What are some less obvious tips for ensuring my crowdfunding campaign is a huge success?

At ShopLocket, we deal with a lot of crowdfunding alumni like InteraXon, Nomiku and PopSLATE (among others). Through talking with them and through other hardware entrepreneurs in our Blueprint series (www.shoplocket.com/blueprint), we've uncovered a lot of great tips and tricks that I haven't seen anywhere else. Here are just a few:

- Send individual emails to your mailing list when announcing your campaign rather than a generic mass blast. At least for people you're close with. It greatly increases the chance that they will act.
- Send calendar invites out to friends to remind them when the campaign starts.
- Have a website during the campaign to look more professional. Maybe even setup an AngelList profile, a lot of investors now use Kickstarter as a source for leads.
- Use virtual assistants from services like ODesk to help you with some of the grunt work launching your campaign. Like media list creation and email drafting.
- Be ready to launch pre-orders immediately after the campaign to keep up momentum. Just collecting email addresses rarely converts to sales months later.
- Send updates more than you think you should. It keeps everyone in the loop and also increases the likelihood that you get shared. Here are some stats on the collelation between updates and amount raised from Indiegogo > http://support.indiegogo.com/entries/20491883-how-to-send-campaign-updates
- Shipping can be very expensive. A cool hack is to ship pallets to Amazon overseas in order to save on international shipping

These are just a few tips, we're actually in the midst of writing a full guide. If you have any additional questions feel free to email me at katherine@shoplocket.com or ping me on Clarity!