Ok, ok… The Coolest Kickstarter campaign has wrapped up and (spoiler alert) we didn’t reach our funding goal. I’m proud we hit the elusive six-figure mark coming in at $102,188 during our 30 day campaign, but we just couldn’t quite get to the more elusive $125k goal I set.

My next post will talk more about the reasons I believe we missed the mark, but right now I want to tell you more about what we did during the campaign to bring in the eyeballs and try to drive more sales. The fixed window of crowdfunding campaigns is both a blessing and a curse, but it does force you to examine your assumptions and strategy almost daily if you aren’t getting the results you need.

Our plan for driving traffic was to initially cast a wide net to see what was effective, then focus our efforts on what was working. Here’s what we tried:

• Email friends and family
• Launch party
• Facebook (personal, professional)
• Twitter (professional)
• Facebook ads
• Twitter celebrity paid posts
• Email blast
• Blogger outreach
• Media outreach
• Press Release (multiple written by team)
• Paid professional media Press Release
• Event marketing (taking the Coolest prototype to football tailgates)
• Interviews
• Newsletters
• Instructables.com project
• Kickstarter project updates

I tried sooo many different ways to bring in traffic in the hopes that you wouldn’t have to. I thought I might be able to figure out a formula that would be effective across many different campaigns, but that just didn’t happen. At the bottom of this article you can see how many sales came from each avenue, as shown by the Kickstarter dashboard.

A big challenge is that it’s very hard to track what’s working because of the limited analytics that Kickstarter shares with you. You can find out how many sales came from a particular site or destination, but you just don’t know how many visitors stopped by. Sharing that data would be at the top of my wish list for a Kickstarter platform upgrade. Without that data you’re forced to rely on 3rd party solutions like Bit.ly link shortening to find out if anyone clicked on your link from that particular outreach.

Some of the techniques we used to get lots of eyeballs (FB ads) brought in plenty of curious people, but they just weren’t interested in supporting the project. Another concept that on paper showed potential ended up not getting a single supporter (Twitter paid post). I’m glad we tried them, but you won’t be seeing them in the Coolest re-launch this spring.

In the end our most effective way to get traffic that actually ended up supporting the project to our Kickstarter page came from two sources. The first was directly reaching out to people I knew and asking them to reach out to their network for me. If you know people who love your idea, chances are they have some like-minded friends. You’ll be surprised which of your friends and family help out and which ones don’t. Hedge your bets and start connecting to new friends, communities, and blogs at least a couple of months before you launch. You can bet that over the next four months or so I’ll be very activelyreaching out and connecting with all sorts of people who are fans of tailgating, camping, smoothies and any other demographic that ties in with my product.

The other (somewhat) effective strategy was getting press releases out to our target blogs and sites. I say somewhat because we just didn’t get enough sites to cover us during the launch to really build the buzz we needed. An earlier reach-out plan would have helped, but it turns out that even the Coolest cooler is still not that newsworthy in the middle of winter. Our self launched, self written press releases had next to no impact on driving traffic. Publishing a press releases is one step in getting media exposure, but if you can find a marketing team with contacts in your industry they can follow up with, I would highly suggest adding them to your team.

The other item worth mentioning is taking your product out and showing it off. We brought the Coolest to football tailgates and if I could have sold them on the spot we would have crushed our goal. Unfortunately it’s just not feasible to have people create account on Kickstarter on the spot, especially after explaining what the heck crowdfunding is anyway. If you make up cards or flyers that’s fine, but FIRST get their email! We had many more sales through email follow-up than people who actually typed in the URL from the cards the next day with a tailgating hangover.

My takeaway on crowdfunding traffic is that it’s fine to secretly hope your project will be a featured pick, or your video will go viral. Just remember that you move from “lottery-ticket odds” to double-digit chances for success if you first have a solid foundation of people who are likely to back your campaign, connect you with other supporters, and help spread the word in place.

If you want to to get updates on the progress of the Coolest re-launch, you can sign up at CoolestKickstarter.com. We just had an awesome meeting with our designers and should have a some sketches of the production design in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s the sales/traffic breakdown from the Kickstarter dashboard. Let me know if you have other ideas for attracting supporters before a launch in the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’m so excited! The COOLEST is live and up on Kickstarter here:

We’ve had an amazingly successful first day so far and we’re just getting started.

Heres are a few of my take-aways on launch day:

1. You won’t know what traffic will be effective so start diverse. We’ve put time and effort into getting exposure from lots of avenues, but our traffics patterns and conversions were a surprise. Now we can take this data and refine our strategy along the way.

2. Manage your messaging. Your family and friend are most likely to back you right off the bat. Allow them time to support you before you blast out to a larger, lesser known group. Casual visitors are more likely to fund a campaign that already has some contributions in place.

3. Do MORE beforehand. We had an aggressive launch window we were shooting for, and I feel good that we hit it. That said I would feel better if I had slept more hours in the last few days than I have fingers.

4. You can’t know what kind of interest people will have for any reward level until you get started. For example, our highest tier reward level disappeared in less than 3 hours!

5. Show your appreciation. It’s likely that when you launch a crowdfunding campaign you’ll have help from others. Maybe this is technical help, or even just a wonderful spouse carrying a bigger load to give you time to prepare your campaign. Make sure to take a few moments- especially at the peak of hecticness- and show your gratitude.

What do you want to know about the first day launching a crowdfunding campaign?