Hey all! I’ve only been launched for 2.5 months so I haven’t been able to experiment much with promotion and delivery of my Patreon rewards.
I’m an artist offering monthly stickers ($5 tier) and print+sticker packs ($15 tier) - unique to each month. One thing I’ve been wondering about is the timing for promoting the rewards on social media. My Patreon is set to charge new patrons upon joining.
For example:
Say we’re looking at the rewards for June.
One idea would be to post the sketches of the rewards on Social Media on the 1st of June, giving me the month to finish them. Then posting the finished designs towards the end of June and promoting them again. Another idea would be to have the finished designs ready to post on the 1st of June and use the month to work on the next month’s rewards.
Maybe I’m totally overthinking this! Would love to hear what other people are doing for this type of Patreon! Thanks!
Hello @luluspicedesigns! I wanted to chime in from Patreon’s Creator Success team. Looking forward to hearing what other creators have to say about this. I think since your page is Charge Up Front, it makes the most sense to really promote the most at the beginning of each month. Whether this means you’ll use the sketch or the finished design to promote is up to you - what do you think your community would be most enticed by? I like the idea of the sketch personally so people can join for the journey, but you know your fans better than we do!
I don’t offer this type of reward, but I’ve seen other creators who have and one of the ways that I think works best is like laurab said above and that is to promote the item at the beginning of the month. But you might consider working a month ahead. What I mean is, beginning of June there is a shiny new sticker design, completed and ready to ship out to new patrons, so if they sign up now they get that new sticker AND they get to have input on design and watch the process of the July sticker. This would hopefully create better retention of patrons from one month to the next as they would be somewhat invested in the process if they were a part of it.
I offer monthly letters, postcards or cards to patrons of a certain tier and higher. Every month, once I’ve written my letters and photographed them/the stationery I wrote on them/stamped envelopes etc (never giving out personal info), I do a monthly patron shout out. This is included for patrons of all tiers. I include the letter photo with the shout outs and include a link at the bottom with a variation on ‘join the club at [link]’, ‘want to get a letter each month? Join here…’ etc.
Because I do that every month without fail, casual followers can see I offer something consistent and exlcusive. So even if you end up promoting in the middle of the month (I usually do, as I ensure payments are processed before I start writing letters, and life gets in the way), people know it’s something you always offer. They might join for a specific design, but they might also just want in on the exlusivity of getting a cool new thing every month.