Generating Thousands of Signups Pre App Launch
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During week two of our sprint to build and launch Yoroomie App in 30 days, we crafted and implemented a prelaunch campaign. The goals of our prelaunch campaign were to generate interest in the product, capture emails to convert into users when we launched the app, and also validate the idea while we continued to develop and quickly iterate.
Similar to Harry’s prelaunch campaign, we employed a few of the same strategies in order to maximize the effectiveness within the short window (7–14 days) that we had to capture as many emails as possible. The main points for our prelaunch campaign are as follows:
Landing page- The design of the main landing page was very simplistic and conveyed our UI/UX in the slideshow with three images of the app. This would not only familiarize users with our app, but also make our product speak very loud to visitors. There were little options for the page, such as stripped out top navigation and the only call to action (CTA) was a submit email button.
Messaging- The messaging on our page was very straightforward and compelling. It addressed a problem and also posed Yoroomie as the best solution. The CTA button was “Get Early Access”, which created an exclusive sense of urgency.
Invite mechanism- Following entering your email, the user would be served with a confirmation page that showed their position in a queue for our waitlist. In order to jump ahead, they could simply share this page with their friends and they would be bumped ahead. Since we were not a physical product, could not offer a financial incentive, and also could not give a invite/promo code, we simply had to rely on making our verbiage as humanly as possible.
Confirmation email- Following a visitor entering their email and hitting our confirmation/invite page, we would automate an email that would be sent to them to also encourage sharing. The verbiage was short, concise, and clearly attempted to prompt users to share or forward the email to other potential roomies. We included social icons to increase visual impact.
In addition to the main points identified above, we heavily promoted our app and pointed traffic to the landing page through social media. A few tactics that we used were targeting searches on twitter for people searching for roommates, posting in Facebook “looking for a roommate/housing” groups, and also college campus marketing. At the end of our campaign we had generated thousands of emails, which eventually converted into our first users when Yoroomie App went live.
