WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS LOTS OF CHARTS. READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Last time, things were going well from Day One. Your first 24-48 hours are probably going to be strong, possibly the strongest of your entire campaign. Below are some charts from Kicktraq of our previous four campaigns that demonstrate just how important those first 24-48 hours can be:
Evidence to support my claim. And boring.
These first 48 hours are very important and what you do in them can be crucial to your success. Sometimes your campaign can be a 'slow burner', earning gradually at a consistent rate throughout the fundraising period. Sometimes it might all come together at the end where you see an upswing in backers. There's a variety of reasons as to why this happens but here I'll be looking at how we managed to get such strong interest straight out of the gate.
The simple answer is 'pre-build'. There might be a proper term for it in marketing circles but that's what we call it here. The shortest pre-build we've ever done is two weeks, the longest, six months, which is when we opened our store in May 2015. The first day was pretty strong. We sold out of product very soon after:
That went well...
All this came from creating a huge email list with the help of
MailChimp and a signup form on our website. Combine this with Facebook ads and we were generating plenty of traffic to our site and getting a decent number of signups. From the end of our first ever campaign to the launch of our store, we had over 2,500 email signups of people who were interested. All this came from a fairly minimal spend, around £5 per day on Facebook ads.
Alongside the cultivation of an email list, you can always benefit from press exposure. I'll use that phrase in a broad sense to include print press, online, blogs, Instagram, YouTube and so on.
But this can be a lot harder than it appears.
