Waitlist style campaign helps you to generate word of mouth, build an audience, and generate future sales by encouraging people to join and then move up the waitlist as they refer friends and earn points in your contest online.
How do waitlist mechanics work?
A lead starts at the end of the line placed at the position determined by their join date. So if 100 people had already joined they would start at position 101.
If that lead earns a point they would then jump ahead of anyone with zero points and be at the end of people that had earned one point. Leads with 2 points would always be ahead of them unless you removed them from the waitlist.
You may choose to give earlier access to people who are at the top of your waitlist as a reward or even combine it with reward levels where people can move up your list AND earn guaranteed rewards. If you remove people from the waitlist you everyone behind them would move up in line.
We see people run successful waitlist campaigns for new apps, pre-launching crowdfunding campaigns, and online store launches.
Campaign Dashboard Welcome Tour
Once you’ve created a campaign you’ll be taken to your campaign overview. This page allows you to view your campaign at a high level and navigate into common settings.
At the top of your campaign you’ll always find links back to this overview page, the lead list, reporting, and setup steps where you can configure scoring, actions, rewards, messaging, and advanced settings.
On the right hand side you’ll find a checklist of some basic next steps…
Then you’ll see areas to drill into your campaign setup.
For example, in this campaign I’ve setup 3 points for each referral, 3 separate actions, and three reward levels… meaning optional score levels where leads would get a reward for achieving that score.
You may simply be running a giveaway/sweepstakes style where rewards are not required, but you can always mix and match campaign features like this to combine contest types.
Single Page Campaign
Lets talk about campaigns setup as a single page.
A single page campaign is designed to be an all-in-one landing page for your contest. This means that the lead registration, thanks, contest actions, and contest status checks all happen on the same page.
This makes it simpler to launch your campaign because you only have to focus on designing a single page. You can always add a secondary status page later if you’d like to run this as a two page campaign down the road.
For a single page campaign here are some next steps. You can ignore the Campaign Contest Box and AnyForm at this time if you don’t plan to use them.
So Lets take a closer look at the landing page.
- You’ll see it’s setup as the default page, has it’s internal name, a preview, link to the published version and the confirmation type set to “on page message”
Lets edit the page and dive in more.
- Most text can be edited by just clicking into a section.
- For now lets focus on the stuff about the form you’ll want to edit in your single page contest.
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- On most single page campaigns there is a message that encourages people to signup built into the form. You can edit it now. This message will go away once someone signs up and be replaced with the conformation message.
- Here you’ll see the confirmation message that people will see once they are signed up. Note you could switch this down the road to one of our other confirmation types like contest box or a dedicated status page.
- If you edit that you can change the text or, in the future, change the confirmation to link to a dedicated status page.
- You can also add additional form fields like “first name”, change form styles, or anything else you’d like to see.
Once you are happy with the changes to your page you can hit publish.
This takes you to the general settings page for the landing page.
Here you can edit the page title, description, and publish the page to a custom domain if you’ve set one up.
At the bottom of this page you’ll find a more detailed video that teaches you about editing your landing pages further by adding new sections or content, changing colors, fonts, background images, spacing, and mobile specific design tips.
I suggest you give it a watch when you are ready to seriously start editing your pages.
Double Page Campaign
Lets talk about contests setup as a landing page + a status page.
A two page campaign is designed to give each part of your funnel more room. By separating the signup step from where leads earn points and check their contest status you can have longer copy on the signup page and give leads a dedicated space they can always bookmark and return to check their status.
It’s more to setup than a single page campaign, but if you want longer form copy and a dedicated status page it can make sense.
For a two page campaign here are some next steps.
So lets take a closer look at the landing pages.
- You’ll see the first page is the signup page, has it’s internal name, a preview, link to the published version and the confirmation type set to “default status page”
- If you ever added a different status page you could click on “default URLs” to modify where the default confirmation goes.
- Lets edit the page and dive in more
- Most text can be edited by just clicking into a section.
- Most sections can be designed by clicking the pencil button. This is where you’d setup section specific background images, spacing, alignment, etc.
- The signup page confirmation is controlled at the page level by the form.
- You can open the form for editing to add fields, change the style or modify the confirmation type. Just note it says “campaign default” for now. You could pick non-default pages here, just show a message, or even bring up the contest box as the contest status box.
Once you are happy with the changes to your page you can hit publish.
This takes you to the general settings page for the landing page.
Here you can edit the page title, description, and publish the page to a custom domain if you’ve set one up.
At the bottom of this page you’ll find a more detailed video that teaches you about editing your landing pages further by adding new sections or content, changing colors, fonts, background images, spacing, and mobile specific design tips.
I suggest you give it a watch when you are ready to seriously start editing your pages.
Walk through campaign scoring
We just talked about the dashboard and the basic setup of your contest. Now lets setup the scoring.
This is how leads will earn additional points towards rewards or entries in a giveaway contest. Kickofflabs gives you a lot of control over this with several options.
To walk through them you could choose Setup > Scoring from the top menu or Scoring > Manage scoring from the sidebar.
The signup and referrals tab controls how many points a lead will be awarded for entering their email address and how many points they would receive for every friend that is referred by them using their unique links. 
The next important step is to define the campaign actions. The actions block will be shown to leads on your contest pages and contest box. Notice how the top action is for referrals. This is where leads will share their unique links with friends via social networks.
Lets edit Refer Friends Online. To do so click “Edit” at the end of the line. Then in the next screen add the copy and paste action as a sharing option.
There are several other actions you could choose from. You can also rearrange the order of these actions as well.
If you plan on connecting your contest to an online store then the purchases tab is for you. Here you can choose to credit leads with points for making purchases using the purchase tag or even give them a point for every dollar spent on your store.
You can also choose to award points for referring friends that purchase even based on how many dollars the friend spends. It’s a great way to encourage sharing for your store where the participants get more entries for spending real money on your store.
You’ll find instructions for setting this up with Shopify at the bottom of the page.
Finally, you’ll see “lead tags” that can be used to award points for just about any other behind the scenes action. For example: you could create a tag for a lead having completed a survey and award it to them manually when you receive their results.
Got an idea for a scoring action you’d like to see? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with your feedback support@kickofflabs.com.
Running This With A Contest Box
Lets talk about setting up your campaign as a contest box. I love it. It’s simple to setup and just runs on your web site.
When you create a campaign you’ll see the contest box is enabled at the top of the dashboard. We’re going to go through editing this box and the steps that are required to install it to your website.
Lets open the contest box for editing.
You’ll see a preview of your contest box on the right and editing controls on the left.
The basics tab allows you to control the colors, call to action text, hero image, and more.
When you scroll down, you could optionally hide or show elements, like a leaderboard, total leads, countdown, rank or next reward.
Your contest scoring, actions, optional reward levels, and the countdown are setup at the campaign level since they’d be shared with any emails or optional landing pages added to your campaign.
The next tab would allow you to modify the form.
Next you’d find additional text and localization settings.
Finally you’ll find the installation tab.
Here you would grab this campaign script and paste it into the page header area if possible. We’ve created some guides below for installing the KickoffLabs campaign script on wordpress, shopify, Squarespace, Unbounce, Wix.
Once you’ve installed the script to your site the contest box will just start showing up as designed.
Running This With AnyForm
An AnyForm campaign is designed to work with existing sites and pages that already have an entry form designed. This is a great option if you have your own design team working on a site or you had your heart set on a different visual look than our provided landing pages.
It turns any existing forms into a Kickofflabs contest form by just installing our campaign script and setting up the confirmation/status for contest participants.
Lets open the AnyForm settings to take a closer look at the setup.
In this case you’ll see I’ve setup anyform to show a default campaign status page I created and hosted on KickoffLabs.
It’s common to have this setup since you don’t have to rebuild any of our status page components like the waitlist, reward levels, or entry counters. Yes – you can still use your custom domain with the KickoffLabs status page.
You could also use the contest box to show the campaign scoring actions, rewards, and other status after signup as well. This option would allow it to be 100% hosted on your site and is simpler to setup.
You most likely would not have to change the form selector and I wouldn’t touch it unless you know what you are doing.
You can update the error message for when something goes wrong and then head over to the installation guide.
Here you would grab this campaign script and paste it into the page header area if possible. We’ve created some guides below for installing the KickoffLabs campaign script:
and other popular website or landing page builders.
Once you’ve installed the campaign script to a page with a form the form will then be connected to KickoffLabs. You can verify that by signing up on the form. You should be redirected to the status page.
Going back to the campaign menu. If you chose the status page option you’ll want to open the status page for editing.
In the next page
- Most parts can be edited by just clicking into a section.
- Most sections can be designed by clicking the pencil button. This is where you’d setup section specific background images, spacing, alignment, etc.
- You can add and remove other status options like reward levels or leaderboard if needed.
Once are happy with the changes to your page you can hit publish.
This takes you to the general settings page for the landing page.
Here you can edit the page title, description, and publish the page to a custom domain if you’ve set one up.
At the bottom of this page you’ll find a more detailed video that teaches you about editing your landing pages further by adding new sections or content, changing colors, fonts, background images, spacing, and mobile specific design tips.
I suggest you give it a watch when you are ready to seriously start editing your pages.
If you setup AnyForm to connect to the contest box you’ll want to edit the contest box. It should be set to “Status Only” so that it only pop-ups up when the form is completed on your site.
You see how to change other sections in the Contest Box, please see above.
At this point you know what’s important about setting up a campaign with Anyform whether the confirmation is set to a status page or the contest box! Let us know if you run into any issues.
Waitlist Campaign Features
Lets now review some settings in your campaign that are specific to waitlist campaigns.
If you have some leads already collected and want to ensure they’re on the waitlist first you can import them from the leads tab and import leads.
Another question we always get is whether or not you can “fake it till you make it” by inflating your waitlist number when you get started.
Yes, you can do it under Setup > advanced settings > Fake Leads Jumpstart Feature.
You can control the number of fake leads added to your campaign as well as a range of random points to assign to each lead. When you update this the counter on your landing pages and contest box will start at the number of fake leads.
When you setup this campaign the default waitlist contest box and landing pages would have a representation of the waitlist numbers people can track over time.
If you edit a landing page you can control what numbers are shown here or add the boxes again to another part of the page.
In the contest box the position number is shown at the bottom as their status.
Remember – If that lead earns a point they would then jump ahead of anyone with zero points and be at the end of people that had earned one point. Leads with 2 points would always be ahead of them unless you removed them from the waitlist.
Removing people from waitlist
Which brings us to taking people off of the waitlist. If you are granting early access to a store or application you may want to remove a chunk of people from your lead list.
You can do this by clicking on the Leads tab at the top of your campaign.
Sort your lead list by contest score, add any additional filters you’d like, select the leads you want to remove, and choose “remove from waitlist” and apply.
After a few minutes everyone will have moved up. You can download the set of removed leads from newly saved audience we created in case you want to send them a custom notification in your email tool.
More Campaign Common Settings
Lets review a couple of other common settings you may want to enable.
- Setup > Advanced > Terms and Conditions
We do our best to provide boilerplate guidance here, but we are not lawyers and it’s always best to consult with one for your own legal advice. This text will be showing when people click contest rules or privacy links on your pages and contest boxes.
- Setup default Social Share text and images for your campaign
This information will be used in your campaign when people share. Keep in mind that if you are sharing non-KickoffLabs hosted pages you may need to setup the Facebook settings there too.
- When your campaign is underway you’ll use the Leads tab to view leads as they come in
You can create saved search audiences, sort by contest score, and check out any leads that may have been flagged for fraud by clicking in to view the lead card and lead activity.
- The Reports tab
It gives you a high level view of the ROI for your campaign, the conversion rate, and the viral boost you are getting from that sharing we setup earlier.Once you’ve upgraded to a paid plan I suggest you check out these additional options…
- Advanced Fraud Detection and rules (available for customers with Business Plans and above)
By default we restrict Entries to one per IP address and also offer a lot more options such as flagging people from sweepstakes sites or captcha required registration.
- Under messaging, setup an Automatic reply
The open rates on these messages are over 40% and it’s a great chance to remind people why they should keep taking actions and engaging with your contest. We also offer the option to setup SMS replies.
- Under your account level menu
You’ll see options for adding your custom domains if you are using landing pages, custom email domains to improve deliverability, and sub accounts to add team members who manage the campaign(s) or clients to view their data. This is also where you can add any custom website domains to your account.
- On the Integrations sidebar you can setup weekly status reports for your campaign
It’s here where you would also connect KickoffLabs to MailChimp, Drip, Convertkit, or other services like Klavio via Zapier or Webhooks.
For best practices check out the resources tab on our website. You can subscribe to our podcast, blog, and check out the “best of” advice under Marketing Resources for guidance on copywriting, design, and generating traffic.
We also offer custom “Done for you packages” if all of this still feels a little daunting.
We’ve been doing this for over 10 years. We know we can help you get your contest off to a great start.
If you need additional help don’t hesitate to start at support.kickofflabs.com, email support@kickofflabs.com or check out our community.
