How To Increase Your Conversion Rate By 30x On Your Next Campaign

At LaunchBoom, building a highly qualified pre-launch email list is a key part of our launch strategy. This pre-launch email list is how we get our projects funded in the first 24 hours (which is where “LaunchBoom” comes from!). Building an email list isn’t an innovative concept, but the way we approach it is way more than just collecting email addresses… and it leads to a list that’s 30x more likely to convert.

The biggest challenge with building an email list before you launch is measuring how qualified that list is. (By qualified, we mean email subscribers who are likely to actually back your campaign when it goes live.) We wrestled with this question for a long time, and we tried a lot of different things to figure it out. LaunchBoom even hired a data scientist to analyze our campaign metrics and our email list to see if there was a connection that we were missing. When he didn’t find anything, we wondered if we would just be guessing forever.

In 2017, we stumbled upon our answer almost by accident. One of our team members found a product that wasn’t launching through crowdfunding, but that was doing something really interesting: instead of just collecting email addresses, the company was asking for a $1 deposit. That small deposit allowed the potential buyer to reserve the product at the best discount when it launched on the website.

We knew right away that this idea could be the answer we’d been searching for. LaunchBoom CEO Mark Pecota contacted the founder of the project for the details, and this is what he learned:

1. Making a purchase on a website (even for $1) is a much better indicator of purchase intent than just providing an email address
2. By tracking those that make $1 deposits, you can optimize Facebook advertisements for $1 deposits vs. leads

We started testing the strategy within a week and, in time, saw that this reservation funnel system was exactly what we had been searching for.

How our Reservation Funnel works

The reservation funnel is actually easy to understand at a high level but it took a lot of fine-tuning to get it to where it is. We’ve done a lot of testing over the years, and we’re at the point where we don’t launch a pre-campaign landing page without one!

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Facebook/Instagram Ad

The user sees an ad we’re running on Facebook or Instagram and clicks on it. They’re taken to a landing page for the product.

Step 2: Landing Page Signup

After clicking on the ad, the user is sent to a landing page. The call to action on that page is to submit their email address so we can notify them when we launch the product.

Step 3: Reservation Signup

After getting the user’s email, we then send them to a second page asking them to put down the $1 deposit. In exchange, these VIPs reserve the product at the best discount we’ll ever offer.

Step 4: VIP Facebook Group

Everyone who puts down the $1 deposit is invited to a closed VIP Facebook group. In it, the founder is available to answer questions and interact with these VIPs, and the VIPs can interact with each other. These VIP-only groups do a great job of fostering community before the campaign launches.

How much better does our Reservation Funnel work?

The short answer: a lot better.

By now, we’ve had years of running reservation funnels, and we’ve been able to gather a lot of data. After crunching all the numbers, we’re confident in saying that people who put down a reservation are, on average, 30x more likely to back a campaign at launch than people who just sign up for the email list.

By using the reservation funnel, LaunchBoom is able to:

1. Optimize ads for purchase intent vs. lead intent
2. Allocate ad budget more effectively and get a higher return on ad spend (ROAS)
3. Build a community of people that is 30x more likely to buy a product when we launch

LaunchBoom has been able to use the reservation funnel to consistently drive the best returns for our clients on pre-launch email lists. Nobody else in the industry even gets close to these kinds of results! What’s more, we’re continuing to innovate and optimize the reservation funnel, and each iteration is better than the last. We’re excited to see where it goes in the future!

Want to learn more about the reservation funnel and LaunchBoom’s system for launching a product, building a brand, and raising millions? Click here to watch our free training!