How to Create Catchy Kickstarter and Indiegogo Rewards

Crowdfunding campaigns are becoming more and more popular and the major crowdfunding player are Kickstarter and Indiegogo, when you launch a crowdfunding campaign on these platforms you should definitely aim to reach the goal by offering catchy rewards.

The purpose of a crowdfunding campaign is to raise money to finance an innovative project and people contribute just because they believe in it.

Initially, rewards were not a fundamental part of the crowdfunding process, but as crowdfunding popularity began to grow more and more people would be interested in having the final product in their hands, that's where the whole reward system came out.

Rewards on Kickstarter and Indiegogo are not only satisfactory for the backers, they are also an opportunity for the creator of the campaign to generate pledges and create buzz around their campaign page, it's a win-win situation!

These rewards have become a fundamental part of a crowdfunding campaign, but it's not easy to generate attractive rewards that push people to back and participate, so let's see what are the steps to follow to create catchy rewards.

Before reading the article...

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1. MAKE THE FIRST STEPS

Before thinking about rewarding a t-shirt or a multipack version of your product you should start from zero and think about basic questions like what's my product's target?

That's where you should start building your buyer persona and think about what they people need and how your product could help them. These are the people who will be the most motivated to see your project succeed, so you need to offer rewards that will entice them. Understand who your backers are you should definitely split that audience into segments like age, location, industry etc. After doing it you will be able to target a reward to each segment in your audience.

For example, if your core reward is a pair of earphones, and your audience is composed of friends, teenagers, tech enthusiasts, people looking for a unique gift, and those who like your idea and want to see it become reality. These are the groups you need to target.

2. START WITH $1 REWARD

After creating a list of your goals for your different backer levels, you need to associate a reward that goes with each amount.

When planning your reward always start with 4 amounts, then you can always add others, but the most important thing to set before publishing the campaign are few amounts, all of them should set a precise level of perk, for example, a low-budget one $1 to $5 offering a thank you card or a mention on the product page, a small but consistent level that goes from $10 to $30 offering a special invitation to an event, a medium level from $30 to $50 offering a signed card of the product, gadgets, electonic version of your product (e-book, app, videogame etc), then the higher level from $100 and more including the physical product plus all the previous rewards. This is just an idea, then the more creative options you can offer to make people back you the better!

Don't be scared to add low-priced rewards, always remember that people would like to participate and be part of the project without spending a lot of money. Actually, there's a whole strategy behind the $1 dollar reward and it can create more buzz than you think. Since $1 dollar is very easy to spend a lot of backers will contribute with $1 and it will ''hack'' the platform algorithm as it sees that your campaign is being visited and backed by a lot of people. This may lead your campaign to be featured by Kickstarter or Indiegogo. It is worth to try right?

Also backers who pledge will get your project updates in their inbox from then on, so you get to engage them and show them your project. The hope is that they’ll get to know your project day by day, they might become passionate about it and later on, they’ll increase their pledge to get you product. Some backers would just buy the $1 level just to show their individual support. However, you could really play with creativity with this reward to make people have fun and back it!

Just look at this example of different rewards proposals from my client Frescopod:

3. KEEP IT SIMPLE AND CATCHY

It is common to think that it's better to offer a big range of choices to make everyone satisfied, but it's not like this, remember to keep it simple and keep backers focused. It’s not always a great idea to offer people lots of options some people will be overwhelmed by a choice of 20 colors.

If your product comes in more than one variation it's better to not offer all the options at once. Instead, start with one or two varieties and introduce other options as stretch goals as we talked about on my previous article. This approach will ensure you don’t overwhelm your backers with tons of information, create incentives for stretch goals and reduce the cost of your campaign.

Another important point to keep in mind is ''the scarcity effect'', which will ensure your rewards a feeling of exclusivity. Scarcity increases desirability and gives backers that but that rewards a sense of uniqueness. This secret sauce behind most crowdfunding platforms subconsciously pushes backers to act now due to the implicit time/quantity constraint.

Limiting the number of rewards you offer at some levels creates a buzz around your campaign. Backers can see a reward is selling out quickly and are motivated to act. Take for example the early bird discount, which takes a reward tier reserved for fans and brings it to a level a core backer might consider accessible.

Make sure to keep it ''catchy'', post your rewards always with clear visuals that catch the eye of the backers, use good quality pictures, brilliant colors or make a gif showing your product reward, they’re engaging and a great way to explain the functionality of your product. 

4. OFFER EXCLUSIVITY

As we already said, the feeling of exclusivity is key. A backer should feel ''lucky'' to have managed to buy you a super-limited reward, but let's not stop here. Remember that you can always use the up-sell strategy, try selling complementary rewards to those who opted for your main perk. You have to make backers say ''I really need this'', so focus on your product and think about what you can add in order to offer the up-sell option.

How to do this? Keep in mind that creators use updates just to say thank you to backers, but you can introduce new rewards in your updates as well. Be professional, use updates to up-sell (and say thank you, of course). You can add an extra buzz with a limited-time offer, for example, this reward will only be available for 78 hours, creating an incentive to take quick action.

Now let's talk about another exclusive option: secret perks. Indiegogo recently announced this innovative feature, these secret perks which you can personalize to your loyal backers and early adopters. People can access and see this secret perk only if you sent them a particular URL.

For example, you can tailor a specific perk to reach out to influencers making them feel special. It can be also a thank you note with a special discount for those who contributed to your campaign in your preparation stage. You can also incentivize your community to become an early backer and get your Secret perk. Choose something exclusive that your community will be excited to get before anyone else!

WRAPPING IT UP

This is it for today, creators, rewards have an essential role to increase the popularity of your campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, they can help you create buzz around your campaign and incentive people into backing your campaign, so make sure to plan them really well and think about the target for your product, also BE CREATIVE!

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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