How to Follow Up Crowdfunding With Ecommerce and Not Blow It

Let’s say you had a killer crowdfunding launch for your product. Thousands of backers, smiling faces, great expectations. Against all odds, your campaign got funded and you delivered your product to your customers (mostly) on time. Now you’re thinking of turning it into a scalable business and, depending on your level of technical and marketing knowledge, it may seem daunting. So how do you do it? Crowdfunding and ecommerce are two sides of the same coin. In the end, you’re getting your products out to customers who have trusted you temporarily with their cash in return for your product. They’re slightly different, but if we create a few criteria for both, it’s easy to show how you can move from a splashy launch to a sustainable ecommerce business. Let’s pick some easy, obvious words. Necessity: Logically, how much the customer needs the product.Desire: Emotionally, how much the customer wants the product.Trust: Assuming their want and need are met, how much the customer trusts you to deliver. When Everyone Is Talking About Your Brand, Know Who Matters Trust In your crowdfunding campaign, you might have noticed that while creating desire is the easy part, trust and necessity were the uphill battles. To gain trust, you might have added schematics, manufacturing information and interviews with the team. Now you’re in ecommerce and the good news is, for some reason, people trust ecommerce websites more. Possibly because Amazon reliably delivers items, the spillover trust is a benefit that you may now enjoy as an ecommerce brand. The name of the game here is familiarity and clarity: For first-time buyers, familiar and clear return and shipping policies will work wonders for conversions. Crowdfunding has no refunds or returns, so it might seem scary to offer this so prominently. However, I’ve oddly found that stating it very clearly and even giving a 30-day refund guarantee can double conversions—even though the return rate might only be 1%. Twice the customers while handling a few returns and exchanges are worth it. Desire The bad news here is that, because an ecommerce website usually implies there is an unlimited amount of product, it will be much harder to create desire. After all, what you’re selling is probably close to other products that are available elsewhere. If your product is truly unique or has brand loyalty that can’t be matched, you’ll be fine. But if it does have lots of competitors and it’s in a space where people are OK with switching brands, creating desire is tricky. One way to do it is to actually borrow some of the tactics that made your crowdfunding successful. You can do limited editions, restricting the amount that can be purchased. You can do exclusive launches, like giving existing customers first access to a new product. You can add social proof and reviews, giving your ecommerce shop the same social feel as a crowdfunding campaign. Most of all, you can communicate what your mission, vision and community are. When you join a crowdfunding campaign, you’re getting a ticket to a moon mission. When a customer buys your product on your website, what are they joining? A movement, a mission, a community? This can be reflected in the copy, style and even the calls to action for your store. Necessity Necessity in ecommerce heavily depends on your product. Desire and trust are a result of how you sell your product. Necessity is usually in what you’re selling. You might get lucky and have a must-have item on your hands, like a fidget spinner when everyone was nuts about them, but most likely you’re making and selling something useful. Necessity can be communicated by tapping into some of your customers’ innate needs, and this is more of an art than a science. Maslow's hierarchy of needs lists, from top to bottom, self-fulfillment, esteem, love, safety and physical. A business school will see great results making it very clear how spending on tuition could fulfill the need for self-fulfillment. A customer should be able to look at their website and say, “I need this for career advancement and self-fulfillment.” A fashion brand may heavily message why their products are a necessity for esteem and love. A customer should be able to look at their offering and say, “I need this, I’ll look super cool.” Amazon does a great job of fulfilling safety and physical, adding verbiage like “Amazon Basics” and features like “Subscribe and Save” to make sure you never run out of those basics. If you’ve got these combinations mixed up, like a fashion brand trying to tell you it’s a basic need or a lightbulb being sold for self-actualization, you will more than likely get poor results. Correctly identify the need that your product fulfills, then communicate it in your advertising as well as your website. Here is your copy and paste cheat sheet, as you tweak each one of these watch the conversion rate go up: Necessity: What you sell—What need does it fulfill, and is this clearly communicated?Desire: How you sell—Why should they care, and what do they get for joining you?Trust: How you deliver—What happens (literally) when they give you their money? And of course, measure it all using analytics. UTM tags will help you visualize where the revenue is coming from, and Facebook Pixel events will let you check the funnel of the website. The relationship between the visits, add-to-cart and purchases will let you calculate the abandonment rates and overall conversion rates. Using some simple math you can fine-tune every step of the funnel. Twitter, Shopify Reveal Partnership at Cannes Lions