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How to Succeed in Marketing Crowdfunding Campaigns

Enventys Partners specializes in crowdfunding projects on platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which has its own set of challenges. Here’s how the agency overcomes them.

Adam Holden-Bache, Director of Email Marketing and author of How to Win at B2B Email Marketing.

Every great idea has to start somewhere, even if it’s a humble napkin sketch. But what do you do with that napkin once you’ve hit the innovation jackpot?

Enventys Partners, an agency headquartered in the heart of Charlotte, North Carolina, is happy to take a look at it. In fact, they’re a one-stop shop for product development, crowdfunding, and e-commerce solutions. “Our success is largely contingent upon our clients being successful,” says Adam Holden-Bache, Director of Email Marketing and author of How to Win at B2B Email Marketing: A Guide to Achieving Success.

But helping crowdfunding campaigns succeed comes with its own set of challenges, especially when it comes to launching projects on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or other platforms—and establishing contact with customers using Mailchimp. Here’s how they overcome them:

Challenge: Start off strong. Strategy: Promote the crowdfund launch.

“We like to see at least 30% of funding within the first 24 hours,” Adam says. “So if it doesn't get there, it's going to be a challenge. It’s not impossible, but it is really difficult to rebound from a poor first 24-48 hours.”

"Enventys Partners uses a combination of Mailchimp landing pages, Facebook ads, and social media to find fans and drive them to the crowdfunding campaign."

Enventys Partners uses a combination of Mailchimp landing pages, Facebook ads, and social media to find fans and drive them to the crowdfunding campaign. “From a conversion standpoint, Facebook has worked for us better than any other channel, so we continue to put most of our efforts there,” Adam says.

Those ads tell people that they’ll get a highly discounted early bird price if they provide their email address. Once Enventys Partners collects the opt-in, they send the data from Facebook to Mailchimp via Zapier, which triggers a drip campaign that informs and educates subscribers about the soon-to-launch product. The emails use several tactics to ensure recipients know about the launch date including a countdown clock (using MotionMail) and calendar invites (using Eventable).

Challenge: Keep up momentum. Strategy: Send consistent email updates.

Another obstacle for the team is managing email marketing for each project. “We're different in that we're very, very, very fast,” Adam says. “We do a lot of volume. We might turn around 30, 40, 50 campaigns in a day.”

"In addition to using Mailchimp to send pre-launch emails to generate interest, the team sends a launch email with a special offer."

In addition to using Mailchimp to send pre-launch emails to generate interest, the team sends a launch email with a special offer. Then they follow up with non-opens—including using subject lines generated from an AI platform called Persado—by segmenting out those that opened.

After that, they send updates regularly during the crowdfunding campaign that highlight where it stands, like an email about the project being fully funded, or to announce events, like a Kickstarter livestream. “If we find a communication that we need to use regularly, we'll create a template for it,” Adam says of marketing opportunities they haven’t encountered previously. “And then we’ll use that template for everything moving forward.”

Challenge: A weak fundraising campaign launch. Strategy: Gather customer insights.

If a crowdfunding project isn’t taking off, Enventys Partners starts by trying to figure out the reason why it is underperforming. “We'll do surveys to try to get information so we can reverse the course of the ship,” Adam says. To do so, they send an email asking the opt-in subscribers why they did or didn’t back the project. “Usually that insight will help us drive our strategy for the next portion of the campaign.” From there, the team can derive if it’s a price issue, feature issue, or some other problem.

“We'll do surveys to try to get information so we can reverse the course of the ship."

Once they solve the problem and a campaign is funded, Enventys Partners will sometimes use PR outreach to get different press outlets talking about a crowdfunding campaign and keep the momentum going. They’ll also tweak their email messaging to entice new buyers with a hint of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out, i.e. “Everyone is backing this, and you should, too!”) as well as run flash deals to try and bump sales up, too.

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