100,000 Emails Collected In One Week: Harry's Razor

Gathering 100,000 emails in one week, is it possible??

Yes it is, that's how Harry's, a man-grooming brand, managed to launch a successful product on the market! We're not talking about a crowdfunding campaign, but this strategy could be applied to your campaign too.

When launching a crowdfunding campaign the most important phase is the pre-launch as I always tell my clients, this part is the most important one because it's when people start acknowledging your project and get involved in it. The more you involve people the more potential backers will be there on your launch day.

During your pre-launch phase, one of the most important steps is e-mail gathering in order to keep your contact constantly updated on your project.

Let's see how Harry's team managed to reach this success through some simple steps.

Before reading the article...

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HOW HARRY'S STARTED

Harry's is a razor company born in 2012, they started small and grew quickly. They now have more than 600+ employees, an online store, a barbershop in New York, and an online magazine called Five O’Clock. In January 2014, 10-month-old Harry's announced it had raised a $122.5 million investment round from Tiger Global, Thrive Capital, Highland Capital, and SV Angel. At the same time, Harry’s announced it would be purchasing Feintechnik both the company and its 93-year-old factory in Germany. By doing so, they added 600 people to their team. Today, you can find Harry’s products on their website at harrys.com and at more than 65 men’s boutiques and hotels across the country.

But how did they manage to get to the top? By following and implementing a successful referral strategy.

Much of the success of week one was due to what they did in the previous months. One week before Harry's e-commerce site went live, they gathered emails from nearly 100,000 people who were eager to learn more about Harry’s. We had collected those email addresses thanks to a one-week-long prelaunch campaign, that we're gonna see right now.

1. PAVE THE WAY IN ADVANCE

Harry's team idea for the pre-launch was built around the belief that the most powerful and effective way to be introduced to a new company was through a credible referral. For this reason, they focused on building a campaign that helped people to spread the word to their friends.

Before the launch, the creators of Harry's brand spent a couple of months meeting friends, entrepreneurs, and virtually anyone else who would be interested in knowing more about what's their new brand was about. The most important thing is whether or not people could be interested in the razors, they focused the attention on their story, to involve more people. Soon that list of people became a couple hundred long by the launch, and they created the campaign to help that group of people publicly share in the excitement of Harry's launch.

After taking some inspiration from other famous startups they decided to try the referral mechanism in order to spread the word about their new product.

2. HARRY'S SUCCESFUL REFERRAL MECHANISM

Starting from the visual, the user interface of the campaign was relatively simple just a two-page microsite where people entered their email addresses on a splash page. This first step was essential since to capture emails both for their list and to use it as an identifier for tracking referrals.

The copy on the splash page was, “Respecting the face, and wallet since like right now.” The copy was intended to be playful and introduce people to the purpose of the brand but also leave some mystery. The only visual was the picture of Harry's razors and no more information about the company or product... that's catchy!

The call to action words was STEP INSIDE, easy and friendly like an invitation to come and discover Harry's world. Above the field was a small drawing of a key to reinforce for early customers that they were getting insider access, which made people feel special.

The second page was where the referral mechanisms lived. It contained a shareable link to the splash page specifically coded for the user. Below the link were buttons to share the link through email, Facebook and Twitter with just a click. Now the good part: by sharing the link with friends, users had the opportunity to earn free products. The more friends who signed up using the unique referral link, the bigger the prize user earned. Pretty engaging right?

The actual referral page had a more enigmatic design and copy. A funny picture of a furry mammoth with the words: “Shaving is evolving. Don’t leave your friends behind.” Again, we see that Harry's wanted people to feel that something big was happening to which they had front row seats and the opportunity to invite friends to join them.

3. HOW THE REFERRAL WORKED OUT

The fundamental mechanic of Harry's campaign was a game: complete the challenge of referring friends and earn prizes. It may seem that easy, but creating engaging prizes to make people excited to play and share it it's not easy, you got to create a strategy behind it. That's what worked for them.

First, making rewards tangible: free Harry’s product. On the page, the copy was very clear “Invite Friends and Earn Product.” It was the only message on the page, there was no mystery and left nothing up to interpretation.

Second, placing attainable rewards that were appropriate for actions taken and become increasingly exciting. And here's the real success of Harry's referral strategy. The first award was easily attainable and each subsequent tier wasn’t discouragingly difficult to achieve.

-To earn the first tier prize—a free shave cream—you had to make only five successful referrals.
-The next tier was only five further referrals. If you signed up ten friends, you earned a free razor.
-The jump between tier two and tier three was more significant but still not overwhelming: 25 referrals and you’d receive a shave set with a more premium handle.
-Finally, even the grand prize was within reach: a year of free shaving for those who referred 50 friends. It may seems unachievable but over 200 people achieved the highest referral tier.

Harry's CEO also said that they considered offering a lifetime of free product for 1,000 referrals. But they ultimately decided to scrap that tier, worrying that it would discourage people from participating at all.

4. MAKE IT FUN AND SHAREABLE

To amplify the referral experience, the campaign page included a tracker, pictured above, where users could see how many friends they had referred and what prize they had achieved or almost achieved. The purpose of this tracker was 1. Giving users faith throughout the one-week campaign that we were going to keep our promise and 2. Keeping track of their referrals while also incentivizing users who were close to the subsequent tier to keep sharing. It created real challenges between friends that strived to reach the next tier.

Harry's team also encourage shareability of the page that's why they included social sharing buttons. It's not easy to rely on the users to copy and paste the link.

Right below the custom link field on the page, there were icons for Twitter and Facebook using the standard Twitter and Facebook icons for sharing brought to higher engagement than if you design your own. People are used to them and recognize them immediately.

It's important always to pay attention to small details and to re-consider our beliefs, just like Harry's team did.

Other than pushing the referral strategy they also relied upon friends, family, and business partners. All the team was told to send sample emails to their contacts, in order to share the campaign and the new product.

WRAPPING IT UP

It all went well for Harry's, after producing and shipping the products through coupons to the ''winners'' , they became a well-established company, owning a big e-commerce selling only Harry's products, with a variety of product related to man's grooming.

Why this story could help you?

As I already stated, this strategy could be easily replicated and inspire your pre-launch phase, it's important to make people feel curios abbout your product but your potential backers may also want something back! So make sure to focus on making them feel special and unique, because they're the first people in the worls seeing and supporting your product!

A crowdfunding launch requires a lot of hard work and sacrifices, but I'm sure that it will be worth it in order to start making your dream project come true.

Always remember that before launching your project you will need to analyze and prepare your pre-launch phase to launch your first product, I’ve got you covered with my crowdfunding pre-launch free e-book called ''3 steps to success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo''. 

As always make sure to subscribe to my channel to stay updated on fresh new content that I’m gonna drop there.

Ciao ciao! 

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