Email plays a central role in how crowdfunding campaigns build momentum before and during launch. It is often the first channel creators use to gather interest, share context, and stay in touch with people who want to follow the project more closely.

To talk through how email is used in real crowdfunding campaigns, I spoke with Anna, Copy Team Lead at TCF. She is also a content creator and manager with over ten years of experience working across different industries and campaign types.

Below, Anna explains how to use email to build early communities, structure pre-launch communication, and keep engagement steady throughout a campaign.

Jasmine: What makes email marketing such a consistently reliable channel for crowdfunding campaigns?

Anna: Email is one of the few channels where you can make a relatively small financial investment and still get a meaningful outcome. The moment your lead generation page goes live, email begins working in the background. You start collecting leads immediately, and that is the point where your community begins to take shape.

Crowdfunding relies heavily on that early community, especially for the new creators. These are the people who follow your updates, learn your story, and eventually carry the launch. Email gives you the space to build that group from zero, even when you do not have an existing audience. It is a direct line to the people who showed interest, and that makes it incredibly reliable.

Jasmine: What does email marketing help creators achieve that other marketing channels do not?

Anna: Email helps people get to know you as a creator. Not only the product or the landing page, but the person behind the entire project. When you write from your own perspective, you build a more personal connection. You can share credibility points, early videos, insights from development, and small parts of your story that people will never see in an ad.

Ads appear once in a while, and the same person might not see them again for days. Email shows up consistently. People hear from you every few days, and each message reveals a little more. That steady build of familiarity and trust is what makes them more confident when launch day arrives.

Jasmine Khachatryan: How should creators structure their first emails after someone signs up?

Anna: The flow begins the moment someone signs up. 

The first email is always a welcome email so people know they joined the community, and this is also where you offer them the chance to claim a VIP spot. Even if your landing page already includes the reservation step, you can convert leads into VIPs through email, so that invitation belongs right at the start.

The next email is the story email. This is where you introduce yourself, explain how you discovered the problem, and show why you started building the solution. That story becomes the first real credibility point for your audience.

After that, you move into team details and other credibility elements. People want to see that there is actual experience and skill behind the product, so the early emails include information about who is involved and what background the team brings to the project.

Once those pieces are in place, you shift into product features. You explain what the product does, why certain features matter, and how they solve the problem you introduced earlier. If you have prototype videos, this is the stage where they make the strongest impact because people can see the product working.

So, the early sequence moves in a simple order: welcome, story, credibility, then features. These first emails give people all the context they need before you move into the rest of your pre-launch messaging.

Jasmine: How should creators approach email segmentation in crowdfunding campaigns?

Anna: For brand new projects, segmentation stays very simple because there is no existing community to work with. You usually have 2 groups: subscribers and VIPs. Leads are the people who signed up and showed interest. VIPs are the ones who went further and paid a reservation fee, so they are much more committed.

For projects with history, segmentation becomes more layered. You might have former backers, ecommerce customers, or people who used older versions. With those groups, you speak directly to their experience. For example, you can say, “5 years ago you used version one, and now we have improved it with these new features.” You rebuild that community from scratch but with a familiar starting point.

Jasmine: How can creators use email marketing to re-engage people during the mid-campaign slowdown?

Anna: A mid-campaign slowdown is completely normal. It is not a warning sign. It simply means people are waiting for something extra before they commit. You can start a new round of lead generation, but new leads take time to warm up, so the faster wins come from the audience you already have.

Within your existing list, you can lift activity by introducing offers, sharing new credibility points, or adding interactive elements. For example, with Kara Pure we ran AMA sessions. We asked people to submit questions and then invited them to a live call with the founder. The first call was small, but the second one grew a lot because the community began talking about it on social media.

Giveaways also work, and so do strong updates. People, especially with high-ticket products, want to know where things stand. If you tell them you already have 100 units ready to ship once the campaign ends, that pushes many of them to take action. These updates reassure them that the project is real and moving forward.

Jasmine: What are 3 practical tips founders should follow to strengthen their email marketing?

Anna: First, if your open rates are high but your click rates are low, the content inside the email is not relevant enough. It might be the placement of the button, the visual pulling attention in the wrong direction, or the overall structure. A/B testing helps you spot what needs to change.

Second, use email to answer objections early. If people have concerns about certain features, address those concerns before launch. By the time they reach your campaign page, they should already understand the feature and feel confident about it.

Third, pay close attention to subject lines. Highlight the keyword, use brackets or capitalization, and limit emojis to 2 so you avoid spam filters. Always include a preheader. And once in a while, stop the subject line right before the interesting part, because that little bit of curiosity can significantly increase the open rate.

Conclusion

Email may sound like the simplest tool in the stack, but conversations like this make it clear that simplicity is where its strength comes from. Crowdfunding moves fast, attention drifts, and every other channel fights for space in an increasingly crowded feed. Email does something different. It slows the noise down. It gives creators control over the pace, the message, and the relationship they build with their earliest supporters.

As Anna points out, campaigns are not carried by one big moment. They are carried by the steady, deliberate rhythm that helps people understand the creator, the product, and the story behind it. Email is the only channel that delivers all of that with consistency. Nothing else in the marketing mix creates that level of stability. Nothing else keeps the relationship intact when everything around the campaign gets noisy. Email holds the line, and in crowdfunding, that single advantage can change the arc of an entire launch.

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