clients right now. We post a lot of content, either theirs or from other sources, to their Facebook page, so the warm audience sees that content first and if they start to organically engage with that content, that’s a good sign that it’s hitting the mark.

Personally, I’m not a fan of running boosted posts on anything that is not already organically converting. This is an issue I see a lot with people who are starting their Facebook ads. They have something that they put out there organically, nobody likes it, and they think, ‘Oh, I’ll put more money behind it.’ Well, if it was a dud organically, it’s most likely going to be a dud on paid advertising as well.

The exception to this is if you have a brand new page and you really don’t have a following yet. Don’t put tons of money behind something until you test it out for $5 to see how it performs. When I start to see something organically getting traction, that’s a pretty good sign there are more people who are going to resonate with it and seed it with social proof of others who say “Yeah, I like this. This is awesome!”

Should I optimize the audience and goal for engagement first and then widen the audience after I have enough social proof on the ad?

Pedersen: I have done that in the past, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that until you’re sure that you have nailed down what the interests, copy, and creative should be. The reason being if you’re just trying to get engagement and you have no idea who your audience is or even if it’s a popular subject. If you haven’t validated it, then I don’t recommend doing that.

Sometimes when I run ads, I’ll test different objectives against each other with the same end goal in mind. Let’s say we wanted to get a complete registration or somebody opting in with their email address. I would do one that has a video and have video views as the objective. I would have one that leads to the landing page with a complete registration objective and then one with website clicks. So, three different objectives. We have the same goal for all three but you never know which one is going to perform the best because one might get a ton of social proof and then slowly get cheaper for the cost per registration.

Check out the full podcast for the entire interview that also includes information on how to validate ads and what kind of ads work well for live Kickstarter campaigns.

The post Adventures in Facebook Advertising: Podcast Follow-up appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Many project creators think the hard work is over once the crowdfunding campaign ends. But if you’re selling pre-orders as part of your campaign, the marketing effort should continue. A little legwork can help you capitalize on demand for your product from late backers, as well as new audiences.

Having your pre-order store up and running once your campaign has ended is a great way to capture demand from backers who have missed the original campaign. Serial entrepreneur Cathryn Lavery, the creator of BestSelf.CO and Calm the Ham, says that there’s likely to be plenty of demand for your product in the two-week period that Kickstarter takes to process payments.

In 2015, she ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for the SELF Journal, a daily planner that is designed to maximize productivity and goal-setting. “It was crucial to ensure we took advantage of the traffic that was still coming out way after the campaign had ended,” she writes. “In the seven days after the campaign, we drove 14K in additional funding without doing any marketing.” Lavery used Celery to sell the initial batch of pre-orders during this two-week period before hosting a store on BackerKit.

However, most products won’t sell themselves – it’s up to you to spread the word once the marketing from the original campaign dissipates. Small steps can have a significant impact. Most pre-order stores are standalone sites that you can link to on your social media profiles, campaign updates, and email signatures.  If you’re using Kickstarter, you can link to your store using the Kickstarter Spotlight button.

Adding passive links can supply a trickle of traffic, but driving significant sales requires some preparation. Ideally, a pre-order store requires a promotional marketing campaign to  boost revenue.

Use Your Mailing Lists

Chances are you built up a solid email mail list during your campaign and now you have a backer list to add to it. Emailing your contacts about your pre-order store launch will help to spread the word.

How you launch your store matters. Just sending out an email, saying “Hey, we’re open!” might not be enough to get people to click through.

Make sure to highlight specific products that are available for sale and consider including a promotion, such as a limited-time discount or coupon to increase the sense of urgency. Make sure that the email has a prominent call-to-action – a ‘ Buy Now’ button, for instance – to ensure that readers have an easy way to go to the store.

Sendwithus offers plenty of tips on creating an effective email campaign. Rather than spam all of your contacts with potentially irrelevant (and annoying) promotional emails, it recommends building a separate, month-long drip campaign for the leads that have not yet converted. It also suggests using each email to “reinforce the value of your product and then include social proof from other pre-customers who converted”.

In this instance, social proof could include tweets or social media praise from excited backers, snapshots of your campaign successes, press mentions, or testimonials from those who love your product.

Alex Smilansky, creator of desktop vacuum former FormBox, said that having a large signup list and continuing to nurture it was fundamental in generating sales on Kickstarter and after the campaign had ended. He says that leads generated from his mailing list were converted over time. His Kickstarter campaign raised $588,775, exceeding his funding goal ten times, and his pre-order sales with BackerKit totaled $192,256. His most popular pre-order item was a limited-release version of the FormBox, priced at $399.

The Power of Paid Ads

Many creators use paid ads to drive traffic to their crowdfunding campaign pages, but they can also vastly increase the visibility and reach of your pre-order store. Most project creators we’ve spoken to say they’ve had the highest conversion rates promoting BackerKit pre-orders through Facebook ads, although some have also used Google Adwords with varying degrees of success.

Formbox’s Smilanksy said that out of all the Formbox’s pre-order store traffic, 80% to 90% of it came from Facebook advertising, while the remainder was organically driven. The company now plans to run more targeted experiments and run ads on Pinterest using the platform’s Promoted Pins.

When choosing a paid ad platform, it helps to consider the nature of your product.

If it addresses a need that is searchable, Google Adwords could be a promising fit. Meanwhile, Promoted Pins are well-suited to products that are visually appealing and aspirational.

All of these platforms offer analytics and conversion tracking. If you’re using Facebook ads, you can use the Facebook pixel to measure cross-device conversions, create custom audiences for your ads, optimize delivery, run dynamic product ads, and find out how people are interacting with your website.

Nurture Your Brand

Ultimate Survival Tips’ David Robert didn’t use paid ads to promote his pre-order store. Instead, he focused his efforts on growing an existing audience base that had been cultivated over time through targeted content marketing strategies. “When we did do promotional material for the MSK-1, it helped to fuel interest for our pre-order store,” he says.

The MSK-1 knife raised almost as much in pre-orders ($170,455) as it did in its Kickstarter campaign ($197,693). Its most popular pre-order item is the Ultimate Survival Bundle ($519), which comprises one MSK-1 survival knife with handle survival kit, an ACS 2-in-1 sheath system (Kydex and nylon), one MSK-1 mini knife and sheath, a 1/4″ firesteel rod and holder, and a large strap-on kit pouch. Its second-most popular item is the starter package, which includes the MSK-1 survival knife with a handle survival kit and black Kydex sheath.

The fruits of his efforts can be seen on YouTube, where his channel has amassed over 42 million views and almost 400,000 subscribers. Some of Robert’s most popular videos have garnered over a million views. “I had spent about three years developing our product, so along the way there were lots of teasers and anticipation online,” he says.

“Part of what we had going in our favor was a pretty large social media presence going in, and our most popular YouTube videos continue to go on and build views over time. That link love continues to feed into the pre-order store.” He uploads new videos regularly. A few are promotional videos for the MSK-1 knife and its accessories – some of which took a few months to produce – while others are videos packed with tips for bushcraft, hunting, and survival against the elements.

In addition, Robert also has a Facebook page for Ultimate Survival Tips, with 50,000-strong followers, where videos promoting the MSK-1 and the pre-order store are woven in with other survival-related content. He also regularly engages with followers on Instagram.

The post How to Promote Your Pre-Order Store appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Email marketing and public relations outreach top the list for free marketing channels, but when it comes time to spend money, many creators recommended Facebook ads. We decided to test the channel out ourselves by running a Facebook ad campaign for a live Kickstarter project.

Our friends at Lay Waste Games, the makers behind Dragoon (the tabletop board game where you play as a dragon), happened to be launching a Kickstarter campaign for their new Standard and Gold Editions and the Rogue and Barbarian Expansion.

The team wasn’t planning to do any Facebook advertising for the campaign, but they’re cool people and they agreed to let us run a Facebook ad experiment for their campaign so we could share what we learn to help other creators. 

We’re not Facebook experts (we specialize in making backer management software) but that wasn’t a problem. We wanted to approach the problem like eager beginners since that’s where most creators will be when they start running their own Facebook ads.

We agreed to pay for the advertising ourselves and Lay Waste Games would pay us 15% of whatever amount the ads raised for them. If our ads failed to attract backers, they wouldn’t be responsible for any of the costs. We came up with the 15% rate because the professional agencies charge anywhere from 20-35%. Making profit wasn’t our goal, so we hoped that 15% would be enough to cover our advertising expenses and we’d get a lot of great ad performance data to share with creators.

Estimating the Cost Per Acquisition

One concern going in was that the average pledge amount wasn’t going to be high enough to make the ad cost feasible. In online advertising, there’s the concept of cost per acquisition (CPA) which is the amount spent to acquire a customer. You can calculate your CPA by dividing your total spend by the number of customers acquired. For example, if you pay $500 on Facebook ads and it generates 20 backers, then your CPA is $25.

A $25 CPA could be good or bad for you depending on the price of your product. If your product is $200 and only costs $75 to manufacture and ship, then a $25 CPA would be fantastic since you’ll generate a $100 profit per customer. However, if your product is priced at $40 and it costs $20 to manufacture and ship each unit and your CPA is $25, then you’ll lose $5 on every transaction. If you have a lower-priced product or low profit margins, you will need a lower CPA to make the marketing channel profitable for you.

The Dragoon expansion and reprint campaign had several different pledge levels ranging from $30 or $40 for just the expansions all the way up to $650 for a premium Wyvern edition that comes with a handmade Wyrmwood board. We estimated that the average pledge amount would be around $75 which would give us a target CPA of $11.25 ($75 x 15%) to break even.

Given that the average Facebook CPA is $18.68 according to Wordstream, it looked like we were going to be in a tough position trying to hit a $11.25 CPA.

If you are considering using any paid advertising channel, figure out how much you can afford to spend to acquire each customer. This will help you set your CPA target and you’ll be able to tell if ads are profitable or not based on the actual CPAs you see once you have live performance data.  

Audience Targeting is Essential

Facebook performs well because it’s excellent at giving you ways to customize the audience that sees your ads. You can target people by age, gender, location, language, and specific interests.

Two of Facebook’s most effective targeting features are custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Custom audiences allow you to target people that you already know. You can use customer lists, website traffic, or Facebook engagement activity to create custom audiences.

The main drawback with custom audiences is that the size of each audience is limited by the customer list that you provide. If your audience size is only a thousand people, you can exhaust that list very quickly with just a few dollars in ad spend. That’s where lookalike audiences come into play. You can give Facebook a custom audience and ask them to create a larger audience that has similar attributes.

A lookalike audience will give you more people to advertise to and it’ll convert better than an untargeted list, but it won’t convert as well as your custom customer audience since it’s a larger group of people that aren’t customers yet.

Generating Audiences

The easiest way to waste your advertising budget is to put your ads in front of the wrong audience, so we set aside a small budget to test out different audiences.

We started with the backer list from the first Dragoon campaign and used it to generate a custom audience. When you generate a custom audience your browser hashes the email addresses and uploads the hashed data to Facebook. Then Facebook compares the data to its hashed user data to find any matches and saves them into a custom audience. It’s a complicated process but it ensures that you never share actual email addresses with Facebook so you keep backer data private.

This is when we encountered our first problem. The original campaign and pre-order backer list only turned up 1,200 matches, which means that advertising to just this list would generate less than 40 clicks per day if we maxed out our spending. If clicks convert into pledges at 2.5%, then we could only expect this list to generate one pledge per day and advertising at that rate would exhaust the list quickly and ads would become ineffective in a matter of days. 

We needed to find larger audiences to drive more potential pledges. Our solution was to use the Dragoon backer audience to create several Lookalike audiences segmented by country.

We ended up creating a lookalike audience in the United States for our test audience. The original Dragoon campaign didn’t have EU-friendly shipping, so the backer list had a higher percentage of backers from North America. Once we had our test audience, it was time to create our campaigns, ad sets, and the actual ads.  

Creating the Ads

We created a single “Dragoon” campaign with the objective to drive in website traffic. There are other objectives like engagements, website conversions, and lead generation but website clicks made the most sense to us. Website conversions sounds like a promising option but, as far as we know, there’s currently no way to install the Facebook conversion pixel on your Kickstarter campaign page.

After we had our campaign ready, we set up an ad set for the US lookalike audience. Organizing your ads by campaign and ad sets makes it possible to separate out performance data to let us see what ads work best for each audience. It’s common to divide ad sets by audience country for example. 

Then we created ads for our ad set. For the initial audience testing, we went with basic single-image ads. We had five images to test, so we created five ads with identical headlines and text descriptions but different images.

For the text, we tried piquing viewer interest by mentioning the special offer and that the first edition sold out, and creating a sense of urgency by emphasizing the time left in the campaign.

The Lay Waste Games team created several custom referral links in the Kickstarter dashboard for us to use to track conversions and we created a spreadsheet to track ad spend, reach, clicks, conversions, cost per click and cost per acquisition each day. Kickstarter doesn’t give you a way to filter referral conversions by day, so we had to be diligent about recording our conversion counts once a day to make sure that we had an accurate view of our Facebook ad performance.

Evaluating Performance

We started the US lookalike ad set about halfway through the campaign with a daily budget of $20 and ran it for a week.

Dragoon, US 1% Lookalike Audience

• Reach: 17,271
• Clicks: 495
• Conversions: 4
• Spend: $127.63
• Cost per click: $0.26
• Click-through rate: 2.87%
• Conversion rate: 0.8%
• Cost per acquisition: $31.91

The cost per click started out at $0.37 on the first day but quickly fell to $0.32 on the second day and settled at $0.26 by the end of the week-long test. All of the ads had a Relevance Score of 8 or 9, so that helped lower our average click cost.

The good news was that our average pledge amount came in higher than expected at about $93.00 per backer which brought our break-even CPA up to $13.95. The bad news is that our conversion rate was terrible at 0.8% and the cost to acquire each backer was $31.91. We ran another smaller test with a Canada Dragoon backer lookalike audience that brought in 95 clicks, with two pledge conversions, and cost $56.21 for a CPA of $28.11.

We tried ads with lookalike audiences a couple times during the campaign but were never able to get ads to consistently produce CPAs below $25.  Getting a 3-to-1 return on ad spend in an initial test would have been an acceptable result for many projects running ads on their own but that kind of return wasn’t going to break even for us. 

Making Adjustments

The tests showed that our ads could generate clicks and those clicks converted into pledges but they just weren’t effective enough. We needed to lower our cost per click or increase our conversion rate, preferably both, in order to lower our CPA.

The ads were good enough to get clicks at a reasonable cost but the people weren’t converting when they reached the Kickstarter campaign page. We had to improve our audience targeting to get in front of more people that might want to back a Kickstarter game.

You don’t need to have a BackerKit account to answer a project survey, but hundreds of thousands of backers have created accounts over the years. We segmented the accounts by backers that had an affinity for tabletop games and used them as a test audience to see if we could achieve a lower cost per acquisition. Maybe they would be more likely to convert because they’ve actually backed game projects in the past.

We put together the audience and created the new ad set using the exact same images and copy. Here’s how that test performed:

Tabletop Backer Audience

• Reach: 16,506
• Clicks: 870
• Conversions: 19
• Spend: $205.44
• Cost per click: $0.24
• Click-through rate: 5.27%
• Conversion rate: 2.18%
• Cost per acquisition: $10.81

Success! Improving our targeting almost doubled our click-through rate, nearly tripled our conversion rate and brought our CPA down to $10.81. Note that we only used backers that personally signed up for BackerKit for this test but people that didn’t have accounts could still see ads if they were included by Facebook in a lookalike audience.

Engagement Matters

When we reviewed the earlier tests to see which images had the best click-through rates we discovered that there wasn’t a single best-performing image.

Whichever ad happened to get engagements such as likes, comments, and shares the earliest performed the best and the effect would snowball because Facebook would show that ad more and it would earn even more engagements.

We also learned to be smarter about including time-sensitive information in the ad text. If you edit the image or the copy in an ad it will reset the likes and other engagements. All of those ads that had mentioned that there were only two weeks left to back the campaign had a lot of likes and shares but we couldn’t adjust the text as we closed in on the campaign end date.

Next time we’ll try using text that will work through the entire campaign duration. We’d also try experimenting by showing an ad to a very friendly audience first, such as existing fans and customers, just to build up the likes and then adding in a broader audience once the ad had built up an impressive amount of social proof.   

Videos vs. Images

Once we had our audiences working, we decided to see how video ads perform. We uploaded the new Dragoon campaign video and then we used Facebook’s captioning tool to add text captions that display when videos auto-play in silent mode.

We were worried that we’d lose viewers early because the campaign video has a long opening animation, so we added extra caption text to keep viewers engaged. It takes extra work to set up captions but it’s worth it because many people browse Facebook with their phones on silent.

Here’s how the two ads performed:

Single-image Ad

• Reach: 18,394
• Clicks: 521
• Conversions: 16
• Spend: $214.16
• Cost per click: $0.41
• Click-through rate: 2.83%
• Conversion rate: 3.07%
• Cost per acquisition: $13.39

Video Ad

• Reach: 63,923
• Clicks: 2712
• Conversions: 56
• Spend: $881.22
• Cost per click: $0.32
• Click-through rate: 4.24%
• Conversion rate: 2.06%
• Cost per acquisition: $15.74

We found that the campaign video ad was better at generating clicks with a 4.24% click-through rate compared to 2.83% for the image ad. The video ad also generated far more reactions, comments and shares, but the image ad had a better conversion rate with 3.07% compared to 2.06% for the video ad.

Facebook automatically allocated budget between the ads because they were in the same set, and the system gave video ad four times as much budget as the image ad by the end of the campaign. We increased the ad budget from $100 per day to $200 per day through the last three days but clicks became more expensive after we increased our budget, rising from $0.28 per click up to $0.42 per click which hurt our CPA.

We can’t draw any definitive conclusions with our small sample size but the limited results show us that video ads are worth trying.

Timing matters. We noticed that conversion rates started rising significantly once the time urgency kicks in and the Kickstarter countdown timer switches from counting down days to hours.  

The video ad we tested started five days before the end of the campaign on April 6 and had a 1.90% conversion rate on the first day but the conversion rate was down to 1.39% just two days later. In the final two and a half days of the campaign, the conversion rate rose to 2.75%. That’s an incredible swing and we would have missed out on the conversions if we disabled the ad early.   

Your Results Will Vary

Ads are complicated and there are so many variables in play with your audience make-up, ad copy, and crowdfunding campaign quality that guarantee that you will see different results if you try running your own ads.

We had major advantages because the Dragoon expansion campaign provided great media assets and the campaign was already at 5x its funding goal when we started sending in Facebook ad traffic. Backers could also have increased confidence in backing a project that had already successfully fulfilled one campaign.

We had an incredible audience advantage. If we had continued using only lookalike audiences, it’s very likely that our CPAs would have stayed in the $30 range which might be a reasonable target CPA for most campaigns.

If you’re going to run Facebook ads for your project we recommend starting them later in the campaign after you have a respectable funding amount and running them through the very end.

Calculate your break-even cost per acquisition ahead of time and constantly monitor performance so that you can improve on audience targeting and ads during your campaign.

The post Adventures in Facebook Advertising appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

When a crowdfunding campaign draws to a close, project creators typically witness a sudden influx of last-gasp backers rushing to back the project before it ends. Fresh attention is great news for any campaign, and a final surge of support can help to carry a project over the funding finishing line. But what can project creators do about those who missed out?

Enter pre-orders. Offering pre-orders can propel your campaign’s momentum outside of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, giving backers the opportunity to contribute to your campaign after it has ended. They’re an easy way to raise additional funds, which can sometimes end up covering platform fees or unexpected surprises in the fulfillment phase. Either way, the business case is compelling.

Sometimes, project creators raise more in pre-order sales than their original campaign. The creators of Friday the 13th, a multiplayer video game, raised $823,704 from 12,218 backers on Kickstarter, exceeding their funding goal by about $100,000.

Once the campaign ended, they offered pre-orders for digital and physical copies of the Friday the 13th game, art books, soundtracks, digital rewards, and other branded merchandise through BackerKit Pre-orders.

Friday the 13th made more money in pre-order sales than in its crowdfunding campaign, amassing $1.365 million from pre-order sales in BackerKit alone.  

Alternatively, project creators can use pre-orders as a way to improve and iron out the flaws in their initial campaign. In fact, that’s what Jym Daniels did. Once his Kickstarter campaign for the Think Ink Pen met its funding goal, he used Indiegogo and Shopify to give his fidget-focus toy a second life.

“We launched our Kickstarter campaign on November 1, which is a terrible time of year – just before Christmas,” Daniels says. “You would never, ever want to launch any crowdfunding campaign before the holidays.” He intended to launch months earlier, but the marketing company he enlisted wanted to hold off the campaign until additional video content had been created.

The campaign met its funding goal, but Daniels had expected to raise more for the project. “We were pretty disappointed,” he says, but not discouraged.

“We knew it was still going to take us three months to produce the product, so why not continue to take preorders?”

Setting Up Shop

There are many ways to run a pre-order store. You can set one up independently, use a platform like Indiegogo or Shopify, or host a store through the BackerKit app. Pre-order stores hosted by BackerKit allow you to manage your campaign backers and pre-orders in the one place, and you can use a widget that places a store on your own website.  

Setting up a pre-order store requires some planning. Don’t leave it ‘til the last minute! Regardless of the e-commerce platform selected, project creators should plan ahead to set up their store and test links to ensure backers don’t drop off once their crowdfunding campaign ends.

Once you’ve set up shop, it’s time to promote it. Don’t let your project recede from backers’ memories: make sure your followers and contact lists know that it is taking orders. If you’ve run a Kickstarter campaign beforehand, consider using Spotlight, which allows project creators to link to external websites, including your pre-order store. If you’ve set up a pre-order store in BackerKit, the app generates a link for project creators to share on social media and Spotlight. The app also prompts backers to share the link to your pre-order store with their followers on social media once they’ve completed your survey.

Some project creators worry that offering pre-orders after the campaign’s official end-date might frustrate their most loyal supporters. We’ve found such fears are unfounded. It’s now very common for crowdfunding campaigns to move into pre-orders.

Project creators can create some differentiation between pre-order backers and original backers by offering slightly different pricing for pre-order rewards, or shipping those pre-order rewards only after the original backer rewards have shipped. This approach allows you to give your most fervent backers preferential treatment while keeping your project open to the crowdfunding community.

Strategies to Drive Pre-order Sales

On December 14, 2016, Friday the 13th announced the release of two betas in a project update: there would be one for ‘Friends and Family’ (early supporters) and a ‘Pre-Order Closed Beta’ (for backers who pre-ordered the game on Kickstarter or BackerKit). Anyone who pre-ordered the game through BackerKit received five beta codes as well, which could be passed on to friends – a neat way to fuel excitement (and sales) through word of mouth. The project update also included a link to the BackerKit pre-order store.

To drum up more buzz, Friday the 13th announced it would stream the Pre-Order Closed Beta on Twitch. These marketing strategies helped fuel a large spike in preorders, which provided vital upward momentum and helped push the project from the $600,000 plateau to over 1.3 million in BackerKit pre-order sales.

The creators posted monthly project updates until the close of the pre-order store in April. These included the introduction of new character concepts, additional Twitch streams, and appearances at PAX South.

Meanwhile, Daniels and his team decided to take pre-orders for the Think Ink Pen on Indiegogo InDemand. He says the platform’s standing in the pre-order market and its exposure to news sites made it a no-brainer. He took the opportunity to supplement his marquee product, the Think Ink Pen, with related products such as ‘fidget sliders’, desk toys, and bundled deals in the InDemand campaign.

 “We had a marketing company that devised for us an official launch, social media and news strategy, but they were finished up in December.” So, Daniels and his team devised a marketing strategy of their own to drive in pre-orders. They sent emails to a database of around 5,000 people, posted updates on social media channels, and secured a placement in Indiegogo’s promotional newsletter.

As it turns out, his bet paid off: the project raised about $150,000 in Indiegogo, compared to $67,000 on Kickstarter. “Initially, we would have been lucky to break even with our Kickstarter campaign. We did not fully expect our efforts on Indiegogo to double what we made on Kickstarter.”

They did, however, have a secret weapon: their product video. Daniels promoted the video through Facebook ads and paid for it to appear on Gadget Flow. From there, it was picked up by Viral Thread, which re-edited it and released it, and the rest is history: it was shared by social news sites like Unilad, which boast nearly 30 million Facebook followers, and 30-odd marketing sites on the web.   

“Content is truly king,” Daniels says. “Media mentions help, but nothing compares to the experience of being picked up by a social influencer or large social media site. We immediately got contacted by people everywhere, who make their own version of the video.” He says project creators should keep this in mind. “If I were developing a product today, one of my big factors to consider is: what kind of content can I build around it?”

Daniels believes video content is worth the investment, particularly if the product has demonstrable and aesthetic appeal. “We’re investing most of our ad dollars in creating good video content around our product and delivering it to the companies that have picked it up in the past,” he says. He’s also looking at building more affiliate relationships with companies that post videos on their sites in exchange for a small fee. “It’s not a bad deal to acquire a customer and only pay 10 per cent, versus 50 per cent on a wholesale retail spread.”

The post Pre-orders Best Practices appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Every day, your social media feeds are home to countless digital ads, each one vying for your eyeballs and cash. Project creators might wonder whether paid advertising is worth the cost — if it can give their crowdfunding campaign a significant boost without losing money.

Paid advertising should not be seen as a silver bullet. A slew of ads won’t help a campaign with a soggy narrative or ill-defined target market. What’s more, not all crowdfunding campaigns need paid advertising to succeed. However, it appears that many high-profile, large-scale projects have enlisted help from agencies to ensure their PR and marketing strategies are primed for success.

Some project creators work exclusively with one agency; others collaborate with a number of agencies. Eddie Lee, co-founder of Podo Labs, has conducted successful campaigns with and without paid advertising. Podo Labs didn’t undertake any paid advertising for its first Kickstarter campaign, but it did partner with agencies for subsequent campaigns. Lee says the impact was significant.

“For the Podo v2, we wanted to grow the numbers as large as possible. As long as you’re covering the costs — even if maybe you’re not covering the cost of your BOM, you just want to grow your campaign — that’s one of the best ways to do it,” Lee says.

Paid advertising can be effective, so long as it isn’t spammy. “For the second campaign, we were referred to a few different paid advertising firms, and that worked out well for us,” Lee says. One strategy included cross-promotions with other crowdfunding campaigns.

“Some people have mixed feelings about that — it might turn off your backers — but it’s also free advertising,” he says. “It depends on how you frame it. We make it clear to people: ‘This is the end of our announcements. Following ahead are promotions if you’re interested.’ And then we list them there — so far we haven’t gotten any backlash.”

A Helping Hand

Roy Morejon, president of Enventys Partners, says partnering with an agency gives project creators more time and resources to run a prosperous campaign.  “Running a crowdfunding project is not the sort of thing where you set it up, launch, and then come back 30 days later to collect your money,” Morejon says.

As a vertically integrated product development, crowdfunding and inbound marketing agency, Enventys handles “every aspect of campaign management”, Morejon says — “gathering leads before launch, writing copy for the campaign page, photography and graphic design, social media, emailing marketing, Facebook Ads, public relations and more”.

Due to the effort involved in running and maintaining a crowdfunding campaign, most agencies choose to work with a projects larger funding goals. The duration of engagement can cover a period of six months, covering pre-launching efforts to post-campaign services.

Mark Pecota, COO and co-founder of full-service agency LaunchBoom, says the best time to engage his services is “once you have a functional prototype”. In addition, LaunchBoom requests a lead time of three months before launch. Morejon concurs. “As soon as you have a marketable product ready to go, enlist an agency. Don’t wait until a week before you’re ready to launch the project.”

Nailing the Pre-launch Campaign

A project creator’s pre-launch strategies are a crucial determinant in their campaign’s success. Yet these activities — which include email marketing, social media promotion, lead-gathering, and so on — are often the most time-consuming.

“One of the biggest places we feel people do not put enough emphasis on is in the pre-launch, so most of our system is focused on properly preparing the project by building all the marketing assets you need,” Pecota says. This includes making hundreds of digital ads — crafting the headline copy, body copy, and imagery — and defining the audience that the project creator should be targeting. LaunchBoom sends traffic down two to five funnels and makes different landing pages to test different hypotheses to determine the campaign’s ideal target audience.

LaunchBoom builds lead generation campaigns designed to get email signups from the target demographic, and “from there we send an automated follow-up response, which essentially welcomes them to the community”, Pecota says. LaunchBoom’s approach to email marketing is highly personalized— any correspondence is tailored to come directly from the project creator, lending a more authentic touch.

Social Media Advertising

“There’s basically two big players in the ad world right now: Facebook and Google,” Pecota says. “We found that the highest return has come from Facebook itself. “ He says LaunchBoom’s strategy to “put more money into the pre-campaign and spend it on Facebook to build an audience basically to collect emails”.Building your email list ahead of launch produces a “higher return on investment in the long run rather than waiting to spend all of your ad budget during the campaign”. Facebook Ads are also the weapon of choice for Morejon. “The targeting is really good,” he says, “so we can reach a ton of people who would be interested in the product we’re advertising at a low cost.”

The ease of setting up Facebook Ads allows project creators with smaller budgets to experiment with paid advertising without hiring an agency. Arthur Maitre, e-commerce manager at Native Union, ran paid advertisements through Facebook to bolster an email list in the lead up to the launches for the JUMP and Eclipse cable campaigns.

“We did three different images and four different taglines, which gave us 12 different possibilities for combinations,” Maitre says. The winning ad was the one with the highest click-through rate. “The hero image and tagline you see on the Eclipse campaign page came from a data-driven decision,” he says.

Of course, not all clicks on Facebook and Google ads will convert into pledges — project creators’ experiences will vary. Adespresso has a useful guide on Facebook ads that breaks down outcomes based on ad spend, and highlights how such ads can be used to build email lists and generate pledges. It offers the example of Self Journal. Its creators spent $92.89 on Facebook ads over a period of a few days to garner 172 emails.

The efficacy of social advertising will largely depend on how targeted and relevant the ad is to a particular audience. As Native Union’s experience demonstrates, this process involves some trial and error.

What Makes an Ideal Client?

A harmonious working relationship between an agency and project creator requires both parties to be honest with each other about campaign expectations.

Lee says project creators should do their research, particularly when it comes to cross-promotion of other campaigns. “We made a mistake once where a paid ad firm told us to do a cross-promo, and we didn’t vet them, and then some backers found that they weren’t having very good experiences with that campaign,” he said. “We wouldn’t have done that if we’d vetted them better.”

From an agency perspective, project creators should have a product that demonstrates strong market appeal. Most crowdfunding marketing agencies are very selective about the projects they take on: at LaunchBoom, Pecota says “less than 10% of applicants qualify” to work with the agency. 

“The two things we look for is a great product and a great team,” Pecota says. “The best ones to work with are those with a very clear problem they’re solving. If they have some type of validation in the market beforehand, it’s going to be a more ideal client for us.” 

Morejon says an ideal client “needs to have done a lot of market research, and need to know who their product is meant for”. He says that Enventys “prefers to work with tech projects, as it is the category where we’ve found the most success”.

The post Do Paid Ads in Crowdfunding Pay? appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Kickstarter provides the aspiring project creator with some sobering statistics on campaign success rates. Since Kickstarter began in 2009, 334,769 projects have been launched to date, but only 118,408 successfully reached their funding goals. The success rate stands at 35.76 per cent, a reminder that successfully completing a crowdfunding campaign is hardly a cakewalk. What’s more, a staggering 14 per cent of projects completed campaigns without receiving a single pledge. For many project creators, just getting noticed can be as much of a challenge as meeting the funding goal.

When it comes to crowdfunding, failure is the norm — but it doesn’t spell the end of a project creator’s crowdfunding journey. A post-mortem analysis might be painful but it can also prove invaluable, especially if a project creator is keen to give crowdfunding another shot down the track. Identifying a campaign’s mistakes and pitfalls can highlight areas for improvement and, in some cases, allow the campaign to be resurrected and successfully funded.

Plenty of project creators have endured setbacks and funding failures, only to rebound with vastly revamped campaigns. One example is artist and photographer Rob Decker and his National Parks Poster Project.

A Shaky Start

Decker’s ‘30s and ‘40s-style graphic art posters encapsulate the exquisite topography, stunning landscapes, and rich history of America’s national parks. They’re designed to appeal to outdoor enthusiasts, nature lovers, and the broader public alike.

Recently he’s been on a tear: three of his crowdfunding campaigns have raised enough money to fulfill his goals of creating an exclusive art collection designed to spark the public’s imagination.

Decker makes it look easy, but it’s important to remember that this wasn’t always the case. In fact, his first attempt at crowdfunding failed to reach its funding goal. For some, failure would be a deterrent, but it energized Decker’s crowdfunding efforts. Since the first campaign attempt in 2013, Decker has created three more campaigns on Kickstarter, with each one far exceeding its initial funding goal, raising between $20,000 and $30,000 per project.

What Went Wrong

Decker’s first crowdfunding campaign aimed to raise $27,000, but the goal eluded him. By the end of the campaign, 43 backers pledged a total of $5,370. Decker says there were a couple of flaws in his first crowdfunding attempt. “I had set my funding goals too high,” he says. “Although I got a significant number of backers, I did fall short.”

A lack of outreach, compounded by a lack of social media promotion, loomed as another significant factor in the campaign’s failure. “I relied too heavily on my friends and family — my initial contact list — and also relied too much on what Kickstarter would bring to the mix,” he says. His use of social media was minimal — he admits he “didn’t really promote it” on any platform.

To promote his first campaign, Decker had a mailing list that comprised 1,000 or so contacts. It was a sizable number, but it wasn’t ambitious enough. In retrospect,” he says, “it wasn’t a big-enough list to generate the kind of funding I was looking for”.

New Campaigns, New Strategies

When it was time to relaunch his campaign, Decker decided to correct his early mistakes. First, he lowered his funding goal from $27,000 to $4,950, which gave him greater confidence that his efforts would be successful.

Then, Decker embraced social media to promote his crowdfunding efforts. He primarily used Facebook to spread the world, but also uploaded campaign videos to YouTube and posted promotional content on his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, which helped to disseminate his message to a broader audience. The revitalized campaign ended up raising $23,120 from 373 backers.

A fresh pair of eyes can provide new perspective on the strengths and weakness of a campaign. Decker enlisted the assistance of a crowdfunding consultant and a publicist to tweak the focus of his successive campaigns.

His first crowdfunding project was called ‘American Icons: Our National Parks’. He asked prospective backers to join him on a “journey to create iconic images for all 59 National Parks in a style reminiscent of the WPA from the 1930s and 1940s”. The next campaigns had a simpler, catchier title: ‘The National Park Poster Project’. The tagline was similarly tightened: “An exclusive graphic art collection of America’s national parks … 35 years in the making.”

He also made some small but significant changes to the copy in the project’s ‘about’ section. Shortening the paragraphs and including images and infographics made the content more visually appealing.

Rethink the Product

Restructuring the pledge rewards to make posters the main focus was the most important change. In the first campaign, backers had to pledge $40 to receive a National Parks poster; pledge tiers below that level offered rewards such as postcards, note cards, T-shirts and a calendar. In successive campaigns, National Parks posters were made a core focus and made available to backers at the $25 pledge tier. This decision proved immensely popular; the majority of backers chose this option in each of Decker’s three successful campaigns.

Decker notes that although the National Parks Poster Project received little media coverage, having a cogent, engaging story defined the project’s appeal for the most important audience: the backers . “It really did help shape the narrative,” Decker says. “It created a more singular message that better described the campaign and the project.”

The post How to Relaunch a Failed Kickstarter Campaign appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Here’s a secret: there’s no one-size-fits-all method to how a project creator should get things done. Different projects take different approaches; there are different approaches to the way rewards are done, how add-ons are organized, and how a project creator makes use of surveys and follow-up questions. As a tool, BackerKit’s admin interface is designed to be flexible to help project creators set things up the way that works best for them.

Reward Tier 101

In the above picture, we can see how the “I’m Scared” project has set up their reward tiers. Some tiers can offer digital-only packages for backers; therefore a physical address becomes unnecessary. This is particularly useful for campaigns that offer a low reward tier for rewards that aren’t designed to ship, but rather are social incentives. At $7, backers can get a shout-out from the project via Facebook or Twitter, and for $25, a backer can pledge to have their name in the credits.

To mark this difference, a project creator can select the above option while creating or editing a reward tier.

Surveys: What to ask?

After setting up reward tiers, a project creator needs to focus on what kinds of questions they want to ask their backers. Surveys are useful for covering all of the basic things you need to know about a backer’s preferences for their base pledge tier.

When editing or creating a survey question, options are displayed regarding what reward tier backers can see and respond to. Below, we can see that this shirt question is only applicable to reward tiers that specified clothing.

In BackerKit, the answer system can be used several different ways: as a multiple choice question, as a form for text entry, and as a field for uploading a file, such as a custom picture. Multiple responses can be added to a question simply by clicking “Add an Answer”. In this project’s case, the answers are all size options for an article of clothing.

Below, is a different use case for survey questions. Here, an author is signing copies of a book as part of a reward, the question asks the backer who to make the signature out to.

So, you’ve put together your surveys and reward tiers. Let’s talk about add-ons.

Add-ons: Offering additional items to backers

The add-on system is one feature that’s particularly unique to BackerKit. It allows project creators to sell items in addition to the reward tier a backer pledged for. There’s a couple of things going on here that pull the cart experience together for the backer.

Variants

Let’s say a project creator puts a t-shirt in their add-on store. Needless to say, there are quite a few different ways to organize t-shirts: by style, by size, or by color are all common approaches that have been taken.

A good practice is to figure out what system of variant organization you want to go with, and stick with it for related add-ons of type. If you’re organizing t-shirts by size, organize pants the same way.

Shipping

There are two popular approaches to handling shipping on BackerKit: factoring international shipping into the prices of add-on items and rewards individually, or offering different shipping options as variants of a shipping add-on.

The latter is more convenient if international backers intend to buy a specific amount of items, such as 8 limited edition figurines for Warmachine:Tactics. By doing this, shipping is handled as a lump-sum based on how many things a backer wants to buy.

The former is better for projects that are less concerned about item amounts; the trade-off is that the add-on prices will vary depending on which option a project creator goes with. One option lumps the price into the product, the other lumps the price into its own package.

Follow-up Questions

Some items may be set up in complex ways that might require further instructions. Case for Humanity, for example, enables a backer to order a box with a custom engraving on it. Follow-up questions work like survey questions, but instead of being for specific reward tiers, they’re instead for different items.

One thing that’s convenient about follow-up questions is that one set of questions can be used multiple times. Let’s say a backer buys 2 engraved Case for Humanity boxes; the backer is able to customize the text for both boxes. The following text field and upload form appears twice to account for both products.

Lockdown

At some point, a project creator will need to specify when they’ll stop taking orders. Setting a lockdown date is easy; all a person has to do is set a date in the project settings.

After this date passes, the add-on store will finalize all existing orders and stop taking new ones. Of course, if a specific backer missed the lockdown date, the project creator can log in and unlock them individually.

Testing your flow

BackerKit ships with a useful tool for testing how a project’s entire flow is set up. When a project is set up with BackerKit, two test accounts are created: one US-domestic backer, and one International backer.

The project creator can easily log in as either one and walk through every section to test how they’ve set everything up. An admin can modify the test backer’s reward tiers and credit amount to test everything we’ve talked about above.

We hope this guide has been helpful for you in getting your project set up and good to go. If you have any questions, drop us a line.

The post Putting your BackerKit project together appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

A conversation on the Kickstarter Best Practices Facebook group inspired this post. Please comment if you have questions or new ideas to add!

Lesson 1: Your time is more valuable than you think.

They say you can learn a lot from your failures, so let’s start with one of our own.

In the past, we’ve advertised BackerKit as the software platform that can save crowdfunders from countless hours of menial work, leaving them free to spend their time working on the more creative aspects of their project.

But when we talked to prospective customers, this wasn’t the strong selling point we’d hoped it would be. Our platform still caught their attention, but for an entirely different reason—smart project creators saw value in our add-on system, which allows backers to continue their financial support of a crowdfunded project long after the campaign has officially ended.

In other words, the prospect of additional funding proves more attractive than significant time savings.

This would come as no surprise to economists (which we aren’t). It turns out that most people tend to undervalue their free time. Just as some project creators are willing to devote hours to updating convoluted backer spreadsheets, other people are happy to drive for an hour and half and battle crowds to reach a Black Friday sale, or wait in a really long line for that free cheeseburger.

And yet you can make stronger economic choices when you realize just how valuable your time really is. Once project creators begin using our platform, they make good use of the timesaving tools at their disposal, and they clamor for more—which is why we’ll keep building what they need.

Even as we do, project creators are constantly finding their own new ways to save time and make their journey an easier one…

Lesson 2: The Ultimate Hack—backer happiness.

Backer happiness is vital to your project’s success. We view it as the Holy Grail of the crowdfunder’s journey, something to be coveted and highly treasured.

If you can consistently delight your backers, they will become your most loyal fans and ambassadors, offering their support long after your first campaign.

Project creators have gotten wise to the fact that connecting with these backers requires a focused marketing effort. Early and effective promotion of your project can often mean the difference between successful funding and a failure to launch.

There are all kinds of ideas for hacking your way to a rabid fan base, from gamifying your campaign to outsourcing your marketing work for maximum impact.

But beware of any marketing scheme. There is a fine line between evangelizing your creative vision, and transforming your campaign into the kind of spammy, tone-deaf marketing machine that alienates friends, family, and strangers alike.

If you really want to connect with potential backers, the key is to stay honest, and lose the hype.

Some have compared a crowdfunding campaign to a dating game—it’s all about learning how to communicate with people who share your passions.

Lesson 3: Hack your way from funding to fulfillment.

Once the dust settles after the wild dance of a funding campaign, a project creator is wise to seek advice from other successful crowdfunders.

But always remember—when you read about a crowdfunding project, you are probably only hearing half of the story.

Project creators are compelled to put their best face forward. With the eyes of their backers upon them, they are reluctant to share their mistakes, and often whitewash what they say about their campaign. Rest assured, that mighty crowdfunding wizard is actually just a man (or woman) behind the curtain.

There is no magic here; blood, sweat and tears are an inescapable part of every successful project. And crowdfunders often have difficulty handling the post-funding mayhem that a campaign is sure to bring, especially if they have raised more money than anticipated.

Still, many crowdfunders have responded to these pressures on the fly, and cobbled together a wide array of hacks. Here are a just a few examples:

In the course of a running a project, keeping an open channel of communication between you and your backers is absolutely essential, but notoriously difficult. The repeat crowdfunders behind Stonemaier Games found that you can hack the standard crowdfunding messaging system and reach backers more effectively by segmenting your communication stream.

You can certainly make use of your crowdfunding platform’s messaging system, but you can also enlist a blog, Twitter, Facebook, and an email management service to help target your communications.

Merging your backers’ information into your chosen email service, as Indiegogo suggests, is another way to help segment different groups of backers.

One communications problem that all crowdfunders face: backers are not static.

In the months that it takes to fulfill your project, many of your backers will move, or request changes to their address information.  And if they don’t receive their rewards due to bungled shipments, it becomes a time sink for all parties involved, poisoning the trust and faith your backers have in you.

One hack to fight this inevitable problem is to carefully schedule several address update emails to make sure backers aren’t lost amidst the confusion of fulfillment.

And speaking of fulfillment…

As we’ve said before, fulfillment can be an alternate universe. Doing it yourself can be a full time chore, but no-frills companies like Stamps.com and ULine can help you save time and stay on top of your packaging, labels, and postage game. Another excellent hack? Just have your dad do it.

The alternate way to hack fulfillment is to utilize a full service house, such as Shipwire, Fullfillrite, Amplifier, Shipstation or Amazon. You’ll need to send them accurate shipping information, and you may have to fork over some hefty fees, but they have established networks, warehouses, robots, and small spaceships at their disposal to get your stuff wherever it needs to go.

As you conquer fulfillment, you’ll also need to figure out how to offer rewards to the latecomers who want to support your project.

If you are producing a good as a project reward, presale platforms such as Celery, Shopify, and Shoplocket can make your life easier. They can allow you to take orders from new customers, saving you the time and expense of building your own online storefront—in exchange for a cut of the proceeds.

As you explore other storefront and sales options, be sure to remember Lesson #2. Backer happiness trumps all. Offering deals or discounts to new customers may increase your funding, but it could alienate your most loyal fans: the backers who’ve been with you all along.

Lesson 4: Even if you have mastered these hacks, don’t be surprised when something explodes.

The beauty (and agony) of crowdfunding is that every project is unique; when you start a new project, you are sailing into uncharted waters. No one can tell you exactly when you’ll encounter calm seas, stormy weather, or even the occasional Kraken. So, what advice can we offer?

Stay flexible and your project will remain robust.

Regardless of how you choose to hack your project and build out your crowdfunding stack, we’ve learned from experience that project creators need flexibility.

Even if you have been fanatical in your preparation, you may find you need to run another survey, adjust your reward tiers, restructure international shipping, add credits for that one special backer, or slice and dice data for export to a different fulfillment center.

And as the wildly successful Machine of Death project found out, it is simply unbelievable how many backers will need to change their shipping address at the last possible minute.

At BackerKit, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to keep both crowdfunders and their backers happy.  One of our goals is to build flexibility into our platform, so you can configure it in multiple ways, utilizing whatever services your project requires to succeed.

With the right tools, your project can bend, rather than break, as you encounter unexpected obstacles.

We think it’s possible for you to hack your project and still keep ahold of its reigns. Stay close to your backers, but give them the freedom to manage themselves.

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Thanks for reading. In upcoming posts, we’ll delve deeper under the crowdfunding hood and share more of what we have learned. We’ll shed the hype and talk about what isn’t talked about in the crowdfunding community. We’ll get down in the trenches with project creators. Let us know if there’s a topic you’d like to see us address.

Love, Team BackerKit

The post The Hacker’s Guide to Crowdfunding: The Good, The Bad, & The Flexible appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.