We had over 1,000,000 pre-order signups 8 months ago and now we’re ready to launch. How do we email everyone, not have it go to spam, and get 100% of them to convert to paid?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly work like that.

In reality, building a strong rapport with your pre-order community will make the final announcement deliverable (ie: not be flagged as spam), and will lead to a much higher conversion rate. It makes sense that your average consumer is more likely to buy something they’ve been following for weeks or months, rather than a product they forgot about a year ago and may not even receive the announcement email. The most important part of your pre-order campaign is to understand that people sign up to be part of the journey.

So without further ado, here’s my guide to having an amazing pre-order email campaign.

High Level Strategy (tl;dr)

Accepting pre-orders is not about collecting email addresses and then sending one email to everyone when your product is ready. People are forgetful, email deliverability is a real problem, and providing an email address to a pre-order form is only a moderate signal of purchase intent.

This guide will help you nurture your pre-order signups, build your email reputation, drive more conversions on launch, and ultimately build a long term community. Let’s get into it.

Sidebar: for more information about deliverability and why building an email reputation matters, see Appendix E(mail).

Step 0: Have a Great Pre-Order Form

The key to having a great pre-order form is setting customer expectations. What kind of expectations do you want to set? An ideal pre-order form establishes an expected frequency of messaging. It’s bad form (pun intended) to promise an email when the product is ready, and then send an unexpected monthly email.

Since it’s crucial to your product’s success that you keep up regular communication (see TL;DR goals above), an easy way to set expectations is to invite your pre-customers to opt-in for regular updates on the progress of your product.

A simple example of this is a checkbox and message reading: