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.

Visualizing the lifecycle of a crowdfunding campaign can prove difficult for first-time creators. This is particularly the case for the post-campaign phase, which encompasses the window between reaching your funding goal and the delivery of your rewards to backers.

If you’ve little experience at hand, it can be hard to set and manage expectations, especially with so many variables at play. That said, there are some general guidelines to make this process easier to define.

Determinants of your project timeline will be your ability to swiftly gather accurate item counts from your backers, the time it takes your manufacturer to produce all of your rewards, as well as the time it takes to package and ship your rewards to your backers.

As a general rule, it’s wise to allocate more time than you need. This means setting deadlines that incorporate a sizeable buffer against unexpected production delays, manufacturing mishaps, or unforeseen hitches in fulfilment.

In this post, we’ll delve into the post-campaign stages and what they might look like for your campaign.

Sending out Surveys

BackerKit recommends sending out surveys 14 days after your campaign has ended. On average, 70% to 75% of surveys in BackerKit are filled out within the first three to five days. But that’s no reason for complacency – your work’s not over yet.

Success manager Anna Walsemann says that higher completion rates are driven by creator communication.

“The more communicative the creators are – the more they post on their campaign page about their timeline and so on – the stronger the conversion is for surveys.”

Charging Cards

“Figuring out the timelines for delivering and asking people to fill out their surveys is important,” Weiser says. “You don’t want to ask people to fill out their surveys too early because people move, you send it to the wrong address.” Figuring out the right time can minimize chargebacks: this time around, Weiser only received two send-backs.

BackerKit’s Head of Support, Michael Kent, says that the timeline for charging cards and locking down can vary immensely. He’s seen project creators charge within a week of 80% survey completion; some project creators have even charged orders while surveys are progressively being completed. In more extreme cases, some have even charged a few times a day while surveys are being sent out.

Kent cautions against this last approach. “That’s not something we recommend, because once your lock and charge, the backer can’t change anything but their shipping address,” he says.

‘That complicates things as far as the support flow goes because once a backer is charged, they can’t make any changes without writing us an email. Making that change entails a refund in order to unlock the order and change it.”

The ‘happy path’, as far as backers are concerned, involves giving your supporters enough time and flexibility to update their orders. This means holding off and waiting to charge cards once you’re ready to fulfil your campaign rewards.

“Some creators need to charge cards immediately for pre-orders and add-ons in order to ramp up production,” he says. “Others with a more robust production plan will want to start manufacturing production for far more orders than they’ve received in crowdfunding. They can usually hold off and wait to charge cards closer to when they’re fulfilling items. He says this tends to result in a “happier backer flow”.

This option is a best practice recommendation, but Kent notes it requires creators to “have enough funds available to get to production and manufacturing for all of your original campaign rewards and add-ons, which can be difficult”.

Another source of support tickets occurs when creators charge cards. It’s inevitable, but not an insurmountable obstacle: Kent says queries can be kept at bay by keeping your backers informed of your project timeline. 

“You need to make it really unmistakably clear to your backers that you will be charging them on a specific date,” Kent says. “Sometimes, if a backer is blindsided by a charge, or if they assume that the money was taken during the survey, it could cause financial issues for them.”

“That’s never a position you want to put your supporters in, so definitely post an update or two updates leading up to your charge date to make it clear that they will be charged then.”

Locking Down

A project’s lockdown date will largely be determined by your fulfilment partner and whether your project relies on specific counts for manufacture.

For instance, if a project needs to ramp up production based on direct counts, Kent notes a lockdown date should be set relatively soon so that as many backers can fill out the survey as soon as possible, allowing counts to be calculated with the most accuracy.

On the other hand, if a project doesn’t depend on direct counts – these might include project creators who plan a pre-order store or Indiegogo InDemand campaign as well – the timeline differs. “If they’re expecting to have ongoing orders and manufacturing, they’ll probably just put in a huge order with their manufacturer, and therefore don’t need to worry about counts,” Kent says.

“In that situation, it’s best to set your lockdown date much later – you might not even lock orders until you are ready to ship. That’s a better flow for backers support-wise, because they’re able to make any changes they want, and that doesn’t matter to the creator because they’re overproducing everything in anticipation of more orders in the future.”

Handling Unforeseen Hurdles

Mark Weiser, creator of the PON push pin, said he endured delays in production that were unexpected.

“I encountered some issues after the Kickstarter campaign,” he says. “The company I was going to work with flaked on me, they weren’t able to do what they said they would, so I had to scramble. My project ended up being delayed by 6-8 months because of that, and I had to go overseas instead.” This meant that the timeline for delivering his campaign blew out significantly.

For his first campaign, Weiser noted that there was too much complexity in terms of the rewards offered to backers. But he learned from the experience the second time round, electing to radically simplify his campaign.

Generally speaking, when delays occur and are announced through project updates, creators can expect a spike in the volume of support tickets. When in doubt, transparency is the best policy – better to let backers know that a delay is forthcoming, rather than keep them in the dark.

Shipping

The scale and complexity of your project will determine the time it takes to ship your rewards to your backers.

“Usually, if you’re either working with a fulfilment center or by yourself, you’ll need to separate your backers into similar package groups and ship based on those groups of similar items,” Kent says. 

He notes that shipping times will also hinge on your project’s manufacturing timetable.

“A lot of the time, project creators want to ship immediately. The first items to come off the manufacturing line that pass quality assurance are often the first ones to start shipping. That might be a deciding factor in your packaging groups,” he says.

“That might create a snafu if you’ve got another item in the same order that is not manufactured yet.  Some project creators might choose partial fulfillment in this scenario; others might wait until everything has come off the line.”

The post From Surveyed to Shipped: The BackerKit Project Lifecycle appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

The reward fulfillment process is a crucial part of any crowdfunding campaign. This stage is fraught with potential obstacles, delays, and unexpected costs – and not to mention anxious backers.

Figuring out the finer points of manufacturing, storing, and shipping your goods can be time-consuming. As a project creator, it’s important to consider the complexity of your campaign – the rewards structure, the number and geographical location of backers when calculating your fulfillment workload.

Should You DIY or Use a Fulfillment Center?

The first decision project creators must make is whether they will partner with a fulfillment center or go it alone. If you’re choosing to outsource fulfillment, many project creators typically combine online research with sales calls and possibly site visits with warehouses or fulfillment centers to ensure there is a system in place to keep on top of inventory.

Thomas Sleeth, BackerKit’s customer success manager, says a project creator’s fulfillment workload is ultimately determined by a campaign’s backer count and the type of product you need to manufacture. As a general rule, a campaign with thousands of backers or a more and a cumbersome reward might be more easily conquered with the help of a fulfillment center.

“The pros are that someone else does the fulfillment for you, they’re professionals, and hopefully less error-prone,” Sleeth says.

On the downside, it’s a hefty expense,  you have less control over your product, you have less insight into the status of individual orders, and fulfillment centers are optimized towards ongoing sales rather than shipping everything out in a single wave.

“Many fulfillment centers charge a ‘pick and pack’ rate, which means you have to pay for each item that is getting moved around,” Sleeth says.

“If you have a bunch of different items and not a lot of backers, even though it’s complex to keep track of it at your end, it would be very expensive to do with a shipping partner.”

He reminds project creators to bear in mind the time and labor associated with doing it yourself, as well as the hidden costs (printing, packaging, return to sender). For project creators with less than 2,500 orders, he recommends BackerKit Postage, which lets project creators purchase and print shipping labels within BackerKit.

If you decide to work with a fulfillment center, Peter Imai, head of growth at Whiplash, recommends project creators “have an idea of your product roster”. This means being across how many items in each reward, whether any assembly is required post-production and pre-delivery. “The more you know about your rewards roster, the better idea you’ll have in terms of actual cost of fulfillment,” Imai says.

Predicting Your Production Capacity

Chris Muscarella, the creator of the Field Skillet, says that production forecasting can be challenging for fledgling businesses. “When you’re a very young business, your ability to have precision around production forecasting is still a work in progress,” he says. “People expect to buy something online and have it show up in a few days.”

Crowdfunding campaigns require more patience – from backers and project creators alike. Contributing to a campaign is not like shopping on Amazon where products are already manufactured, packaged, and sitting in a warehouse ready to be shipped. Determining your production capacity can be difficult, particularly if you’re planning to offer pre-orders and add-ons.

The campaign for the Field Skillet was, in some ways, a victim of its own success: it raised a total of $1.6 million on Kickstarter, far exceeding its modest goal of $30,000.  “It created the problem of creating months of work to fulfill all our pledges”. That meant that we didn’t want to try and immediately double the amount of back orders.”

Muscarella says it’s important to set and manage expectations before and during the fulfillment phase. “We decided to lean into scarcity until we had a better handle on our production capacity,” he says. Muscarella did this by creating a waiting list so that people could line up for more product availability. “They were able to bump up the line if they shared the link with friends and that resulted in an extra ~5% or so of list growth,” he says.

Five months after the campaign ended, the Field Skillet began shipping its first batch of products to backers. The company then decided to release a second product – a larger-sized cast iron skillet – as an add-on option for existing backers.

The Field Skillet was delivered to backers in waves over time, rather than all in one shipment. “We knew we were going to have limited production capacity and it gave us a way of managing expectations,” he says. “It also gave us a way to control inventory during our campaign and cut the rewards short when needed. Theoretically, this was a great idea.”

But in practice, he says, tiered delivery schedules are difficult to manage, and considered uncommon practice by fulfillment centers. Some 3PL shipping providers and software tools weren’t equipped to deal with the request, and it made the fulfillment cycle longer than normal. This is something to bear in mind if you’re working with a 3PL.

Common Mistakes

Many project creators will have never subjected their product prototype to large-scale production prior to their crowdfunding campaign. They can build one perfectly but figuring out how to build a hundred at a time can be a challenge. Sometimes, scaling up manufacturing can be difficult, and might result in higher costs than your initial estimates.

If creators underestimate the number of backers they get for their campaign, they must expand their initial production run. This might cause supply chain issues, resulting in production delays. To manage expectations, it’s important to set delivery timeframes that account for these delays and keep backers up to date with project updates.

Sleeth says that prematurely optimizing for fulfillment can be a costly mistake. He cites the example of a smaller project in the UK with about 500 backers that were looking to set up a fulfillment center in Australia, despite having a small number of backers there.  “It’s important to get a sense of the scale of the problem before you try and solve it,” he says.

In a blog post on Medium, Triggertrap Ada creator Haje Jan Kamps explains how one mistake in the production process can have disastrous flow-on effects for your campaign. He writes that picking the wrong software supplier resulted in problems affecting production, problems with battery life, source control, code quality, documentation, and cost.

Kamps stresses the importance of communications at all times – with manufacturers, other team members, and most importantly, backers. 

“Kickstarter backers understand that there are delays from time to time, and they want to be part of the journey through the minefield that is product development. Keeping our backers informed goes a long way towards having a good sense of understanding.”

“If it hadn’t been for our Kickstarter backers, perhaps we would have struggled on behind the scenes. That simply isn’t an option: We’re late. We’re embarrassed. And now we feel duty bound to air our laundry in public because ultimately, we’ve failed to live up to some of our backers’ expectations,” he writes.

The post How to Manage Your Fulfillment Workload appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Which pre-order platform is right for you? As a project creator, your decision will be influenced by a number of factors such as the setup of your campaign, your crowdfunding platform, possibilities for software integration, platform fees, as well as personal preferences for customization, layout and design. You should also consider whether your chosen pre-order platform is easy to set up, and can be integrated with other apps.

BackerKit, Shopify, and Indiegogo InDemand are three popular avenues for selling pre-orders, each with its own set of unique strengths. Read on to find out which one is right for your project.

BackerKit

BackerKit’s hosted pre-order stores are specifically designed for crowdfunding campaign creators. Creators that use BackerKit to survey backers and sell add-ons can easily enable a hosted pre-order store. It lets project creators sell pre-orders as soon as their campaign ends with minimal setup hassle.

Another major benefit besides ease of setup is that creators can use BackerKit to process all pre-order backers at the same time as their campaign backers.

Creators can host their stores directly on BackerKit or embed a pre-order widget directly onto a product website to sell directly to customers. Other features include coupon code support, Stripe and PayPal payment integration for credit card purchases, and flexible shipping fee options that allow project creators to set free shipping, flat-rate shipping, or custom shipping fees based on location.

David Robert, creator of the MSK-1 Knife, used BackerKit to host pre-orders once his campaign on Kickstarter ended. His campaign on BackerKit raised $173,261, nearly the same amount as his original Kickstarter campaign. “Doing a direct link from Kickstarter over to our pre-order page was so seamless,” Robert says. “I have people who have pre-ordered who didn’t even realize they’d been transferred to a different platform.”

He says that using BackerKit as a platform for pre-orders suited the needs of his project, which had a particularly complex reward structure.

“BackerKit does such a job of taking multiple SKUs and combining them into packages. That gave me the flexibility to offer so many different packages, and that’s fairly hard to pull off on some of the other online store applications.”

Some project creators have raised more in BackerKit 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. In BackerKit, they amassed $1.36 million from pre-order sales in BackerKit alone.  

Meanwhile, the runScribe raised $257, 294 in its Kickstarter campaign and $18,814 in BackerKit pre-order sales.

BackerKit offers three plans for project creators. Pre-orders are included in all pricing plans.

Shopify

Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that can be integrated with your Kickstarter campaign as well as BackerKit. Shopify isn’t tailor-made for crowdfunding campaigns, but it has many features that will appeal to project creators that need to have an ecommerce store for ongoing business. Many creators will launch a Shopify store after shipping out campaign rewards and BackerKit pre-orders.

Rockwell Razors’ founder Gareth Everard used Shopify after orders for the Rockwell 6S campaign had been shipped with BackerKit. It seemed a strong fit for his plans to shift Rockwell Razors from the pre-order phase to a permanent e-commerce store.

“We sold out the entire first production round,” he said. “We already finished our orders in BackerKit and wanted to move towards being a regular e-commerce store.” Everard says one of the most appealing features of Shopify is that you can set up a store with the domain name of your choice.

“This was the point where we moved to rockwellrazors.com as our URL on our Shopify store, just to make it a more cohesive experience for customers.” He also cited the strength of its support infrastructure, its ease of use, its built-in analytics software, and its integration with a large app ecosystem as key strengths.

Shopify has three pricing plans ranging from $29/month to $299/month.

Indiegogo InDemand

Indiegogo’s InDemand allows project creators to raise funds after their initial crowdfunding campaign has concluded. It can be used by project creators regardless of what platform they used for their crowdfunding campaign.

Arthur Maitre, digital manager at Native Union, says “there was still quite a bit of interest” for the products in the hours and days after the Kickstarter campaign for the ECLIPSE cable had ended. The Native Union website saw a huge spike in traffic in the last two hours of the campaign, and received many emails from people who had missed out on contributing while the Kickstarter was still live.

“We needed a platform for people to be able to pre-order the ECLIPSE so they’re the second group of people to get it after the Kickstarter backers and before the product goes to market,” Maitre says. So, the company chose to use Indiegogo’s InDemand, which allows project creators to raise money for an indefinite period once a crowdfunding campaign has run its course.

The amount of money raised through pre-order sales on InDemand varies across projects. The campaign for the EcoQube C raised $375,058 on Kickstarter and $44,825 through InDemand pre-orders (10.7% of all funds raised). Meanwhile, the Airbolt: Truly Smart Travel Lock raised $202,306 on Kickstarter and $81,276 on its InDemand campaign, which comprised 28.7% of total funds raised. The campaign for the Trunkster raised $1,395,370 on Kickstarter and an additional $110,895 in InDemand (7.4% of total funds raised).

Platform fees for InDemand are 5% if you ran your campaign on Indiegogo, 8% if you ran your original campaign on another platform such as Kickstarter. and higher than 8% if you bring your project over from another platform and receive additional support from the Indiegogo team.

Mixing Platforms

Sometimes, project creators might choose to use one platform for pre-orders and a different one for pledge management and add-ons. Chris Muscarella, creator of the Field Skillet, says a platform’s aesthetics and design can influence the marketing your product. He used BackerKit for fulfillment and Celery (recently acquired by Indiegogo) for pre-orders.

“We wanted to run a campaign that felt organic and respectful of all of the backers who were going to help us make this thing a reality, which meant being turned off by other platforms that felt more aggressively commercial,” he says.

“We used BackerKit for managing fulfillment and add-on sales to our existing backers, and then we used Celery for additional pre-orders and add-ons on our own site,” he says. “We chose BackerKit because of the team and the support, which has been generally excellent. We chose Celery because it had a simple flow that wouldn’t confuse people and was very fast to configure.”

At the end of the day, the platform you choose is less important than what you do to market your pre-order store. Ramping up your promotional and marketing efforts will play a significant role in making sure your pre-order store is a success.  

The post Planning for Pre-Orders: Three Stories 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.

Prynt, the world’s first instant camera case for smartphones, launched on Kickstarter in 2015. It instantly prints the photos you take from your iPhone and animates them on screen through augmented reality technology.

It is the most successful French crowdfunding campaign to date, raising $1.58 million from over 9,000 backers worldwide, aided by a strong showing at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple of months prior and a mountain of press from publications like Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Le Monde, Techcrunch, the Financial Times, and many more.

Keen to capitalize on its Kickstarter success, Prynt built on its campaign momentum by implementing a comprehensive distribution strategy for online and brick-and-mortar retailers. We spoke to co-founder Clément Perrot about how Prynt managed its shift into the online and physical retail market.

Tips for Determining Retail Prices

The first step in going to market involves picking a price for your product. “The first time you put a pricetag on your product is in your crowdfunding campaign,” Perrot says. “At that stage, you might not know much about pricing strategies, or how much your product is really worth,” he says.

Perrot says he used a “combination of strategies” to determine the retail price for the Prynt. In general, he says, there are three ways to determine a retail price for your product.

There’s bottom-up, which uses the cost of producing the product as a base calculation. The first step is to assemble the bill of materials (BOM) to account for the raw materials, components, assembly costs, parts, and so on that make up the end product. Perrot recommends multiplying this figure by 4x, to cover markup margins and the cost of marketing.

Then there’s the top-down approach, in which the price for your product is set as high as possible, while demand is assessed and adjusted accordingly. Project creators can do this by “running competitive ads that showcase the product at different prices,” Perrot says. “The number of clicks on your ads is the main metric. When the clicks start to plateau, that’s the point at which you set your price.”

Finally, there’s the competitive pricing model. This involves researching your competitors as well as the broader market, finding out how your product fits in that environment. “You want to know, for example, if your product sits at the lower or upper end,” Perrot says.

Perrot says that pricing pre-orders correctly is key for a smooth transition into retail. If you offer a steep discount as part of your crowdfunding campaign, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to sell your product at a higher price once it’s on the market. After the end of the Kickstarter campaign, Prynt offered a limited number of pre-orders for $99, the recommended retail price.

Why Amazon Matters

Perrot says maintaining an online store on the Prynt product website and selling on Amazon helped to boost the product’s reputation and drive more sales.

After the end of the Kickstarter campaign, the Prynt team launched an e-commerce store hosted on the company website. Perrot says a lot of effort went into making sure the e-commerce experience was as smooth and frictionless as possible. “We were focused on improving the experience for users in terms of onboarding and so on,” he says. “We wanted to be certain that we would have good reviews.

Once Prynt had established a brand name, it was time to launch on Amazon. “Amazon drives 90 per cent of e-commerce sales,” Perrot says. “Even though it cannibalizes revenue from our own store, it adds another 50 per cent more sales for us.” What’s more, he says, Amazon gives project creators greater control over pricing compared to other online vendors – Amazon will not discount your product to shift units.

The Importance of a Strong Retail Marketing Strategy

Once Prynt had Amazon up and running, it was time to move into physical retail stores, starting with Urban Outfitters. This was a logical step, Perrot says, as Prynt’s appeal was highest among women and consumers in their twenties – a key demographic for the youth-focused apparel and accessories retailer.

“We wanted to focus first on the retailer with the most relevant audience to our product.”

Prynt later launched in stores with broader demographic appeal, like Bloomingdales, Best Buy and Target “Having a product on a shelf can be really difficult,” Perrot says. “It won’t sell itself.” The challenge, he says. is to develop an effective retail marketing strategy to raise brand awareness and ensure consumers are familiar with your product. “We spent money on channel marketing specific to each store,”Perrot says.

“With Urban Outfitters, we gave them a quarterly budget to spend on advertising and events, like scavenger hunts and and an appearance at SXSW.”

Prynt also tried different marketing strategies for other retailers. For Best Buy, Prynt’s marketing strategy was centered around making sure the product had prominent placement in the retailer’s catalog.

Getting into retail isn’t for all projects, but the increased distribution can move a lot of product. You need to show significant customer demand to get retailers to notice you, and need to have the margins to handle wholesale pricing and sponsorships for retail marketing programs.

The post Go-to-Market Strategies for Project Creators 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.

Creating compelling reward tiers is a challenge for any crowdfunding campaign. Nailing the structure is vital: it can be a determinant of whether a campaign succeeds or fails to meet its funding goal. Too few tiers can shortchange your campaign figuratively and literally, but too many options risks confusing backers and the added complexity can make fulfillment difficult.

Data from Shopify suggests the design of crowdfunding reward tiers is less of a science and more of an art. At one end of the spectrum, a campaign offered three reward tiers to backers; in contrast, another offered 44 tiers. This diversity suggests the capacity to offer multiple reward tiers hinges on the nature of any given project and the costs involved in producing any associated rewards.

In any case, the first step to designing reward tiers is setting a price for your product.

Pricing Your Product

Last year, PocketChange Designs successfully raised funds to create the Tuck, an all-in-one comfort device that can be used as a pillow, blanket, headrest or Jedi-like cloak. Launched on Kickstarter with an initial funding goal of $15,000, the Tuck completed its crowdfunding campaign, raising a total of $68,458 from 1,131 backers. It raised an additional $7,636 from 1,085 backers in pre-orders with BackerKit.

Cody Lewis, the founder of PocketChange, says he determined the price point for the Tuck by researching similar products on the market before deciding to position the Tuck as a premium offering.“I knew that an alternative on the market would typically be sold at around $20-30, and I wanted to place myself higher than that,” Lewis said. “I saw my resale prices around $40 or $50 — around the high-end bracket.”

The majority of Tuck backers pledged $27 (a limited-time special for early backers) and $32. These pledge levels included one Tuck, a digital copy of the Tuck pose book, access to campaign updates, the backer’s name permanently engraved on Pocketchange.life and a ‘giant thank you’. Lewis calculated this price point would cover the cost of manufacturing the Tuck and sending it out to backers. But the number of international backers threw a wrench in the works due to the high cost of shipping. In hindsight, Lewis says, the price should have been set higher to offset the costs of shipping goods from the US to Europe, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere.

Nord Games’ Christopher Haskins took a similar approach to pricing his dungeon tile sets, which netted $25,388 from 404 Kickstarter backers, exceeding an initial funding goal of $2,500. “What I did was look at the costs of production to make and ship them, and then usually we’ll multiply that figure by five or six to come up with the actual retail price,” Haskins says. “When we sell them to stores, we’re going to sell them at half-off, essentially 2.5 or three times the cost of production.”

Haskins supplemented these calculations with market research. “We looked at other dungeon title products that have been out there, but there’s not a lot of brand-new stuff. So, we had to feel it out,” he says. Faced with a lack of market information, Nord Games went right to the source. Its team asked customers, strategic partners, and people in the broader gaming community what they believed the product was worth. Haskins said being candid encouraged honest appraisals from his customer base. “We said: ‘This is an idea that we have — how much would you pay for this?’”

Creating Compelling Reward Tiers

When designing reward tiers, Haskins says Nord Games tries “to give bulk discounts whenever possible”. In the case of the dungeon tile sets, the most popular pledge levels were $38 (two sets), $68 (four sets), and $104 (eight sets). “We thought that most people are going to want to have a lot of these tiles so they can have a lot of options,” he says. “The more tiles you have, the bigger dungeon you can make — and the more of an adventure you can have there.”

Incentive bundles give backers a positive perception of a campaign’s value. Nord Games structured its reward tiers to provide backers with a significant volume discount. Cost savings increase with each pledge tier: the highest pledge level (for retailers) amounts to a 50% discount per set. “We thought we’d give a discount up to eight sets, where it knocks off quite a bit of money,” Haskin says. This is clearly outlined in the pledge tier ($104) for eight sets of dungeon tiles, where backers save 35% on the retail price, paying $13 instead of $19. Once stretch goals for the project were unlocked, backers received 40 tiles instead of 30 per set.

For PocketChange, the $27 pledge level turned out to be the campaign’s sweet spot. (Kickstarter’s most popular pledge level is $25.) The team also made the reward tier a limited offer for early birds to further enhance its appeal. Creating this sense of scarcity and exclusivity helped to generate demand and draw support from 200 backers. Once that deal sold out, 384 supporters opted for a pledge of $32. More expensive pledge tiers offering multiple Tucks proved an attractive prospect to backers as they offered significant discounts on the retail price.

Your primary pledge level will feature the main item in your campaign. Don’t invest too much time on pledge levels that don’t include your featured item. Although the $1 pledge can provide value to some crowdfunding campaigns, the $1 and $5 pledge options for the Tuck proved unpopular,  garnering seven backers in total. Its $21 tier — a swag pack with stickers, a branded T-shirt, and some digital rewards — only netted four backers. The $1 pledge is often seen as an entry-level gesture of support, but it can be also harnessed for more lucrative ends. Nord Games offered a $1 pledge for late backers, giving them flexibility to upgrade their pledges after the campaign had ended through BackerKit.

More Tips

In general, offering a variety of pledge tiers allows backers of all financial backgrounds to take part in your campaign. Incentives matter, so making sure rewards across all pledge levels are relevant to your project and unique is crucial.

The cost of creating and shipping tangible rewards (physical items such as branded swag, for example) should not exceed the cost of the manufacturing the core product. Experiential rewards or rewards that can be distributed digitally are an appealing option as they have vastly lower production and shipping costs and provide a simple way to express your gratitude to backers and add value to pledge tiers. PocketChange offered a digitally distributed Tuck Pose Book at most pledge levels, as well as the option to add on a physical copy of the guide book or branded items such as a carry bag or T-shirt.

Finally, reciprocity spurs financial generosity and goodwill. Many project creators have also donated to other crowdfunding campaigns: Nord Games has backed 20 projects on Kickstarter; PocketChange has backed three. Studying and engaging with successful campaigns and project creators can provide first timers with invaluable advice and tips to succeed.

The post Setting Reward Tiers: A Guide for Crowdfunders appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

One of the services we provide to project creators is a final setup review before sending out survey emails. Most project creators are able to build fantastic surveys just by following our Quick Start Guide, reading our help documents, and consulting with our customer success team, but we still perform the final review to make sure that backers have the best survey experience possible and that creators get structured data after surveys are completed.

Items & SKUs

This first step is where we verify that all of the campaign items are accounted for in the survey setup. We read through the project campaign page and record all pledge reward items, stretch goal items, and all variations to make a list of unique items offered in the campaign. Then we load up the project in BackerKit and go through the Quick Start Guide step by step. This is the exact same guide project creators follow when they first build their survey.

Items are first on the list. We check the SKU (stock-keeping unit) list to see if all of the items from the campaign are present in the BackerKit survey.

If any items are missing, we’ll ask the project creator if they were omitted by mistake. Sometimes the creator forgets to include an item. Other times the missing item may be bundled with another item, like a book that comes with a bookmark attached to the book cover. The book itself will appear in our system as one SKU but it will account for two items, the book and the bookmark.

Pledge Levels

Next we review each pledge level to see if rewards are properly assigned. If a reward item does not have any variations or customization involved, the SKU should be assigned directly to the pledge level in the “Pledge Items” field. These are the items don’t require input from the backer to select.

If there’s reward customization of any kind, there should be a pledge question with SKUs assigned to each answer. We look at each pledge question to see if the question is legible, makes sense to the backer, and that the correct SKUs are assigned to each possible answer. If there’s a t-shirt pledge question with two colors and three sizes, we’ll look to see if all six variations have been assigned to their corresponding answers.

We also need to verify that questions are structured correctly to minimize work later when the creator needs to process orders. For example, let’s say that you need to ask your backers to select what color dragon figurine reward they want. If you create this question as a free-form text response question where the backer can type in a color, you’re going to be buried in work later because you’ll have to parse each answer by hand. If you switch it to a multiple choice question with a list of colors, you can assign a SKU to each answer to make it easy to generate your orders and item counts automatically.

We finish up the pledge level review by verifying that the shipping fees are correct and that the survey only asks for address information from backers that are receiving physical goods.

Add-On Items

We examine the add-on items to verify that they all have images and legible descriptions, and we take a look at the prices and shipping fees to make sure that they make sense. (This is when we ask the creator if they meant to offer free international shipping on a 20 lb. item.) We also need to see if each add-on has an assigned SKU or that all item variants have the correct SKU assigned.

Creators have the option to make individual add-ons visible to select pledge levels. For example, if you want to offer the same item at two different prices, a lower, $20 price for the early-bird backers and the normal, $25 price for the regular tier backers, you’d create two add-ons items with different prices and make each item only visible to backers in their assigned pledge level. We double-check the visibility settings for each add-on to make sure the correct add-ons are visible to specific backer pledge levels.

Pre-Orders &  Support

If the creator is using the BackerKit hosted pre-order store, we’ll check the item list and shipping fees to make sure that everything is in order. We also check the settings page to verify that the creator has entered in the project’s Twitter handle and Facebook page to power the social sharing features.

Finally, we review the support page to make sure that the creator has set a support email address and entered a survey lockdown date. The BackerKit platform significantly reduces the volume of support tickets but we still need a support address to resolve inquiries that only the creator can answer such as questions about product specifications. The lockdown date tells backers how much time they have to complete their surveys.

Once we complete the review, we contact the project creator to clear up any issues that we find and then set the project status to “live” which allows the creator to email surveys out to backers.

Looking Out for Backers and Creators

The setup review is an essential part of the BackerKit process. It allows us to catch and fix any problems in the survey before it goes out to backers. This ensures that backers see a survey that makes sense and accounts for all of the pledge rewards that they’ve been promised and that project creators get clean, structured survey data that makes the fulfillment process easier down the line.

Are you intimidated by the survey creation process? Talk to us to find out more about our powerful survey tool and how we help project creators get through the fulfillment process!

The post What Happens in the BackerKit Setup Review? appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

If you’re a project creator with a successfully funded campaign, you’ve probably noticed that the steady stream of visitors you’ve built up through social media, email, and public relations doesn’t stop once your campaign countdown ticks down to zero. If anything, the pending close of your campaign has triggered another round of media mentions and you’ll ride a fresh wave of attention into the close of your campaign.

Are You Turning Away Backers?

A completely new problem emerges as soon as your campaign ends: you still have people coming to your project page but these latecomers no longer have a way to give you their monetary support.

It’s like closing up shop and kicking everyone out when you still have a line of customers ready to give you money.

Not having a way to accept pledges also creates a support problem because these new fans will contact you to find out how to get those pledge rewards that they suddenly can’t have anymore. Now you have to deal with additional support work while you’re already busy trying to fulfill your campaign obligations.

Accept Pre-Orders Using BackerKit

We built a pre-order system into our BackerKit platform to solve this problem for our project creators. The pre-order tool gives you the ability to accept pre-orders immediately after the crowdfunding campaign ends so that you can continue to capture pledges and take full advantage of that final wave of attention.

The pre-order page exists as a standalone site that you can link to from your Website, your Kickstarter Spotlight button, in your campaign updates, and anywhere else you have new visitors interested in pledging.

Visit our project pre-orders showcase to see live projects that are actively accepting orders. You can also use our pre-orders widget to accept orders directly from your existing Website.

You will be able to monitor and process these pre-orders in your BackerKit account using the exact same tools used to manage your existing campaign backers–it’s just like adding more backers to an existing project.

The pre-order system is included in all BackerKit account levels. We advise project creators to sign up before their campaign ends to have time to set up their pre-order store and place links to ensure minimal backer drop-off once their campaign ends.

Contact us if you have any questions about pre-orders or other BackerKit features!

The post Getting Smart With Pre-Orders appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

In September of 2014, Erik Moon raised $91,893 on a $5,000 goal to create to create a sleek, minimalist aluminum wallet that’s about 1/3 of an inch thick. After the campaign finished, Erik offered a great wealth of Kickstarter tips to the crowdfunding community. We’ve summarized his top 3 tips on preparing for the launch of your crowdfunding campaign.

1.     Don’t skimp on the video

Your campaign video is the most important factor in your campaign behind the product itself. Figure out what margins you need to sell your product at to budget in the cost of creating a great video, and price pledge levels accordingly. This is your chance to fulfill two important goals: (1) explain why they should want the product (or why they should support you), and (2) prove your credibility.

The first goal is all about showcasing the product, and the second is all about proving to people that you’re trustworthy and that you’ve done the legwork to ensure your campaign is successful. Make sure you show all the preparations you’ve done, the prototype, and any other plans you have in motion to prove to backers that they’ll actually be receiving rewards when the time comes.

2.     Set up one achievable stretch goal

Stretch goals are super powerful for motivating backers to join in and pledge more at both the beginning and end of your campaign. They’re also great for when the things are slowing down towards the middle. This means you definitely don’t want to reveal all of your stretch goals at the beginning of your campaign. You don’t want to run the risk of having multiple stretch goals fulfilled early on, so that you don’t have anything else to offer to motivate people to join in.

This doesn’t stop you from having your potential stretch goal offerings in mind, though! Just make sure to wait to reveal them and to set the corresponding dollar amounts later on, when you can tell exactly how things are going. This is also a great way to keep backers engaged and excited throughout the early days of the campaign.

3.     Line up support before you go live

Before you click the button to make your campaign live, make sure you’ve got your friends, co-workers, and relatives prepared and poised for an exciting first couple of days. You want as many people liking and sharing Facebook posts, tweeting, and pledging for your campaign as possible. Momentum is a powerful in the world of crowdfunding, and in those first couple of days you want to start off strong. Pledges will speed up as soon as you get closer to your funding goal—so meeting that goal early on helps to convince these backers to join the party.

For more crowdfunding advice from Erik, check out his blog—and if you came here because of the picture, can still pick up a DM1 wallet here­. Erik Moon chose to use BackerKit for help with the fulfillment process, and he ended up raising 39% more on top of the amount raised in Kickstarter. The DM1 Wallet campaign was a runaway success and backers stayed happy throughout the process. As always, feel free to drop us a line at greetings@backerkit.com if you’ve got any questions about the fulfillment process, add-ons, pre-orders, or anything else crowdfunding.

The post Three Best Ways to Prepare for Your Campaign: DM1 Wallet appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Your original Kickstarter (or IndieGoGo) backers will always hold a special place in your heart. They’re the trailblazing early-adopters who got on board early and made your crowdfunding journey possible. But
what about everybody who found out too late, and missed the boat on your original campaign?

For years, crowdfunding project creators have been engineering their own ways of helping these people by allowing for pre-orders outside of the official Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.

Here  are three reasons offering pre-orders is a great way to garner more support for your project.

1.     Save time and effort

If you don’t offer pre-orders, you’ll probably get lots of emails from people who want to support you but missed out on the initial campaign. Ever stumble across a crowdfunding campaign only to be let down by the fact that it ended a few weeks ago? It’s quite a bummer. Of course you can draw a hard line and not coordinate with these people, but there’s a good chance you’ll want to allow them to create a pre-order that you’ll both benefit from. Offering pre-orders either on your own website or through BackerKit (or both, with our handy Pre-orders Widget) allows you to make these people happy with little to no extra effort.

2.     Expand your fan base

A crowdfunding campaign is an exciting event, not a store. Kickstarter has been clear about their position on this, and we think it’s a good idea to retain the sanctity of that event, too. But offering preorders doesn’t actually reduce the value or excitement of this event—it’s just a way for you to allow more people to support your project.

But just to make sure to retain the sanctity of the original campaign, you can always create a little bit of differentiation between pre-order backers and your original backers. Most pre-order backers are excited just to have the option to get in on a campaign that they missed out on, so the easiest way to differentiate is usually to offer slightly different pricing options for pre-order rewards. Rarely have we heard of a campaign’s original backers actually being upset that the creator offered pre-orders after the official end-date. In the end, you’re just allowing more people to get on board and broadening the reach of your project.

3.     Keep the momentum going (on your own turf)

Crowdfunding is about doing what you love to do, while making your backers happy in the process. We like to think everyone has an equal right to support an awesome project, so long as it works out for everyone involved. Offering pre-orders allows you to keep from creating winners and losers out of your potential supporters.

Pre-orders also allow you to keep momentum going outside of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. With the added convenience brought by the new Kickstarter Spotlight feature, you can easily lead backers to your own site for pre-orders, whether it be via the BackerKit Pre-orders Widget or your personal online store. This way, you can direct the momentum you already have while making the first exciting step into the post-campaign life of your project.

Wherever your crowdfunding journey takes you, we hope you consider keeping things going by allowing for pre-orders after the official campaign’s end-date. As always, feel free to get in touch with us at greetings(at)backerkit(dot)com with any questions and lingering thoughts about Indiegogo and Kickstarter pre-orders.

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