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How Smart Armor Raised Over $1.500,000 in Ecommerce Pre-Orders

A case study on how we raised over $500,000.00 in pre-orders for the Smart Cube in 45 days on Indiegogo through crowdfunding digital marketing strategy.
$1.5M
FIRST 90 DAYS
$0.75
AVG. CPL
3.2X
FACEBOOK ROAS
Hero Smart Cube Indiegogo Launch
Problem

Smart Armor created an innovative product but needed money to develop and manufacture without selling much equity.

Solution

Build an email list prior to launch, pre-order through crowdfunding and scale with eCommerce.

Results

Over $1.5 million in pre-orders allowed Smart Armor to fund development and manufacturing while retaining equity.

CASE STUDY: LAUNCHING THE SMART CUBE ON INDIEGOGO

Meet the Smart Cube: Lock Anything, From Anywhere

The Smart Cube is a perfect solution for securing your home and office. Whether you’re in need of a convenient way to protect your belongings, or you are a college student keeping your roommates out of your personal belongings — the Smart Cube is the world’s first and most advanced Bluetooth smart lock solution.

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ABOUT THE SMART CUBE

A Smart Lock for Smart Homes

The Smart Cube is an internet-of-things (IoT) product that allows you to turn any cabinet or drawer into a smart lock. It can be controlled by any smart device to lock/unlock, share access, and receive alerts if someone tries to break into your cabinet/drawer. This technology allows parents to secure medicine and chemical cabinets to protect their children, roommates to lock valuables, professionals to lock documents, and more…

Smart Armor Case Study eCommerce

The Smart Cube is a child brand of Smart Armor, a leader in digital locking security platforms that empowers consumers to lock, track, and share access to cabinets and drawers through their smart devices. Smart Armor’s mission is to provide the most robust B2B smart locking and access point tracking solution.

Child Safety Medicine Chemical Valuables
PRODUCT LAUNCH MARKETING STRATEGY

Launching the Smart Cube on Indiegogo

The Smart Armor team decided to launch the Smart Cube on Indiegogo as the platform allows the company to pre-sell their product and use the raised funds for tooling, app development, and manufacturing. The crowdfunding product launch model enables startups to fund and test their ideas with virtually no risk or initial investment.

Crowdfunding is the perfect solution to test product viability, marketing message, and find the most targeted audience. Ultimately, crowdfunding is a highly rewarding marketing exercise.

How Crowdfunding Works:

harpia ecommerce growth blueprint 1

1. Launch Project on Indiegogo

harpia customer value journey

2. Start Collecting Pre-Orders

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3. Manufacture & Deliver

Marketing Challenges

  1. Find out if people are willing to pre-order the Smart Cube on Indiegogo even though they will only receive the product one year later.
  2. Build an email subscriber list with over 10,000 emails from scratch 30-days before the campaign launches.
  3. Build enough trust to ask people to pre-order the Smart Cube on a crowdfunding website.
  4. Find what is the most profitable targeted audience and message (this is an innovative product).
  5. Educate people about the benefits of Internet-of-Things (IoT) products.
Smart Cube Lock IoT App
THE HARPIA METHOD: A PROVEN FORMULA TO SUCCESS

Crowdfunding Product Launch Strategy

Launching a product on a crowdfunding platform, such as Indiegogo or Kickstarter, could be challenging as there are hundreds — if not thousands — of products live. The competition to become a “featured project” is immense. To beat the market and stay on the top of these crowdfunding website pages you need to be extremely strategic about your launch.

To reduce the risks associated with a crowdfunding product launch, our strategy was to break down the product launch into four phases:

1. Validate

Test Product Viability

2. Engage

Create the Buzz on Social Media

3. Launch

Start Collecting Pre-Orders

3. Scale

Transition to eCommerce

1. Validate

Test Crowdfunding Product Viability

In this phase, we test the product’s viability through Facebook Advertising to ensure product success on Indiegogo. The KPI used to measure pre-launch success is Cost-per-Lead (CPL). If the Facebook Campaign generates leads for under $1.50 and has a large serviceable market, the product will be most likely to succeed via crowdfunding.

In addition, this phase is when we test brand positioning, price-points, copywriting, imagery and crowdfunding page layout. The results of these A/B tests can define whether the campaign will succeed on Indiegogo or not.

Ads Tested on this Phase:

2. Engage

Create the Buzz on Social Media

A well-planned pre-launch campaign guarantees the product launch success. This phase’s goal is to generate social media buzz so we can have an active day 1 — so we can create what we call “The Green-Bar Effect.” In other words, when a project gets funded during the first 72 hours, it builds credibility and captures the media attention — free PR and exposure. To do so, we need to build a pre-launch email list so that we can blast a hyper-targeted email campaign to generate sales on day one.

After running our projections, we decided that we needed at least 10,000 emails to push a strong day 1 and reach our $50,000 goal within 72 hours.

Our Pre-Launch Lead Generation Approach Consisted of:

Facebook Advertising

Lead Generation Landing Pages

Viral Giveaway Promotions

Educational Email Series

smart cube lock iot alcohol lifestyle
3. Launch

Collect Pre-Orders and Get Funded

Now that the project is live, we transitioned our advertising goal from lead generation to direct sales. Instead of collecting emails, we are now sending traffic straight to Indiegogo targeting our pre-launch lookalike audiences and generating sales at over 3x. Sending traffic to Indiegogo also helped their algorithm to recognize us as a highly-engaging project, which led us to rank better on the platform.

Here is a Screenshot of our Indiegogo Page:

smart cube lock product launch indiegogo campaign
A PROVEN PRODUCT LAUNCH STRATEGY

Our Staggering Campaign Results

$500,296

Dollars Raised

3525

Backers

479%

Funded in 45 Days

40,000

Email Subscribers

I have had the pleasure of working together with Harpia for years, since the inception of our project. They are very talented & diligent and deeply understand the trends within the online marketing industry. I highly recommend them.

Our Indiegogo Campaign was Featured on:

cnet now this tech crunch product hunt digital trends
ABOUT
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Harpia is an ecommerce growth agency merging human relationship psychology with intuitive technology. The Harpia Method has helped ecommerce stores skyrocket sales with an effective customer journey, sales funnel and kick-ass digital marketing strategies.

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Become the hero of your own ecommerce brand’s success.

Contact us to discuss how the Harpia Method can help you increase sales, average orders, and retention on your ecommerce store. ​

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