Crowdfunding Email Collection Playbook — How to build a 100k email list in 3 months with $10k
By: Chris Herbert
Tags: Crowdfunding, Marketing, Hardware, Startup, Growth Hacking

How does a crowdfunding campaign reach its goal within the first 24 hours of launch? The secret is an email list of people that are ready to buy.

But how does a startup build that email list of interested customers on a shoestring budget? Here is my playbook

What You Will Need

Configuration

Viral Loops

Configure a milestone giveaway on viral loops. Set the milestones to be discounts on your product for each referral. Preferably at the maximum referral level, the user will get a free product. Select to embed the Viral Loop into your own website

Disable the welcome emails but keep the referral trigger emails and customize them. Have the emails come from your domain

Unbounce

Choose any template and customize it with your brand to showcase your product. Embed the viral loop signup form within the page and showcase the levels

Choose another template page that just has the referral buttons and levels for viral loops

Setup Google Analytics, facebook pixels, etc.

Mailchimp

Setup the DMARC, SPF, DKIM records. Configure a drip campaign that is triggered to each person that signs up that entices them to share and supplies them with information over a 2 week period. I do about 5 emails over 2 weeks. The emails should preferably include a link where they can share directly from the email

Facebook Ad

Have ads that direct people to the Unbounce lander with a CPL target (remember to add the pixels to your Unbounce pages for tracking to work). Also run the lead ads directly on facebook to collect emails on the platform

Zapier

This is where you tie everything together

Trigger the email drip campaign on Mailchimp to fire when a user signs up on viral loops

Trigger a sign up to happen on viral loops when a user submits a lead on facebook

That’s it! You can of course use code to customize this with your own site and use similar services to accomplish all this. I also usually add in Facebook Messenger and SMS to increase comms and virality.

Running the Campaign

Once everything is ready, verify that the viral loop is working by sharing the page with your network. I individually facebook message and linkedin message, everyone, I know. (I sometimes hear pushback against spamming your friends and family. If you aren’t comfortable with this, then these techniques are not for you and I suggest you hire an expensive agency to do the dirty work)

With this test, I look for shares happening in the viral loops back end and that referral clicks are happening on Google Analytics. I’ll also watch over a 1 week period to make sure my emails are getting opened and engaged with. If anything isn’t working in the funnel, I begin tweaking it.

But how do I know what and how to tweak it?

You should see in the funnel where fall off is happening across sign ups, click throughs, and sharing.

Poor Sign Up Rate — You most likely need to sweeten your offer or better explain your product. Use survey monkey to survey folks on why they signed up and what made the offer compelling. Incorporate the feedback

Poor Share Rate — This could be your configuration is messed up, the offer to share isn’t solid, people don’t know how to share, there are too many steps to share, or the share landing page is confusing. Again, survey monkey is your friend.

Poor Open Rates — Make sure your DMARC & SPF settings are correct and you are able to get into users inbox by signing up with a test gmail account. There are other services that can do this. Make sure your subject lines stand out. Have the emails come from a recognizable email address.

Poor Email Click Rates — Basically make your emails look like instagram posts, are short, and compelling. Survey monkey is your friend.

Once everything checks out, turn on facebook ads and then your optimization should be about optimizing your initial CPL cost.

Happy Growth Hacking!