How to Use Partnerships to Lead Pre-Launch Sign-ups to Something Valuable

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Kimberley Ong, CEO of RUNWAY.sg  You can follow them on twitter at @runwaysg and “like” them on Facebook.

Getting a LaunchRock landing page up does not just have to be about harvesting email addresses. Many people don’t realize this. Much more is possible if you figure out what you have and how you can offer what you have to users – even with nothing more than a landing page.

Leverage partnerships, big or small. Good partners – and better yet, good partnership arrangements – allow you to generate buzz about your startup pre-launch. But more importantly, good partnerships can also provide you a channel to lead users to something meaningful once they get to your landing page. If you’re lucky, they may even get you to close your first few transactions.

We started RUNWAY.sg, the exclusive online shopping destination in Singapore, by doing just that. It was nearing Christmas and we weren’t ready to get out of private beta just yet. But we knew it would be a waste to miss the Christmas shopping period. So, a couple of days after setting up a Launchrock page and a few hundred user signups later, we launched an exclusive campaign with Singapore’s leading online group buying site. Every day for a week, we offered flash sales of the season’s hottest items at massive discounts. This gave us a thin margin, but it served its purpose. By directing users from our landing page to the campaign page on our affiliate partner site and vice versa, we grew user signups by >1500% and converted 1% of all users to paying customers — with nothing more than a landing page!

Editor: Read about how to use partnerships to create giveaways that increase your traffic and signups in FabFitFun’s guest post.