Launchboom: Getting your campaign funded on its first day

Last week, Launchboom organized the ‘Crowdfunded Summit’, the world’s largest virtual crowdfunding conference. Over the course of three days, participants joined a program hosted by Launchboom and its partners including Indiegogo, Facebook and Kickbooster. The summit included talks on successful crowdfunding campaigns, the use of influencers in campaign strategies, securing intellectual property, campaign testing and Launchboom’s funding-model. We joined the latter by CEO Mark Pecota who explained the Launchboom-model and how crowdfunding campaigns can reach their financial goal within the first day of launching.

To reach a campaign goal on the first days has some attractive benefits. Successful campaigns are usually higher up in the campaign overview of the crowdfunding platform, which makes them more visible to potential backers and customers. In his book CROWDFUNDED, Mark Pecota states that Kickstarter and Indiegogo combined have 30 million visitors per month, which is a huge engaged community that any campaign can benefit from. In addition, reaching a campaign goal quickly can be further used in marketing strategies and makes it more likely for the product to be picked up by the press.

The key idea in the Launchboom’s model is to create an engaged crowd of potential backers before the launch of the campaign by building an extensive email list. This means that a big amount of the marketing budget is spent even before a campaign goes live on a crowdfunding platform. After determining a target audience and communicating a product’s value, the company should start building a reservation funnel. This consists of the following steps:

1. Facebook/Instagram advertising that leads to a sign-up landing page.
2. Sign-up landing page where the call-to-action is to provide an e-mail address, which will be used to receive a notification about the launch of the crowdfunding campaign.
3. Reservation bridge, i.e. an e-mail to thank customers for signing up, and ask them to become a VIP by making a deposit (e.g. of 10NOK). In doing so, subscribers reserve the best discount during the launch of the product.
4. Reservation checkout page, where customers make the actual deposit/reservation.

Following this strategy, a VIP and non-VIP e-mail lists are created. Not only does this division provide more insights for advertising and allocating budgets, Launchboom also found that VIPs were 30 times more likely to contribute financially to the actual campaign. On average, Launchboom sees a conversion rate of 2% in the email lists, depending on the price point of a product. A list of 10.000 people, will thus provide 200 paying customers. Facebook advertising, PR, media placement and traffic from the crowdfunding platform itself all support the traffic generated by the email lists and contribute to the launchboom.

The biggest downside to creating a launchboom is that it requires an investment to create the necessary e-mail list. During the Crowdfunded Summit, Pecota mentioned an advertising budget of over 103.000 dollars to create a list of 33.000 subscribers. Such sums are not easily available in the cultural sector, let alone to privately operating artists. However, the idea of using email lists and engaging with potential backers before launching a crowdfunding campaign can also be useful in the culture sector as many artists have an existing fan base they can activate.

You can learn more about Lauchboom and its model at www.launchboom.com and in Pecota’s book CROWDFUNDED.