How Dappery used Testing, Lookalike Audiences, and a Waitlist to Promote NFTs.

Josh:

Hi. I'm Josh Ledgard and this is the On Growth podcast from KickoffLabs. KickoffLabs has run a lot of campaigns for Web 3-focused companies. The space is on fire and today's guest, Jared Flamm, runs an agency that specializes in the growth of blockchain companies. You learn how KickoffLabs resonates with the Web 3 audience, what sort of social actions you can drive with a contest and why right-clicking on an NFT isn't quite the same as owning it. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the On Growth podcast and give us a five-star rating. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in doing, sign up for free at kickofflabs.com. Enjoy the show.

Hi, Jared.

Jared:

Hey, how's it going?

Josh:

Good. So for anybody listening to our podcast, it's the KickoffLabs On Growth podcast. With me today is Jared Flamm from Dappery.co. He runs an agency that helps people grow a specific type of business, and I'm going to let Jared introduce himself and his agency and the types of campaigns, the types of companies that he's helping people run campaigns for.

Jared:

Yeah. Josh, really appreciate being on this podcast with you. My background has really been rooted in driving growth for startups, primarily user and revenue growth. I started at a B2B email engagement platform really focused around optimizing landing pages for Fortune 500 brands. This was circa 2013, just as landing page builders like KickoffLabs were starting to come out of the woodwork. So I think OnBalance and Instapage and some of those other leading competitors. I now actively manage a growth marketing agency for blockchain projects. So thinking about how can you effectively grow a blockchain project, which is a little bit different than some other typical types of companies here.

Josh:

Cool. Can you tell me how you got into doing growth marketing for startups in the first place? Were you running your own startup? Were you doing that as a side gig for a while? How did you get into that? Were you an engineer? What led you to that path before we get to your current role?

Jared:

Yeah, sure. Great question. So I started off, actually, on the customer success side. So really thinking about how can we provide more value for customers for B2B software platforms. But when I was doing that, I saw a lot of this growth marketing aspect that Sean Ellis introduced around really thinking about optimizing the full funnel and not just the earlier funnel that you typically think about as a marketer. And so I really engaged with that and started working in growth teams across several different startups. So have had a lot of experience working with both large and small teams and then, organically, as I was participating with blockchain projects and kind of just being a community member and helping out, people started reaching out to me for advice, which slowly spurred into being an independent contractor and then building my own small agency to really cater to that niche of growth for blockchain projects.

Josh:

Cool. And what makes blockchain projects so special? Why specialize in that?

Jared:

There's a lot of different answers to that. I think it's the transparency of the blockchain ledger is particularly interesting to me, but in terms of driving growth for blockchain projects, what's interesting is it's so community-oriented. There's such a group of users who are so vastly interested in intricacies of the technology and then also the applications of that technology and it's infective in terms of that energy.

Josh:

Yep.

Jared:

And so as I kind of went down the rabbit hole, I started getting interested myself, but what I was really seeing is that a lot of project leaders weren't thinking about the friction points for users as part of their funnel, and so there appeared kind of an opportunity to help.

Josh:

Could you give us an example of some of those friction points that you've seen in those kind of projects?

Understanding your customers and their demographics and behaviors are really important for expanding your target audience. But what if you don't have much first-party data? What if you don't know if you have product market fit or maybe you don't really have many customers at all?

Jared:

Yeah, I think the largest friction point that affects the majority of blockchain projects is just connecting to a wallet. And so, for those who don't know, having a wallet online in terms of a blockchain project is the place that you would store your token or funds, and it's also the way that you generally interact with those applications. But the process of actually connecting your wallet is a little bit difficult from a UX perspective than what people are typically used to. And so what you can typically see when you look at funnels of projects is there's this real big drop-off point where somebody lands on the website or the page or the application, but then actually connecting maybe 20 or less percent actually go through the process of setting up for the first time. And that's pretty universal across the projects that I've worked with. That's one there, and then also just, given that a lot of projects are open source, there's just a lot less effort being put into identifying those UX friction points and thinking about kind of UI design.

Our hypothesis was that the incentive mechanisms that are baked into the KickoffLabs landing page software would lead to a higher conversion rate of email addresses, which is the primary action point that we wanted users landing on our page to take. And that users also sharing the page would lead to more visits, giving us more data, which ultimately allows us to target even better.

Josh:

Absolutely. When you're so technology focused, I think, sometimes the project managers get caught up in, "There's this cool technology and look what we've done" and not thinking about people that don't understand the technology deeply, what their flow looks like. So this kind of takes us to the point where we've talked about why blockchain and, specifically, what's interesting to you about working with blockchain projects. Can you tell us how you found KickoffLabs or what you were looking to do with these blockchain projects that led you to KickoffLabs?

Jared:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So most people listening to this podcast probably know that understanding your customers and their demographics and behaviors are really important for expanding your target audience. But what if you don't have much first-party data? What if you don't know if you have product market fit or maybe you don't really have many customers at all? That was an issue of a client of mine. And so they recently launched. They had very little data on their prospective customers. Because of this, we wanted to build an ideal customer profile based on the limited data that we had, user research, and collecting some first-party data without breaking the bank. To build that target audience, we actually trialed KickoffLabs. And the reason why we did that is our hypothesis was that the incentive mechanisms that are baked into the KickoffLabs landing page software would lead to a higher conversion rate of email addresses, which is the primary action point that we wanted users landing on our page to take. And that users also sharing the page would lead to more visits, giving us more data, which ultimately allows us to target even better. And the way that we're targeting is we have a tracking pixel on the page that allows us to then build lookalike audiences on platforms like Facebook.

[Having lots of different actions] Some users, would actually go ahead and fill out every single action, therefore building even greater reach for our campaign

Josh:

So just to back up a little bit. So you found KickoffLabs looking to create a more engaging campaign for these customers to sort of trial. Could you get people to take additional actions, getting their email address, connecting with initial sets of customers for the project and what you ran, what it says, I'm looking at one of this first  campaigns. It says, "Block pack giveaway. Win a pack of NFT trading cards backed by real crypto, worth up to $2,000. Enter email below for a chance to win." There's a countdown, and there'll be an image of this for people listening to the podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, there'll be a little picture of it, but otherwise you can go to the podcast page and kind of download the images from this podcast. And you were asking them to earn more entries, which for KickoffLabs means for every additional action they're taking, they may earn somewhere between one to 10 extra points or 10 extra entries, if they had additional tickets in the hat, as it were, to win a chance to win the prize. And you were asking them to share on Facebook, like a tweet, retweet, share on Twitter, follow on Twitter and, ultimately, join you on Discord. And that's the one you weighted the most heavily, at 10 points. How did you go about choosing what the actions were and how many entries each action was worth? Was that truly how you kind of it from the weighting? What you wanted people to do?

Jared:

Yeah, that's a great question. So you're absolutely right. In terms of the weighting, the most important action that we wanted users to take was to join our Discord community. And that's primarily because we were building this community from the ground up. Discord communities are very valuable for blockchain projects. They're kind of a universal in terms of sharing your FAQs, knowledge base, and also just talking with others who are interested. So that was the highest weighted action item. But what was interesting is we actually A/B tested if we had two or three actions, so limited number of actions, such as a retweeting a tweet, would that be more effective? Or would it be more effective to have lots of different actions with lots of different points? And what we found was the latter, that having a lot of different actions. So I think we had about six on that page. Josh, you can correct me if I'm wrong. And what we found is that some users, and you I'm sure have seen this, would actually go ahead and fill out every single action, therefore building even greater reach for  our campaign. So it made sense for us to include the highest number of actions that were relevant.

Josh:

Absolutely. Because I like how you broke it out. I mean, you had like this tweet, retweet us, share. It's broken out so you created more opportunities for people to get engaged, and that's absolutely been the case since we've rolled out these kind of actions that are customizable is people will just go through the actions and they'll share with a friend and then their friend will go through the actions and you get a lot more engagement in social media this way. I want to back up a second to something you mentioned so that people don't miss out on the best practice here, which was that, not only were you the traffic going to the page where you're getting them to try and opt in and take these actions, but there's a certain number of people, no matter how great the conversion rate is, who just aren't going to opt in to a page, they're not going to enter a contest. They might be interested in the product or the ultimate launch. And, in that case, you added a Facebook targeting pixel to the page, right?

Jared:

Yeah. Correct.

The cost of driving ads was better because our target audience was improved because of this campaign. 

Josh:

And that enabled you to create, within the Facebook lingo, audiences within Facebook based on people who were visiting your website. So you could both retarget people who visited and say, "Hey, come sign up now this contest is over" or "Come back during the contest and enter" or, as you pointed out, since you know those people might be into interested, you can create a lookalike audience in Facebook of people that look like this. So now you've got a much bigger pool to swim in because Facebook has so much data, they can say, "Oh, I can take these five personality traits of these people and generate you an audience of these 10 million people around the world that you should target your next campaign to." Which is just an absolute best practice and everybody should be doing that on their landing page campaigns. Tell me, for the success of the campaign, did you guys have a good conversion rate?

Jared:

Yeah. Yeah. So, actually, just to walk it back to the lookalike audience, I think the first point that I would want to share is that our CPC, our cost per click, when using the cohort that we defined from that first test in later campaigns, campaigns that weren't even run on Kickoff, was much better. So the cost of driving ads was better because our target audience was improved because of this campaign. And then, in terms of conversion rates, I think we saw over 30% on both of the two campaigns that we ran on KickoffLabs.

Josh:

Yep.

Jared:

Which, in my experience, setting up hundreds of landing pages, running thousands of marketing campaigns, is incredibly high. So that's what I was really excited about, once we had tried the tool, that maybe this is something that we can continue to replicate because of the incentives and the nature of the software.

Josh:

And you said, ultimately, you weighted the join us on Discord and I'd love to know, did people join you on Discord? Did you see an uptick in people going and joining the Discord channel?

Jared:

Yeah. So we weren't able to track it end to end of being able to absolutely say, "Hey, this user came through the campaign and they also joined Discord". And that's just because of the nature of Discord and the way that we had set up our server.

Josh:

Yep.

So the two key differences between campaign number one that we ran on and Kickoff and campaign number two was that the targeting was optimized for campaign number two, based on the first-party data that we got from campaign number one.

Jared:

That said, anecdotally, we did see a bunch of people reaching out and saying, "Hey, found you guys from this campaign. Is there still time to enter this campaign?" So we knew that they were coming from KickoffLabs. And then we could also see from the invite in the Discord action that there was a high velocity of users who were coming directly from that and landing on our Discord. So we set up custom invite for that campaign, if that's helpful.

Josh:

And so now I want to talk about how that led you to create the second campaign you ran. So the second campaign, also a giveaway, also for winning NFT trading cards, also worth up to $2,500. And in this campaign, you had a similar set of actions that you had in the first one. It looks like you added the general spread the word to get people to refer friends and you also added the leaderboard. And can you tell me what impact the leaderboard or anything else had on this campaign as different from the first one?

Jared:

Yeah. Great question. So the two key differences between campaign number one that we ran on and Kickoff and campaign number two was that the targeting was optimized for campaign number two, based on the first-party data that we got from campaign number one, as we discussed before with Facebook lookalike audience. And then the other additional feature that we added from Kickoff was the leaderboard. And so what we did see was that there were a few people on that leaderboard who had referred a bunch of their friends and the way that they rank on the leaderboard is that they're referring other people to this campaign. And then those people are then converting. We also saw all of our Discord people saying, "Hey, I've hit a 160 points on the leaderboard. I think I have a high probability of winning this contest." Obviously, their language was a little bit less robotic than what I'm sharing here, but we saw quite a bit of it. So we were pretty sure that the leaderboard was fairly effective and would continue, and recommend, using those features if you are running that type of giveaway campaign.

Josh:

Yeah. Absolutely, especially for an audience in this space where you've got a competitive set of people in a new place like NFT space for blockchain. We've seen a leaderboard be really successful in that space in terms of driving participation. Sometimes... I like the way you did it because sometimes people will tend to say, "I'm just going to reward the top five people in the campaign from the leaderboard". And the challenge there becomes, for the audience of the campaign, some people who come in on even day two or day three of a campaign, they look and they're like, "Oh, I'm never going to get to 150 points." Even if it would be relatively easy for them to do it, they're just sort of like, "Oh, I'm never going to be in the top five." But just having the leaderboard on the campaign is a great best practice because it and of itself is a competitive thing that encourages people to take more action even if there's no reward specifically for being the top one or in the top 10, other than you had better odds of winning.

Jared:

Exactly. And I think if you were running the sort of giveaway where there was one prize and, to your point, somebody comes and sees, "Hey, this person's already shared with 600 other people. The probability of me winning is much lower." That could be difficult. In our case, we set up the potential for 50 different winners.

Josh:

Yep.

It's probably going to look a lot different from one product and one platform to the next. And so I recommend A/B testing it and seeing what's most effective and then scaling up over time.

Jared:

And so we knew that it was going to be spread out a little bit more and that, hopefully, users wouldn't see that as a potential barrier. Josh: I want to ask you a question because this comes up as well when people are setting up a contest, which is how do you choose how many prizes to give away and what prizes to give away because one of the questions we get all the time is, "Hey, should I just give away one $2,000 prize? Or should I do three prizes or 10 prizes?" How do you think about that challenge?

Jared:

Yeah. It's a really great question. In this instance, it's a little bit different for us because actually getting the cards, which was our giveaway prize, into more people's hands builds our network and there's network effects based on that are specific to this project. That said, I would say for a typical campaign, that's a great A/B test, right? Depending on what you're selling, what the ultimate value of your product is, and what you're thinking about doing, it's probably going to look a lot different from one product and one platform to the next. And so I recommend A/B testing it and seeing what's most effective and then scaling up over time.

Josh:

Yeah. I could see that. I mean, it kind of depends. I think, in your case, the reason to do it is because there was a network effect of if you had 50 people that were getting experience and exposure to the product, then they might tell their friends about the product down the line. And so you wanted to encourage that network effect, whereas if you were a store and you just had some products, but there's not really a great network effect to a clothing store necessarily, you might just say, "I'm just going to give away two or three big prize packs for people each month" because there's not a huge network effect in terms of getting people to say, "Oh, just go down, get this other digital asset online."

If the lock-in value isn't there, it's going to look a lot different. Hence, why I think A/B testing always best practice.

Jared:

A hundred percent. If the lock-in value isn't there, it's going to look a lot different.  Hence, why I think A/B testing always best practice. Josh: So I don't think we actually mentioned... Are you allowed to say the company you were doing these campaigns for and what they do.

Jared:

I mean, yeah. 

The difference with Elements, which is really interesting, is their NFTs are actually backed by crypto, so it's actually a platform for potentially onboarding new users to buy, trade different digital assets, potentially stake those assets for additional rewards and really buy into.

Josh:

We got a sense because we've been talking about trading cards, but I don't think we've actually mentioned Elements.

Jared:

Yeah, sure. So the client, in this instance, their name is Elements and they're really building out a new mechanism for NFT trading. And what's interesting about their NFTs, I think the question that a lot of people get is, "Oh, another NFT. What is the value in that? Is that just a profile picture? What does that all mean?" Especially for those who aren't engaged with a lot of blockchain projects. The difference with Elements, which is really interesting, is their NFTs are actually backed by crypto, so it's actually a platform for potentially onboarding new users to buy, trade different digital assets, potentially stake those assets for additional rewards and really buy into, or maybe trade their first crypto assets that they ever have because NFTs might be a little bit more accessible. They like the imagery, they like the game aspect of it. So I would definitely encourage any listeners to go check them out. Their Elements.io. Really interesting project.

Josh:

And I have to ask, because I get asked this all the time, so what, from your point of view, not about Elements in particular, but just somebody who's really interested in blockchain and NFTs, what's the value of owning the digital asset as opposed to, "Yeah, look, I can right-click on the website right there and now I have the image of somebody's NFT." What's the value of ownership there for people who are getting into the space. This is a little off topic. I'm just kind of curious. 

NFTs, just in general, digital assets that represent real world objects. So I would think about it less in terms of the image that you're buying and more in terms of what does this fundamentally represent of tangible value, and that could look different from project to project.

Jared:

I think it's a really valid question and I think it's probably a lot of folks' first question when they hear about NFTs. It really depends on the project. So some projects will actually allow you to use that NFT to get access to maybe a private membership or club, so it has some inherent value potentially in those use cases. Some projects, it's all around speculation, and I think that's kind of where those concerns come about, "What is the real value of this?" In the case of Elements, right, they're actually backed by real crypto assets. So the value of their NFTs are equal to the value of the crypto asset that's shared on the NFTs, so the actual image of it would replicate the asset that you're owning. So there's real tangible ownership of value in terms of their mechanism.

Josh:

Because you also have the coin. Yeah.

The first advice is if you don't test, you don't know. And so get up there, make an account.

Jared:

Yeah, exactly. But NFTs, just in general, digital assets that represent real world objects. So I would think about it less in terms of the image that you're buying and more in terms of what does this fundamentally represent of tangible value, and that could look different from project to project. Josh: So what... Before we wrap up, we talked about your two campaigns. What advice would you give somebody who's getting started today? Maybe they're creating [00:20:00] their KickoffLabs account and they're and they have digital asset that they want to promote or digital brand or something they're trying to promote through a contest. What advice would you give them that they should be doing that maybe we haven't talked about yet at this point?

Try it out, set it up, see if it works for your audience and if it does, great. Go from there.

Jared:

Yeah. That's a great question. I think the first advice is if you don't test, you don't know. And so get up there, make an account. I believe that you guys allow for free freemium accounts with quite a bit of the functionality and features. So I think if you're thinking about, "Hey, I want to make a landing page for my contest or potentially like a wait list landing page, and I don't want to go through the process of developing it all on my own", which may take a lot of bandwidth, KickoffLabs makes it really easy to set it up. So you could probably have a pretty good looking landing page with incentive mechanisms done in, I don't know, half an hour. To me, that's kind of a no brainer. Try it out, set it up, see if it works for your audience and if it does, great. Go from there.

Josh:

Yeah. I mean, I think we talked earlier about the value of testing and that's just a huge best practice, no matter how large a contest you're running, whether you're doing it large or small. You want to say, "Okay, we're going to run a small campaign first and work out the kinks. Figure out, like you said, there are three actions resonate with my audience or five. Do 50 giveaways motivate people to take action or three or the top five? Which works best?" So a couple of even... You're getting started, just get started and pick one and think about it in terms of starting small, and then, as you learn what works, you can go bigger and bigger with the contest.

My advice for somebody who is joining KickoffLabs would be exactly your point, Josh, which is start with a small campaign, keep it really simple, identify what your hypothesis is, what are you really testing here?

Jared:

A hundred percent. And I think one area that I see a lot of clients struggle with is they try to do everything at once and, because of that, they do nothing well. And so I guess my advice for somebody who is joining KickoffLabs would be exactly your point, Josh, which is start with a small campaign, keep it really simple, identify what your hypothesis is, what are you really testing here? Is it that you're testing whether the conversion rate will be higher than your typical landing page? What does that test look like? And then run it and then expand from there, as opposed to going so deep at the very beginning and then giving up over time. That said, your guys' tool is quite easy to use. So there is that.

Run it and then expand from there, as opposed to going so deep at the very beginning and then giving up over time.

Josh:

That's great. Thanks for that. Lastly, if a member of our audience is starting or involved in a blockchain project and they want to get in touch with you, how would they find you online and where should they go to get in touch or just even ask a question?

Jared: 

Yeah. Happy to field questions, happy to help connect others or share a little bit more about blockchain projects or growth. You can find me at dappery.co and just use our contact form or jared@dappery.co.

Josh:

Great. I'm looking forward to having this published and I'm sure we're going to get a great response. The blockchain space has been really big lately and there's so many questions that people have. So I imagine that you'll get some folks taking you up on that opportunity and I look forward to that.

Jared:

Sounds great. Thanks for having me on, Josh. Josh: Yeah. Thanks.