7 Ways To Create Product Hype For Your eCommerce Brand

Your product is finally ready to launch so you kick off your online marketing campaign and watch the customers roll in, right?

*crickets*

Building product hype takes work, but it’s well worth it. The trick is to keep an element of mystery, while hinting at great things to come. Unsure of where to start? We’ve got you covered.

1. Plan Your Campaigns

When sending campaigns to create product hype, you want to be thinking about conditioning the next action. You definitely don’t want to only send one message at the time of the product drop. Here’s why:

There will be a lot of people that aren’t expecting the drop
They might be in the middle of something else
They may have other priorities that day

This would be a huge wasted opportunity. Some brands might be concerned about overwhelming their customers with multiple messages, but as long as you are providing value in each piece of communication, it’s okay to send multiple messages in your pre-launch campaign.

Your campaign set up could look something like this:

Pre pre-launch (something big is coming)
Pre-launch (here’s what’s coming)
Launch (It’s finally here!)

One of the best ways to build hype is to be mysterious, so don’t give it all away in your first promotional campaign. Consider people’s natural curiosity; if you tell them everything they need to know right away, why would they come back to get more information? Using teaser promos will stimulate their curiosity.

2. Segment Your Audience

Following on from our previous point, teasing your email marketing customer base is one of the best ways to get people excited about a new release. The key is to segment your email subscribers so you know that you’re sending this information to your most engaged audience.

As part of your pre-launch campaign strategy, you might want to encourage your VIP customers to sign up for early access to the product. Giving VIP customers early access is a great way to leverage your most engaged customers into generating hype.

Another option might be to offer an early bird bonus to those customers who act fast. For example, customers who order in the first 72 hours of the launch could receive a complimentary product or a percentage off their order.

You could even segment the audience that missed out on a product and send them a follow up message saying, “Hey, we know you missed out. Here’s an exclusive offer to use on…” This way they still feel like part of the family and that they’ve been given a ‘runner up’ prize.

3. Take Pre-Orders

Why wait until your product officially drops to start making a profit? Collecting money for pre-orders is a great way to build hype. Now, customers are invested. They’ll also be tempted to tell their friends, family, and social media followers about your product.

Create a landing page with a preorder option.
Before your new product goes live, you could create a landing page with an option for customers to pre-order. Landing pages are a great way of showing users why your new product or service is worth their attention. Further, if you want to see more pre-orders, you might consider offering a special price to people who buy before it’s available to everyone else.

4. Hold a Social Media Giveaway

A good way to use social media to build hype around your product is by holding a giveaway. Similar to your email marketing strategy, you could send out a drip series of posts to get your followers curious about what you’re going to offer. Online giveaways can help you spread awareness, build your subscriber list and grow sales. You could set your campaign up to encourage followers to share your posts and sign up to your newsletter list for chances to win.

5. Promote Scarcity & Exclusivity in Your Messaging

Creating that feeling of “you’re special” amongst your customers is a powerful way to create hype. Promoting scarcity of products or offers is one way to go about this, or you might offer products to those customers who ‘qualify.’ The result? Customers feel privileged to acquire a limited offer. You want to maintain the exclusivity and scarcity of each drop to drive its success.

Some language choices might include:

Limited edition
Not available for long
Until sold out
First in, best dressed

Pro Tip: You’ll want to ensure you communicate drop times effectively so people know exactly where to be at the right time. Using a countdown timer is a good way to heighten customers’ anticipation.

6. Involve Your Customers Early On

Apple really has a knack for this – getting everyone to talk about their products months before they launch. In their case, no one is even talking about what the product does, they’re talking about what the product might do. One way you could get your audience engaged and talking about your product before launch is to encourage them to vote on potential products beforehand. So if you sell ice-cream for example, you might ask VIP customers to vote on what flavour they would prefer to see going forward.

7. Timing is Everything

The last thing you want to do is rush a launch, particularly if you’ve spent a lot of time building hype. Timing should depend on how you’re going to be able to deliver the best experience possible. You also want to avoid overwhelming your audience when sending campaigns, and ensure you are providing value in each piece of communication you send.

The Bottom Line: Plan Your Launch

The key is planning. You need to think through your product launches and plan what information you’re going to release and when, who you want talking about you, and how you can turn your product launch into something worth talking about.