3 strategies to engage email subscribers

Email is the most effective way to engage your audience at scale. It provides a direct line of communication between you and the people interested in your work and enables you to automate your engagement in powerful ways. That’s why it’s essential to build an email list in the lead up to your Kickstarter launch campaign.

I’m sure you’ve already heard many people in the crowdfunding space tell you about the importance of building a list. It’s just as important to have a strategy in place to keep people engaged and interested in your product and to entice them to take action once your campaign goes live.

That’s what we will focus on here today. We’ll share three strategies for engaging your email subscribers. We’ll even sneak in a fourth strategy to engage your subscribers and get their help to grow your email list.

Let’s start with the basics before we dive into those.

✉️ Why is an email list so important?

So what do email lists make possible for independent designers and entrepreneurs who are on the road to launching a product on Kickstarter?

I can think of six things:

1. Extend the timeframe for finding your audience. Most creators have a hunch for who their audience is and where they can find them. The truth is their hunch is often off the mark by at least a smidge, but possibly even a mile. Once your crowdfunding campaign launches, you don’t have the luxury of time to experiment and test to find your audience.
2. Get better acquainted with your audience. It’s common for creators to suffer from the curse of the expert: being so deeply immersed in their work that their interests and language diverge from those of their audience. Engaging with your audience through email and the other tactics we cover here can help you tune in to your audience’s needs.
3. Nurture the interest and desire of your audience. Once a person signs-up for your email list, you can nurture their interest. This is an opportunity to get them more excited about the product and build trust in your team. Nurturing is crucial since people will quickly forget who you are if you don’t follow-up with them.
4. Create momentum on launch day. By building a list of people intrigued by your product and nurturing their interest, you can supercharge your launch day. This hard work has gone on behind the scenes on most campaigns that blow past their funding goal in the first 24 hours.
5. Drive conversions throughout the campaign. Once your campaign is live, you can continue to nurture your subscribers to drive additional pledges. You can reach out with different messages, content, and offers to increase conversions and learn from their engagement with your efforts.
6. Establish a long-term foundation for their business. If properly nurtured, your list will continue to bear fruit once your crowdfunding campaign is over. It’s a powerful channel that provides a direct line of communication with existing and prospective customers.

Quality matters more than quantity

The value of your list is determined by its ability to help you generate pledges for your campaign. That outcome is determined by the level of interest people on your list have for your product, work, and brand. This hard-to-measure attribute is what we refer to as list quality.

What does quantity without quality look like?

A project with a list of 50k subscribers that only generates a few thousand dollars in pledges. This is a real example from a campaign that launched during my time at Kickstarter.

What does quality mean from the perspective of your launch?

It all boils down to purchase intent. The likelihood that a person is willing to pledge money to your campaign in return for being one of the first people to get their hands on your product.

People talk about quantity more often than quality because it is so much easier to measure. You can quickly check on your subscriber count, and it feels comforting to see that number grow. It’s much harder to measure quality.

Three factors that impact your list’s quality

Several of the engagement strategies that we’ll cover help us get a better read of a lists’ quality. But before we dive into those, let’s explore the three most significant factors that can help us better understand quality.

1. Engagement

How are people engaging with the content and resources that you are sharing with them?

As you would expect, a high engagement level usually signals a high level of interest in your product. Keep in mind that not all types of engagement are created equal.

The most basic types of engagements are opening your emails and clicking on links. These activities matter because they are the gateway to all other interactions. The most potent engagements tend to be deeper, though.

Here are a few examples: getting a subscriber to sign-up for a High-Interest List, pay to reserve the product, share the product on social, or join a Facebook group. These engagements also provide additional signals about your subscribers’ level of interest that can be tracked.

2. Recency

How recently did people engage with you or sign-up for your list?

People’s interests and needs change, and their memory span is relatively short. That’s why people who signed-up for your list a long time ago and haven’t interacted with your communications recently are very unlikely to become a backer. They might no longer have an interest or need for your product, or they might have forgotten about it. There is even a term that is used to refer to this phenomenon: list decay.

3. Transparency

How much did people know about your product when they engaged with you or signed up for your list?

Just because someone is interested in the high-level vision for a product doesn’t mean that they’ll want the product once they have a clearer sense of how it works and how much it costs. That’s why it matters how informed your subscribers were when they signed up for your list and engaged with your communications.

Three strategies to engage your subscribers

Now that we’ve established a baseline understanding of how to think about list quality let’s dive into a few different strategies that you can use to engage people on your list. These are ordered from most straightforward to the most complex.

The more complex strategies are more powerful. They enable you to engage with your audience more profoundly and get more insights from those engagements. The overhead involved with implementing those more complicated strategies can be substantial.

It’s valuable to understand the trade-offs to find the approach that is a good fit for your specific product.

The Update List

This approach involves nurturing the interest of subscribers using a simple set of nurturing communications followed by anticipation building launch announcements.

When a person signs up, you’ll send them a steady cadence of updates about your product to nurture their interest. We’ll call these communications the nurturing stream. During the two weeks before the launch, you’ll send all of your subscribers a faster drumbeat of announcements to build anticipation and drive action. We’ll call these emails the launch stream.

The Update List structure serves as a foundation for all other strategies that we’ll cover in this piece.

Benefits

• Easy to implement using pretty much any email marketing platform. No special technical skills are required.
• Enables you to nurture interest through a story that unfolds over a sequence of emails. The same narrative is delivered to all subscribers regardless of when they sign-up.

Drawbacks

• You don’t get much insight regarding how many of your subscribers actually have a high level of interest in your product or real purchase intent.

Ideal if you are…

• Starting to build your email list many months before their launch. This foundation can be augmented with the other strategies near the launch.
• Building an email list at the very last minute. This approach can be set-up quickly and easily compared to the other strategies we’ll cover.
• Launching a campaign with a small goal, under $10k, and have a limited budget, time, and resources.

How it works

The nurturing stream should be set up as an autoresponder sequence. This ensures that you can deliver a coordinated narrative that builds over time. You can start by sharing a few exclusive bits about the product itself, followed by an email that dives into what inspired your team, and so forth.

What is an autoresponder? It’s just jargon for a set of pre-written emails that get sent to your subscribers in sequential order in response to a trigger. In this case, the trigger is signing-up for your email list.

The launch stream should be set up as broadcast emails. These are one-time messages that are sent to all subscribers simultaneously. During the two weeks before your launch you can set-up a handful of these drops in increasing frequency — for example, 14 days out, 7 days out, 3 days out, and then on launch day.

Technical & creative requirements

There are minimal technical requirements for adopting this strategy. You just need an email service provider that supports both broadcast emails and autoresponder sequence. These are widely supported by just about every email service provider.

From a creative standpoint, this strategy requires the lowest effort comparatively. Since all of your subscribers will receive the same communications, you don’t need to create multiple communication streams or versions.

The High-Interest List

This approach involves identifying the people who are most interested in your product—through an explicit action or based on engagement tracking—and providing them with exclusive access to information and offers.

Benefits

• Makes it possible to identify subscribers from your list with a high level of interest in your product.
• Enables you to reward those subscribers with perks and special access to develop stronger affinity and relationships.
• It’s relatively easy to implement with some email marketing platforms, though some technical proficiency is required.

Drawbacks

• Additional technical complexity and creative requirements can put a strain on individual creators or small teams.
• Low barrier to entry in the High-Interest List means that sign-up is a strong signal for interest, but not necessarily purchase intent.

Ideal if you are…

• A couple of months away from your launch date, and want to engage with your most interested subscribers.
• Able to dedicate additional time and resources required to develop exclusive offers to drive and sustain that engagement.
• Have a team member who is proficient with email marketing tools or can hire an agency or freelancer to take this on.

How it works

When a person signs up for your list, they receive the Update List treatment described above. The one main difference is that your emails will either feature an explicit call to action inviting subscribers to join the High-Interest List, or you will set criteria to automatically move your most engaged subscribers to the High-Interest List.

Ideally, the process of signing up for the High-Interest List should be as simple as clicking on a link in an email.

If you are using an explicit call to action, you’ll need to offer incentives to entice your subscribers. The most powerful being the ability to get the product at a specific discounted price. Other incentives include access to live events, Facebook groups, and other content.

If you don’t want to use an explicit call to action you just need to identify actions that show a high level of interest, such as joining a Facebook group. Then, when a subscriber takes that action you automatically add them to the High-Interest list.

Once a person has signed up for the High-Interest List, they will then be moved to a separate set of communications streams. These streams are structured just like those from the Update List. The emails can include a lot of the same content with some variation to more effectively engage the high-interest segment.

Technical & creative requirements

The technical requirements for adopting this strategy are quite simple. You just need an email service provider that has good segmentation capabilities. You want a service that makes it easy for you to segment your lists based on subscriber interactions. ConvertKit is an excellent option because they do this in spades, though other providers like MailChimp and Active Campaign also meet these criteria.*

From a creative standpoint, this strategy requires medium to high effort. At the very least, you will need to create multiple versions of each communication stream. Beyond that, you will likely need to carve out time to engage with your subscriber in a Facebook group or virtual events.

Other High-Interest engagements

Setting up ways to engage your most interested subscribers can be well worth the effort, even if you don’t want to go through the work of creating separate email streams to communicate with them. You can use Facebook groups, Discord channels, and even Slack communities to create spaces where your most interested subscribers can engage with your team. By creating these spaces you’ll send a strong signal that you are open to answering their questions, accepting their feedback and feature requests, and talking shop with them.

* A small disclaimer here, we are linking to ConvertKit with a referral link in this article. We are comfortable doing so because we use ConvertKit and love their platform. This is the only referral link featured in this article.

The Reservation List

This approach involves identifying people who have strong purchase intent by getting them to pay a small sum to lock-in a compelling discount and other exclusive benefits.

This approach has a similar structure to the High-Interest List approach. The main difference is that it requires an explicit call to action, and the barrier to entry is considerably higher; it requires actually putting your money where your email address is (I know, bad metaphor, but you get the idea).

The cost of joining a Reservation List can be quite low. Launchboom, the most prominent evangelists of this strategy, uses a $1 reservation fee across all of the campaigns they manage. This small sign-up fee weeds out people who just have a general interest in your product but lack real purchase intent.

Benefits

• Makes it possible to identify subscribers from your list that have actual purchase intent for your product.
• Enables you to reward those subscribers with perks and special access to develop stronger affinity and relationships.
• Helps you improve the targeting of your online advertising efforts by creating lookalike audiences from your Reservation List.

Drawbacks

• Technical complexity and creative requirements are substantial compared to the prior strategies that we reviewed.
• Fulfilling your core offer to all Reservation List members is cumbersome on Kickstarter since they don’t support secret rewards.

Ideal if you are…

• A couple of months away from your launch date, and want to engage with your most interested subscribers.
• Ready to share the price of your product along with the best-discounted offer that you will make available in your campaign.
• Able to dedicate additional time and resources required to develop exclusive offers to drive and sustain that engagement.
• A team that has a member that is proficient with email marketing tools or can hire an agency or freelancer to take this on.

How it works

When a person signs up for your list, they receive the Update List treatment described above. The emails in the nurture stream will feature prominent calls to action, inviting subscribers to join the Reservation List.

To entice people to sign-up, you’ll need to offer the ability to lock-in a specific discounted price. Other incentives can also be used to sweeten the deal, including access to a Facebook group, events with founders, etc.

The process of signing involves a two-step funnel. The first step is an upsell page that spells out the benefits of joining the Reservation List. The second step is the checkout page, where you’ll collect the payment.

You could possibly include both steps of this funnel on a single page. It’s just important to remember that you will need to compellingly tout the Reservation List’s benefits to entice subscribers to sign-up.

You can even upsell access to the Reservation List to people as they sign up for your email list. Rather than direct new subscribers to a standard thank you page, you can direct them to an upsell page that touts the Reservation List’s benefits.

Once a person has signed up for the Reservation List, they receive an email confirming their registration and are moved to separate communications streams. These streams are structured just like those from the Update List. The emails will include much of the same content with different calls to action.

Technical & creative requirements

The technical requirements for adopting this strategy are comparatively high. The requirements for your email service provider are the same as for the High-Interest List approach. Beyond that, you will need to set-up two web pages as described above, along with the ability to collect money.

From a creative standpoint, this strategy requires high effort. You need to create multiple versions of each communication stream, and you need to create a compelling set of landing pages to sell the Reservation List. You also need to carve out time to engage with your subscriber in a Facebook group or virtual events.

Bonus Strategy: The Referral Program

This approach differs significantly from VIP and Reservation Lists. It involves engaging your subscribers through referral marketing campaigns. These campaigns incentivize subscribers to refer friends and promote your product by enabling them to earn rewards. This is the only engagement approach that is also designed to help you build your email list.

Referral campaigns can be used during the pre-launch phase to build an email list and once a project is live to drive pledges to a campaign. In this post, we are only focusing on the former scenario.

Benefits

• If it takes off, it can enable you to exponentially grow your email list without having to invest much in online advertising.
• Makes it possible to identify subscribers from your list with a high level of interest in your product.
• Enables you to reward those subscribers with perks and special access to develop stronger affinity and relationships.

Drawbacks

• Referral marketing campaigns only work well for a relatively small number of physical product launches.
• It is really challenging to find the right rewards for these programs. This makes it really challenging to create referral programs that actually work.
• If you offer things that are not compelling, like branded t-shirts, no one will be motivated to take action.
• If you offer compelling rewards unrelated to your product, your list will fill up with people who don’t care about your product.
• If you offer rewards that are too compelling, you will entice people to use unsavory tactics to drive referrals — think SPAM.
• Lists built with these programs are often of lower quality than leads captured through other channels. This quality issue is only offset if you can scale these efforts substantially.

Ideal if you are…

• Launching a product that has an audience that is highly connected online. The primary way for participants to earn points is by sharing the product with other people in their networks online.
• Lucky enough to have a product that has the potential to generate a passionate following quickly. If it’s hard to get people quickly turned on by your product, then a referral campaign probably won’t have a significant impact.

How they work

You’ll need to use a tool like Kickoff Labs or Viral Loops to power these programs. They provide the infrastructure required to run these referral campaigns. There are multiple different flavors of referral campaigns. The most commonly used involves rewarding participants for reaching referral milestones.

Video from Kickoff Labs that shows how to set-up a referral milestones campaign using their platform.

Here is an example of what a referral milestones campaign might look like. Participants could earn access to a special discounted price if they can generate five new subscribers for your list. If they generate ten subscribers, they might earn a free accessory for your product when they pledge to your campaign. And so on…

The next most popular type of referral campaign involves rewarding your top referrers with a bigger reward, like the product itself.

Subscribers that are taking part in these programs receive emails associated with their participation and achievements. At the very least, you’ll want to send an email when a subscriber signs up, on their first referral, and every time they reach a reward milestone.

Here is how to integrate these programs with your regular email streams:

You should still provide your subscriber with the Update List treatment. That means they will receive a stream of communications to nurture their interest once they sign-up, followed by a stream of launch announcement communications when your project is about to go live.

If you started to build your list before you launched the referral campaign, you’ll have two subscriber segments, and you should create separate versions of your communications streams. Both streams will have the same structure, the emails will include much of the same content, the difference will be the calls to action. Referral program participants will be prompted to keep sharing, while other subscribers will be encouraged to join the referral program.

Technical & creative requirements

The technical requirements for adopting this strategy are comparatively high. As mentioned previously, you will need to use a tool like Kickoff Labs or Viral Loops to manage the referral program. For the nurture and launch streams, you’ll need an email service provider that delivers solid list segmentation capabilities and integrates with whichever referral tool you plan to use.

From a creative standpoint, this strategy requires high effort. You need to create multiple versions of each communication stream, and you need to customize the referral program’s sign-up page and email notifications.

When should you launch a High-Interest List, Reservation List, or Referral Program?

If you are one of those creators who started building a list of many months, even years before their launch, you might be wondering when a good time to implement a VIP or Reservation List is?

These strategies are designed to help you get a better sense regarding who on your list actually has a strong interest or purchase intent for your product. That means you want to launch these efforts relatively close to your campaign launch date, probably no more than 6- to 8-weeks out. Why? Because recency is one of the most essential factors for list quality.

The other key factor related to list quality that you need to keep in mind is transparency. The way it applies here is that you want to put these strategies into practice only when you are ready to communicate your product’s price and the discount you are offering. There are two reasons for this:

• This is the most compelling offer to motivate people to take action.
• You will get a clearer signal of purchase intent from your subscribers’ actions.

How to ensure Reservation List and Referral Program members get the promised price?

On Kickstarter, you can’t use secret rewards to provide exclusive offers to a segment of subscribers. That means you need to use one of the workarounds below to deliver on your promises. Unfortunately, they all involve some level of manual work.

Here are a few different approaches in order of my personal preference:

The Soft Launch Strategy

This strategy involves stealthily launching your campaign and notifying your Reservation List and Referral Program members about the launch a few hours before making a wider announcement. This gives those members the opportunity to be the first to back the campaign, and take advantage of your best discount.

This is definitely a strategy that you should adopt. However, not all of your High-Interest List members will be able to back your project right away so you’ll still need to figure out a way to deal with stragglers. That’s where the other strategies come into play.

The $1 Pledge

This strategy was created by creators who run campaigns that feature multiple products and accessories. It is commonly used to allow backers to pledge for custom bundles of products. A recent example is Peak Design’s latest campaign called Mobile.

Here is how it works in this common scenario:

First, a backer figures out the price for the bundle of products that they want, then they select the 1 dollar reward tier but pledge for the bundle’s full cost. After the campaign wraps up, the creator uses BackerKit to enable the backer to select all of the products for their bundle.

Here is how it can work in the Reservation List and Referral Program scenario:

You would send out an email providing instructions to your backers to select the $1 reward and pledge for a pre-specified amount that reflects the discounted price you’ve promised. After the campaign wraps up, you can easily identify all backers who reserved the product since they pledged for the amount that you had specified. Then you would use a tool like BackerKit to manually assign the product to the appropriate backers.

If your campaign offers add-ons, that can complicate this strategy a bit by making it harder to identify backers who reserved the product. The reason is, if a backer includes an add-on on their pledge, then their pledge amount will differ from the pre-specified amount you’ve set.

The Perpetual Early Bird

Pioneered by the team at Tross, this strategy involves making your best offer (the early bird) available throughout your campaign. To create an added sense of urgency, the reward is set as a limited reward that looks like it’s always about to run out.

Since the best offer is always available, your Reservation List and Referral Program members will be able to take advantage of it whenever they decide to show up and pledge.

How do you achieve this feat of magic? You go into your project every day (or possibly even multiple times a day) to update the number of rewards available in each reward tier.

Drawbacks? This strategy uses a manipulative approach to create a heightened sense of urgency.

The Post-Funding Refund

This strategy involves asking Reservation List and Referral Program members to pledge for a full-priced reward on Kickstarter, understanding that you will refund them the difference as soon as the payments are collected.

To adopt this strategy, you need to keep track of every backer that is a Reservation List and Referral Program member. You will only have 7-days to refund the difference without incurring Kickstarter’s fees on the refunded amount.

Drawbacks? This strategy will likely lead to a steeper drop-off in conversion since some backers might be unwilling to pledge more than the price your promised.

You made it to the end

That was a long one. Thanks for sticking through to the end. We hope that this piece will help you develop an effective strategy to engage with your own subscribers. Let us know what questions you have about this topic. We want to make this piece even better.

Thank yous

I want to shout-out a few people who provided input that had an impact on the development of this piece.

• Lina Gantar shared a good number of insights from her team’s work at Nuuk — a few of which I’m saving for a future piece.
• Sean Montgomery, Sasha Pas, and Rohan Singh asked me questions about trade-offs and implementation of these strategies that helped identify core gaps in early versions of this piece.

Questions & feedback

Just leave your questions, tips, or feedback, here in a comment, or email me at julio@launchstudio.com.

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