After you've gone through the Launch Guide and addressed or acknowledged each section, it is time to request a review. To help with understanding the review and launch process, we've included some notes below.

Review

Please request your review (by emailing [email protected]) at least 3 business days before you expect to launch.

Topics addressed during the review:

  • Your survey theme. Here we'll make sure that if you've set up a survey theme, that it looks as you intended on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
  • Your products. We'll check to make sure you have set up variations and product questions correctly, that all your products have photos and descriptions, and that prices exist for anything you plan to offer as extras.
  • Your configurations. We'll review these to confirm that what you've offered in each pledge level is what is mapped to each configuration, as well as that your marketing questions are mapped. We'll also check to make sure shipping is set up correctly.
  • Orders. We'll check to see if any orders contain significant amounts of excess funds. This can be indicative of either a special offer, extra pledge level products ordered, or a mistake in the survey setup.
  • Extras. If you're offering add-ons, we'll make sure each pledge level has access to them, whether they're using the global or custom configurations, and again check to make sure all your products have prices.
  • Shipping rates. We'll make sure that all your shipping rates have an "Everywhere Else Rate," and if any configurations or extras have free shipping set up, we'll confirm this with you.
  • Your Pre-Order Page. If you've set up a pre-order page, we'll make sure that each configuration has an image, and that everything above is also set up correctly.
  • Your Account settings. We'll verify your Stripe account is connected, that you have a debit or credit card entered in Billing Info, and that if you choose to use PayPal that it is also connected.
  • Fees. We'll let you know your up-front per-backer or other minimum fee that will be charged to the card on file when the surveys launch.
  • Our Review Product orders. If you've agreed to send us free products in trade for the software access fee, we'll let you know about the orders for these products.

Launch

We'll ask you to go over any notes for the review items. Once we're all in agreement that everything is good to go, we'll schedule a time to launch the surveys. We recommend confirming your survey launch date with our team before promising a launch date to backers. In most cases, we'll want to launch the survey during a weekday morning, for couple of reasons:

  • A better open rate. People check their email most often in the morning, at lunch, or right after work or school. Launching the survey during the morning makes it more likely that you'll get a good opening-day rate.
  • Support. Because we provide backer support for the first 48 hours (or longer, depending on your agreement), we'll want to make sure we're available for any opening-day questions, as well as, any technical issues during the survey launch.

Billing and Survey Invitation Emails

Once we bill your card for any applicable up-front fees, we'll begin sending the survey invitation emails. Depending on how many backers you have, this process can take anywhere from just a few minutes, to a few hours for larger amounts of backers. You'll be notified via email once the survey invitations begin to send.

Survey Invitation Reminders

We automatically send backers survey invitation reminders if they have not completed their surveys. These go out several times in the first seven days, and then less frequently as time goes on, because of diminishing returns. You can see when reminders have been sent to backers by looking at the Emails section of any order.

For backers with No Rewards, we only send a survey invitation once. Backers who are in a "Dropped" status can also receive a survey invitation, with special instructions to pay their entire pledge balance at the end of the survey. These backers will also only receive a single email.

Indiegogo backers are a special case. Because Indiegogo allows backers to cancel their pledge within ten days, they will only receive a survey invitation once ten days have passed since their pledge. If the backer has canceled their pledge, and we were to send them a survey invitation earlier, you could end up fulfilling their order even if they haven't completed a payment. If you've made special arrangements with Indiegogo to remove this cancellation period, we can lower this invitation delay, but for your protection, please make sure this is confirmed with Indiegogo before asking us to lower the 10-day delay. Failure to confirm this could result in unpaid orders being fulfilled, and Crowd Ox is in no way responsible for any failure on your part to do your due diligence with Indiegogo.

What's Next?

You can monitor your results on the Stats page (click for more info). And when you're ready to start fulfilling, you can export your data in a variety of formats (click for more info).