Have you thought about using crowdfunding to raise money? If so, posting your campaign on a crowdfunding site is just step 1. In order to run a successful campaign, your next step is to let people know what you’re doing and how to find you; in other words, you need a marketing strategy!
Incorporating tools like social media and email marketing are key elements of a solid crowdfunding marketing strategy, enabling you to connect with your audience and build that relationship over the long-term of your campaign.
Social media and email marketing work best hand-in-hand. It’s easy to post something on Facebook or Twitter and feel like you’re reaching out, but actually you can’t guarantee that your contacts ae seeing your messages. Also, they are less likely to follow through on your request (i.e. “convert) as they are via email.
According to Campaign Monitor, your email is five times more likely to be seen than if you were to send your message through Facebook. You are six times more likely to have your reader click on your link if you send it through email verses if you send it through Twitter. So social media is a good place to be, but it takes email marketing to actually connect and convert.
If you are interested in adding email marketing to your crowdfunding strategy, keep the following things in mind:
- Use an email marketing platform. When you use an email marketing platform like Constant Contact, you get access to design features and marketing data that are not offered through email systems like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.
- Incorporate your brand. This is the kind of thing that can take your marketing message to the next level. Set a visual theme and tie your message to a particular emotion using colors, a tag line, and an image or logo if you have one. Every message related to your crowd funding should look similar. When you include your branding every time you create a message, you convey that you are serious about your intentions and you help your audience more easily recognize you. If you take yourself seriously, your audience will take you seriously.
- Keep your audience updated. It’s tempting to just send out messages asking for support and stop there. It’s more valuable when you continue to foster your relationships with your supporters by letting them know how things are going. Tell them (or better, show them) where their money has gone and what it’s helped you accomplish. Give them an update on statistics and, if you can, recognize your most recent sponsors.
- Share your email on social media. Just because you don’t have someone’s email address doesn’t mean you can’t reach them with email. When you share your email to your social media channels, you show your audience that there are other ways to stay in touch. (Be sure to include a link in your email that lets people subscribe to receive future emails!)
- Be friendly, be personal, and share your story. You are a human and you are talking to humans, so be human! When you share your personal story about what you’re doing and how you got to where you are, you build an emotional connection with your readers and that resonates! So bring yourself into the story and make it real.
Bonus Tip: Include the link to your crowdfunding page every time. This is your call-to-action! Your audience won’t know where to go and what you want them to do unless you tell them. Include a statement like, “Click here to learn more” and hyperlink it to your crowdfunding page in every message. You can be bold with it and make it central to your message, or you can be subtle and stick it down under your signature. Either way, someone reading your message is going to be wondering where to go, so enable them to find that answer easily and quickly. After all – getting them to your crowdfunding page is the whole point!
