The pre-launch phase of a crowdfunding campaign is the most pivotal part of any product launch. Why? For the simple reason that it’s where you can make or break the success of your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.
The foundation of any good pre-launch starts with a well-structured marketing strategy, and there is none better for crowdfunding than the LaunchBoom reservation funnel. Key to the structure of this funnel is a great landing page, which should meet certain standards to be effective.
Fortunately, we’ve perfected those standards across thousands of landing pages and are happy to be able to share them with any creator leaping into the crowdfunding arena. In this post, we’ll explore eight examples of the best pre-launch landing pages and what aspects you can use for inspiration for your own reservation funnel.
Oh and before we dive in… there’s a YouTube video we put together that we recommend you check out after you finish the article. We’ll leave it here for you now:
Key Takeaways
- Pre-launch Phase Vital: The pre-launch phase is critical for crowdfunding success as it can determine the outcome of a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.
- Importance of Landing Pages: Well-structured landing pages, such as those in LaunchBoom’s reservation funnel, are essential for educating potential backers, prompting action, and achieving conversions.
- Tips for Effective Landing Pages: Focus on clarity in value proposition, design compelling calls-to-action, highlight product benefits succinctly, and incorporate engaging visual elements to drive conversions.
- Inspiration from Examples: Examining successful pre-launch landing pages, like those of Polycade Sente and Botany, provides insights into effective design strategies for crowdfunding campaigns.
Contents
What is a pre-launch landing page?
First, what is a landing page in the context of the LaunchBoom reservation funnel system? If we zoom out, here’s how the reservation funnel is structured:
It starts with an engaging ad from Meta’s platform, then leads the user to the landing page after they’ve clicked on the ad. The landing page is only the second step of the funnel, but its role is pivotal.
With a good landing page, you can accomplish the following:
- Educate Your Target Market: Digital ads are short, and can be quite vague by design. The landing page is your chance to tell the reader everything you want them to know about your product that would make them more interested in continuing down the reservation funnel.
- Build a Pre-launch Email List: each step in the reservation funnel has a purpose. The purpose of the landing page is to collect email addresses.
- Lower Ad Costs: When the landing page is well-designed and streamlined towards a clear CTA, you have a great chance of lowering your ad costs. That’s because if you can build a high-converting landing page, your cost to acquire a lead will drop significantly.
Now, let’s dive into the most important tips for building a crowdfunding pre-launch landing page.
4 tips to build a pre-launch landing page
There are many best practices for designing a landing page that converts, but we’re going to look at the five must-haves. Even if this is the first landing page you’ve ever created, you’ll be able to make one for your product that’s perfectly tuned for crowdfunding. And with this important tool, you’ll be able to determine the likelihood of success for your next Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign before you even launch.
Tip #1: Emphasize clarity in your value proposition
Product positioning is everything in crowdfunding. You have a brand new product that you’re introducing to the world. Why should people pay for it?
Great product positioning means you are effectively communicating the value proposition of your product to your target audience. If you’re not getting good conversion rates with your landing page, it’s a sign that either your audience targeting is off base, or your landing page isn’t convincing your target audience that your product can solve a problem they have.
To best emphasize clarity in your value proposition, we stress a simplistic design that uses quality over quantity. With the basic structure of a headline, body copy, and an image, you can achieve your desired conversion rate as long as each of these components are optimized for good product positioning. We’ll explore real examples of this later.
Tip #2: Design a compelling CTA (call to action)
The important thing about your CTA is that it’s about the sum of its parts. An effective CTA is more than a clever phrase that tells someone to give you their email address, it’s how well each component of your funnel propels visitors to naturally continue further down the funnel.
The key to accomplishing this is having a strategy going in. The strategy for your landing page design starts to reveal itself once you start answering specific questions about your target audience. Are you targeting men or women? What age are they? What lifestyle do they live? What products do they typically buy?
When you start to narrow down the specifics of your audience, the blueprint for design will start to reveal itself. This results in a landing page geared toward a hyper-specific audience and serves as a natural CTA as they travel down your funnel.
Tip #3: Highlight product benefits with simplicity
The landing page is your first opportunity to go into some depth about your product’s various benefits. One common pitfall, however, is the temptation to over-explain every aspect of your product. Don’t do this!
Simplicity and clarity are the mantra to live by here. The majority of people won’t read everything you’ve written on the landing page, and many might even feel compelled to bounce if the page is too wordy. The most important benefits and why the reader should care about it should be communicated in easy-to-understand headlines. Supplemental info can be included in body copy or bullet points, but only if it’s succinct.
Tip #4: Incorporate engaging visual elements
The importance of visuals throughout the entire crowdfunding process can’t be understated, but they are especially important for your landing page. This is your chance to really impress visitors and prove that your product is legit.
Product imagery takes your positioning and brings it to life. Every feature, benefit, and use case should be clearly conveyed through your visual assets. We always recommend photography if you have prototypes of the product, but photorealistic renderings can be just as effective if photography is not an option. You might think you’d be at a disadvantage with renders, but the data we’ve gathered suggests the difference is minimal.
Getting the perfect photos or renders may take time to get right, but that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult. We suggest investing in professional services to make sure these are top-notch. The best part is that if your photos perform well in your reservation funnel, you can use them again when you design your product’s campaign page.
8 best pre-launch landing page examples to inspire your crowdfunding campaign
With our four tips for great landing page design in mind, let’s explore eight Indiegogo and Kickstarter pre-launch landing page examples from successful campaigns that used the LaunchBoom system. We’ll look at a different aspect of each product’s landing page, and what about it helped drive conversions. Hopefully, you’ll be able to draw inspiration for your own design.
1. Polycade Sente
We’ll start by looking at Polycade Sente, a Kickstarter campaign that was able to raise $1,050,872 on the first day of its launch. The screenshot above is of the hero section of their pre-launch landing page and was a major contributor in driving conversions.
Hero sections are the first thing people see when they land on the page. It consists of the three components we touched on earlier: a headline, body copy, and an image. Polycade used the headline, “The Only Arcade Machine You’ll Ever Need,” to immediately convey the most resonant value of their product. It’s customizable, it’s high quality, it can come with virtually any arcade game you could want, and it looks stunning. All of this gets conveyed in just a few lines of copy and one incredible photo at the top of the landing page.
The last key component of any good hero section is having the CTA located directly below it. While we can’t expect everybody to immediately put down their reservation after just the hero section, this CTA immediately lets them know of the action we eventually want them to take. The exact CTA also gets placed at other points further down the landing page, so that we can catch them at any point while they are reading about the product.
2. Botany
Botany is a Victorian-Era-themed board game centered around flowers, and it recently raised $1,057,307 on Kickstarter. For their crowdfunding pre-launch landing page, they showed how a combination of both photography and illustrations can create powerful visuals that can draw people in.
These are two features of the game, combining high-quality artwork and minimal copy. Instead of spending paragraphs explaining how gameplay works and what the cards do in the context of the game, they focus on the aesthetic quality of the game.
If you have a game you’d like to launch, don’t underestimate the power of visuals. Even the most balanced and nuanced gameplay mechanics might be tough to convey on a landing page compared to a beautiful design.
3. Nitropress
Who doesn’t love a smooth nitro cold brew? Well, the creators of the Nitropress thought the same, so they decided to launch their product on Kickstarter to the tune of £649,688. Let’s look at how they explain their product on their pre-launch landing page.
Some important things to remember when launching a new device are to show (1) that it works and (2) how it works. Nitropress demonstrates how to do this efficiently and effectively on their landing page. Using an uncomplicated design, they’ve boiled their how-to section down to three easy steps accompanied by clear photography with a real person using the product and succinct copy.
4. The Crooked Moon
This section from The Crooked Moon pre-launch landing page demonstrates how the product helped dictate design of the page. This is a folk horror tabletop RPG, so they went with a darker landing page design that would enhance the look and feel of the product.
Additionally, some of their copy and headline choices fit the theme of the game. Phrases like “Bewitching Atmosphere,” and “Terrify your players,” are used to great effect to help convey the fantastical elements of the design. We always recommend that creators lean into these aspects of their product. Just remember to test copy and headlines anyway, because we want to make data-driven decisions over purely taste-driven.
The Crooked Moon went on to raise $4,020,234 on Kickstarter.
5. Ring One
Ring One, a smart wearable device that raised $1,675,146 on Indiegogo, showcases how renders can be used to great effect on a pre-launch landing page.
In the section highlighted above, they are clearly demonstrating various use cases and lifestyles that a user of the Ring One might engage in. Notice anything about the ring in these photos? They aren’t real!
Regardless, we’ve seen across hundreds of product launches that renders — when done well — don’t significantly hurt conversion rates. What’s important, like on Ring One’s landing page, is to focus on features and illustrate them in a way that create resonance with the target audience.
6. Xebec Snap
Landing pages aren’t just disposed of after the pre-launch phase is over, they can be repurposed for your live campaign marketing push as well. Xebec Snap, a laptop attachment that launched on Kickstarter and raised $692,303, shows how you can use the same basic landing page design, but just make an important tweak to set it up for mid-campaign marketing.
Their CTA at the bottom of the hero section was changed to “Visit our Kickstarter campaign,” because people were still being fed ads on Meta platforms. Like with the reservation funnel, we want them to land on this page, but the end goal is now to back directly on the campaign page instead of putting down a reservation. Leading users here first allows them to get a preview of the product and it informs them that there is an active crowdfunding campaign. Sending them directly to a campaign page can be incredibly disorienting.
7. Bear Mountain Camping Adventure
If the product you’re launching was designed for the great outdoors, you better make sure you photograph it being used outside. If your product is an outdoor-themed board game, you can apply the same logic with your visuals just like Bear Mountain Camping Adventure.
This board game, which launched on Kickstarter and raised $781,450, is all about bringing the sense of camping and adventure to whatever tabletop you’re playing on. The creators of the game took a fun approach with their photography by accentuating the theme by shooting it outdoors to show off the aesthetics of the game.
8. Xnote
Lastly, we have Xnote, a revolutionary smart pen that turns written notes into a digital, AI-generated copy. This unique selling point may be hard to convey convincingly on a landing page without a video, but the product creators decided to use the next best thing: a gif.
Long, embedded videos can weigh a landing page down, so gifs are a powerful alternative. The hero section features the standard headline, copy, and image, but the gif included below the landing page really demonstrates the capabilities of this product.
Launching hardware that makes bold claims can sometimes be a tough sell for potential backers, so having more than just static images can go a long way in generating conversions. Thanks to the help of their well-designed landing page and marketing assets like the demonstration gif, Xnote was able to exceed their funding goal and raise $259,394 on Kickstarter.
Best pre-launch landing page examples: Frequently asked questions
Why Is a pre-launch landing page important for a crowdfunding campaign?
Crowdfunding pre-launch landing pages serve two primary functions: educating potential backers about your product and leading them down your reservation funnel so that they put a $1 down payment to be able to access your best discount come launch day. People who reserve in this way are 30x more likely to back your crowdfunding campaign.
Can I use templates for my pre-launch landing page?
Absolutely. LaunchBoom LaunchKit is our proprietary software designed to templatize much of the crowdfunding pre-launch process, including the landing page. If you’d like to learn more about LaunchKit and its pre-launch landing page templates, click here to set up an appointment with one of our product launch experts.
How early should I set up my pre-launch landing page before the crowdfunding campaign?
It’s important to have the pre-launch landing page up at least a few months before you plan to launch. This gives you enough time to test different product positioning strategies and gather enough data and VIPs to tell you if your launch will be a success. Read this article for a more detailed look into how long before your campaign a pre-launch should be.
Should my pre-launch landing page include a video?
We don’t typically recommend that creators include videos on their pre-launch landing pages. They can be time-consuming to make, and may affect the user experience of people on the page. If you feel strongly about having moving imagery to demonstrate something about your product, opt for a gif or animation instead.
Can social media be integrated with pre-launch landing pages?
Our pre-launch landing page templates don’t come with social media integration, because we find it’s best to give users less to click on that will bounce them from the funnel. Instead, give them ample CTAs to lead them further toward making a reservation.
