Is it necessary to run ads?

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How effective are ads and email collection when aiming for a successful campaign? People often think that if they have many contacts on LinkedIn / Facebook / Club House, etc. that they won’t have to collect emails. This couldn’t be further removed from the truth.

Email marketing may sound outdated, but it’s proven to be consistently reliable and effective. The big caveat here is that the quality of your emails have to be good as well. Good quality subscribers and effective digital marketing usually lead to a 5% conversation rate.

This means that if you have a hundred emails, anywhere between two and five people will actually back your project. Sometimes it’s way higher or lower, but on average we see a 5% engagement. So how to get quality emails?

There’s an art to finding people who are truly interested in backing your project and haven’t subscribed out of pure curiosity. We recommend that you do lead generation using Facebook ads and to make sure to use a landing page to redirect potential backers.

There’s a built-in option within your Facebook ads manager that says lead generation. That means the ad itself gives a little pop-up where people can subscribe to your newsletter, without even having to leave Facebook. That might seem like a great idea, but it’s actually a terrible idea.

There’s virtually no resistance for people to sign up, which leads to many email signups at a very low cost per lead — convincing you that you’re doing the right thing. This, unfortunately, isn’t the case because the ease with which everyone can sign up generates a lot of lukewarm leads.

Alternatively, you can redirect people who click on your Facebook ad to a landing page. There they have to process more information about the product, scroll a bit and then subscribe. This leads to a way higher cost per lead and fewer email sign-ups, but the people who do sign up are high intent subscribers.

Also, within an ad you can only say so much, but on a landing page you can really go in-depth and highlight product features. You can talk about the retail price versus the Kickstarter price and further emphasize the discount they’re getting. People will get a clear idea of the price and product specs so they know what they’re signing up for — which would otherwise be difficult, especially with innovative products, which they can’t really compare to other products in the market.

To sum up: the best way to get high quality leads is to have a landing page to which people are redirected after clicking your Facebook ads. Mention on your landing page the Kickstarter price they’ll get, rewards for super early birds and talk a bit about the product itself and what people can expect of it. The leads you’ll get from this landing page are a bit more expensive to obtain, but much higher quality.

Another great thing to do, which is very Kickstarter specific, is to promote your Kickstarter prelaunch page after your campaign has been approved for launch by Kickstarter’s Trust and Safety team.

Once you activate this feature (check the promotions tab), Kickstarter will host a very basic page that just shows your main image and your title with subtitle. Ask your email subscribers to hit “notify me on launch” to get a good indication of how interested people are to back your campaign.

This button only works if your subscribers have Kickstarter accounts, which again also demonstrates their intent to back your project. Once you go live, they’re immediately notified. Among the people who hit that button, we see on average a 10% conversion rate.

When a hundred people clicked the button “notify me on launch”, you can expect about 10 people to back your project. We’ve had projects with a conversion rate of 35% so it might end up way higher than anticipated, but we’ve never really experienced a lower conversion rate so it will give you a rather accurate baseline projection. Do this to test the quality of the audience you’re collecting.