Kickstarter in Review Part III: Facebook Advertising & E-Mail Onboarding
[Read the full Kickstarter in Review series]
As we continue through our Kickstarter in review series, we’ll dive deeper into each part of our campaign. We’ll celebrate our triumphs, and analyze our mistakes. Our Facebook advertising campaign was an element of our campaign with more missteps than successes. So, let’s take a closer look.
Facebook advertising was the most costly, quantifiable, misstep of our campaign. We spent $7,785 in direct Facebook ad spend, and with ancillary expenses $9,289.
Including ancillary expenses, we had $6,658 of spend on lead generation which garnered us 2,102 emails ($3.17 per lead). Of those only 32 backed our project for a 1.5% conversion rate, or $208 per conversion.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of our campaign, I want to suggest some further reading – that will give more expert advice on how to actually run a successful campaign.
Backerkit (search by topic)
Lead Expense at the High End of Acceptable
Our direct lead generation campaign had a cost per lead of $2.70. This is within the generally accepted range for Facebook leads of ~$1.50-$3.00.
We tried a number of iterations of ad copy and graphics.
Our most successful ad image was the below.
It was not the image I expected to perform the best. We tried a few other iterations with a similar feeling of components flying towards the viewer, but they all underperformed the above.
Optimizing ad graphics and copy was a matter of iteration. Remember: dynamic ads are your friend.
Demographics
Aside from making sure your audience is familiar with crowdfunding (see this Backerkit article), I found that Meta’s AI did a better job at targeting audiences than us tweaking demographics.
That said, women aged 45-64 meaningfully outperformed any other demographic for our campaign.
Demographic breakdown of one of our ads
I believe we have a bit of a missed opportunity with more targeted marketing to this demographic. Specifically, we should have had a larger marketing push using momfluencers and dadfluencers, and really leaning into the family friendly nature of Nut Hunt.
The Internet Sucks at Nuance
I think of Nut Hunt, like a 90s Disney movie. The game is 100% G rated, but the name can be press-ganged in some off-color humor and puns. I like the name Nut Hunt. It’s memorable, and families get to have wholesome fun, while adults a couple beers deep get to have their fun as well.
But, the internet sucks a nuance.
Our Facebook ads had significant interaction around the game name, including the laugh reaction, and some legitimately gross comments (which I won’t repeat here).
I have a suspicion that these kinds of interactions (from people not actually interested in our game) negatively impacted Meta AI’s ability to place our ads optimally.
Lookalike Audiences
The best performing Facebook ad campaigns use lookalike audiences. That is, rather than input demographic targets and interests, Meta AI can extrapolate an audience from a pre-existing list.
This list can be scraped with a Pixel plugin on your website, or based on past audiences, or customers.
I have spoken with publishers who report lead costs of close to $1 per lead when using a lookalike audience based on actual customers who have bought their games. This is especially powerful when marketing similar genre games.
This is an inherent advantage for incumbent publishers, and for services like Backerkit marketing which has extensive data on consumer purchasing history.
The Problem was Conversions
While our ad campaign could have been better – our results were within a reasonable range that is to be expected of an indie publisher without extensive customer data. Where our campaign fell massively short, was on conversions.
I believe there are a few main drivers of our underperformance
Lack of a strong onboarding cycle
Domain health
[Update: After talking through the article with a few marketers, I believe a major contributing factor to the low conversion rate was poor ad targeting. Our best performing ad not having a focus on the game components, the negative interactions with the ad campaign, etc. all point to potential lower quality leads.]
The Virtuous Cycle
The virtuous cycle is a way to think about the onboarding process for your leads (see Crowdfunding Nerds article on the topic). The idea is to guide prospective leads from your lead generation (Facebook ads) onto a landing page, onto an automated listserv, and cycled into the broader community.
Our onboarding process fell short in a number of places specifically
Lack of a strong landing page to excite and interest people about the game
Lack of strong communication cycling people into our broader community
Low open rate on welcome email
For context our automated welcome email had a 26% open rate, whereas a normal open rate should be 40-50%.
Domain Health
Our listserv grew markedly as we added over 2,000 emails in the course of a couple of months. This negatively impacted our domain health.
The open rates on our emails declined from 50% to 30% at the time of the campaign launch. A portion of this was due to less-invested leads from paid advertising (versus organic). But, I believe a portion of it was due to declining domain health
E-mail service providers sort incoming mail into inboxes, spam, and promotions folders. They have algorithms behind the scenes to sort emails based on open rates, reported rates, and volume growth.
The rapid growth in our listserv without other actions to preserve domain health, led our emails to be sorted into the promotions tab for some number of backers. While I don’t know the full extent of the issue, I did ask a number of our subscribers individually – some of whom reported recent emails showing up in their promotions tab, whereas earlier emails had been in their primary inbox.
In future articles I’ll go into detail on how to improve domain health – but for now it is worth noting that it is an important element of running an email marketing campaign – and to be aware of it with your outreach.
What board game landing pages have impressed you?
