Creating A New Project
A project contains all the information and materials that you have for a particular prelaunch or referral marketing campaign. All settings, the signup form, the referral page, campaign emails, users, reward options, analytics data and integrations are unique to each project.
You can think of it like a room containing all the things and information you need to do work - and the whole house is your Prefinery account.
Getting Started
When you first signup for a Prefinery account, you'll be greeted by our project wizard which walks you through creating a new project.
If you are an existing Prefinery user and have already created at least one project before, you can create a new project by clicking the Create Project button in the upper-right corner of your Prefinery projects-view dashboard page.
Alternatively, from any project dashboard you can click on the name of the current project bottom of the left sidebar navigation and select Create a new project from its menu.
Both actions will bring up the project wizard for existing accounts.
Here are the project wizard steps in more detail:
1. Project Name
The project wizards starts giving your project a name.
We'll use this info to set the initial copy used in email messages and other components that your users will see, but you can change this info later if you need to.
2. Campaign Type
Prefinery categorizes campaigns into two types - Pre-launch Waitlist Campaigns and General Referral or Post-launch Campaigns.
Pre-launch Campaign - Select this if you're looking to launch (or gate access to) your product, service or business by first putting joining users in a waitlist. To move up the waitlist and be invited (or given access) by you either manually or automatically, users would refer other users into your campaign. Beta Management features are also enabled as explained more below.
If you have chosen to run a Pre-launch Campaign, then:
- We use the term "Waitlist" in the account when referring to the list of users competing for most referrals.
- We enable the Beta Management features which includes additional statuses such as
invitedandrejected, and allows you to invite users. - We add a sample Invitation email message to your list of Email Messages,
- We show the Project Settings > Beta Management page, which allows additional features such as the Invite-a-Friend System to be enabled.
Post-launch Campaign - Select this if you're simply looking to run a referral campaign where users earn rewards or reach milestones for referring other users to your campaign.
If you went with a Post-launch Campaign, instead of the above we use the term "Leaderboard" in the account when referring to the list of users competing for most referrals. You can use Prefinery to run word-of-mouth referral campaigns for your product, post-launch.
All General/Post-launch Campaign features are available in a Pre-launch Campaign. This allows you to continue using the same project post-launch if you want to continue with running a referral campaign on the same project. Though if you are certain you don't need a waitlist or the beta management features, and just wants to run a referral campaign, then we recommend that you select General Campaign. Prefinery automatically sets up project defaults like email messages and certain asset copies (which you can edit later) based to your chosen campaign type, saving you time from manually creating new emails or editing copies from scratch.
3. What Are You Promoting?
Prefinery will automatically optimize the project settings for this particular purpose. If you're unsure or would rather fine-tune the project settings later, you can do so by selecting Other.
4. Email Sender Address
Prefinery allows you to use your own custom email address so that your campaign emails will always be presented to come from you and not from Prefinery.
In this step you will be asked to enter the From name and email address from which emails to your users will be sent. The email address must use a domain that you control (e.g. yourname@yourdomainname.com). It is not possible to use shared domain addresses common with free mailbox services like a @gmail.com or a @yahoo.com address. As such, you are required to use your business email address.
Verifying the domain ensures that your sent email arrives in your user's inbox. Additionally, emails signed by your own domain will look as if they've been sent directly from you, rather than delivered by prefinery.com. Once your project has been created, you will be required to verify that you own this email address and domain.
Additionally, in order to comply with Anti-spam Requirements for Email, you must enter the physical address of your business.
5. Website
The last step of the project wizard is setting your project's website URL.
Like the project name, we'll also use this info to set the initial copy used in email messages and other components that your users will see, but you can also change this info later if you need to.
The website will be used as your campaign's Redirect URL. For example, if you enter https://yourdomain.com then your user's referral links will look like https://yourdomain.com?r=john993 though you can always change this later on via Referral Page > Settings > Referral URL of your project dashboard.
What's next: After completing the project wizard, you may want to further customize your project.