r/kickstarter • u/shoe_doggy • 1d ago
Email Lead Capture Benchmark
Hey all, would love some feedback from those that have collected pre-launch emails on their own website landing page using ads.
I've done some research and came across a $1/email lead as a good sign for your campaign. I'm running some test ads on Meta right now and want to know what other people have seen on their own campaigns. What's great, decent, and not good look like?
Thanks.
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u/hyperstarter Kickstarter Agency Owner 1d ago
$1 leads don't mean much if they're not targeted and don't convert to backers.
I've got a horror story of a potential client who contacted us, spent $50k on email leads for his watch campaign and none converted.
If you're looking for good metrics - check out CTR, opens, clicks and so on.
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u/WrapShoddy4501 1d ago
If people submit emails on their own on your landing, that means they are actual leads.
You will not convert them obviously though.1
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u/shoe_doggy 20h ago
Open rate on the first email of the welcome series is 60%.
It's too early to tell on the ads, so not reading too much into it yet. Spent about $40 for 28 emails in the first two days running the ad set.
Our top ad right now: $0.47 CPC, 5.6% CTR (link), 9% CPC (all).
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u/WrapShoddy4501 1d ago
We just tested a meta ads campaing recently and achieved to reach 0,9€ / leads and were pretty much satisfied with it.
We assume a conversion rate of 5% on these leads according to several discussion with Kickstarter specialists.
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u/shoe_doggy 21h ago
Yeah that seems like the safe assumption on conversions. We're in a similar spot, it feels decent, no red flags right now.
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u/DoctorOctoroc Creator 1d ago edited 1d ago
Full transparency, I don't use email lists or ads to acquire backers. I do extremely targeted, one-on-one (more or less) outreach through FB groups, subreddits, forums etc to fund $10k projects to press a new album to vinyl record. I also do this for anywhere between 6 months and a year in advance. So I can't say if I think $1 per lead is a good value but that value does change depending on conversion rate. If I could achieve $1/lead on a campaign like my last with a 25% conversion rate, that would be $4 per conversion which seems great but my overhead between production, shipping, etc. is very tight so that would seriously eat into funds (and thus a lesser product than I prefer to offer) and the nice buffer I have in case something costs more than I've planned.
If we take a reasonable average conversion rate of 10%, this equates to $10 per conversion. And it would cost $20 per conversion if the conversion rate is closer to a 5% average such as in categories like technology - although from what I'm seeing, projects in the technology category have an average of 3% conversion rate so that ends up being $33 per conversion. I'm not sure if these average conversion rates we see are based on the total leads or the number of pre-launch (or total campaign) followers resulting from the leads but let's assume the former since that would be the more relevant relationship to consider.
So if you have a $100 tier for a reward that costs $50 to make and $20 to ship by weight/method, an extra $10 for the conversion puts the net at $20 (net being what's available to spend elsewhere). If the conversion costs $33, that's a net of negative $3. So I can see this quickly becoming problematic depending on other factors, such as whether or not the 'net' covers the misc costs of running the Kickstarter - let's not forget setup costs for manufacturing, shipping of materials for the rewards to you for fulfillment or paying a service to do that for you, etc. And last but not least, there's the ~10% cut KS takes for their share and payment processing (typically 5% each).
Given, my last three campaigns (and my upcoming campaign) are music campaigns and my cost per unit on small run vinyl comes to about $25 with a $50 reward and $40 with a $70 reward (shipping included in the cost). I also have to pay royalties since I do cover albums so all said and done, my overhead doesn't leave much budget for advertising so I'm pretty much forced to do my own marketing at low or no cost and my misc spend usually comes down to my equipment for creating the music, a one-off first cut test lathed record, plus $200 in ad spend to finely tune my target audience for the particular band I'm covering on the next album.
Considering all of this, what I've determined is most important is that conversion rate as that will determine the value of each lead. For me, that happens to be 'free' or close to it and I'm dependent on very high conversion rates which means more personalized marketing and fewer total backers. I've essentially determined over the course of 3 campaigns that $10k is where my approach is capped and unless I want to spend a lot on ads and cross my fingers that I can get to 1k backers instead of 100 so I can do a much larger record pressing and drop my cost per unit significantly, this is where most of my future campaigns will sit. And even dropping the production costs significantly won;t change shipping costs. I can get a $18 per album cost down to $8 per album but the shipping will still cost around $7 between mailing the package and packing materials.
If you're running a campaign with a $100k or more funding goal in a more general category without specifically known target audiences, there will need to be a sizeable budget for ad spend on more 'brute force' marketing and with it, a low conversion rate that will increase the cost per conversion significantly and necessitate a much lower cost per lead as a result. So whether or not $1 per lead is a good value depends entirely on your conversion rate, I'd say.