Along with a fast increasing interest in crypto, the number of new projects appearing in the space grows speedily. Such a trend brings a challenge for projects to stand out as well as grow and retain their community and investors. Countless marketing strategies have been used for trying to stand out. In this guide, we’ll dive into one of the tools widely applied among the crypto community: The airdrop campaign.
An airdrop campaign is a marketing tool used by crypto projects for various purposes: rewarding loyal holders, increasing awareness, promotion, etc. The idea is to distribute tokens among the community, attracting new members’ attention and incentivizing them to hold and/or engage with the project.
Types of airdrops
This marketing tool has been around for quite a few years now, taking on various forms over time. Let’s talk about the most popular ones:
- Standard airdrop
From time to time blockchain projects might distribute small amounts of tokens to the community. Such a drop often only requires providing an email and a wallet address before getting the airdrop.
2. Bounty airdrop
Tokens are distributed to recipients in return for a service — such as promoting the project on social media. Sometimes referring other people to the project can result in earning tokens too.
3. Holder airdrop
In the event of a holder airdrop, tokens are sent out into the wallets of users who are already holding specific coins. For example, most projects built on Ethereum offer users free tokens for holding some other ones. The amount sent out is usually proportional to the amount held by users.
4. Exclusive airdrop
As the name suggests, tokens are dropped exclusively to loyal followers of a particular project. Regular airdrops like that allow for forming a loyal community that will stick with you no matter what.
5. NFT airdrop
To increase awareness about their new non-fungible token (NFT) collections, projects reward their holders with a free one for holding certain NFTs in their wallets. They might also send out NFTs to promote the projects on social media or participate in an NFT giveaway.
The Bored Ape Mutant Serum is one of the examples of NFT airdrops. Mutant Serums were airdropped for free to holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. After the airdrop, they started being sold for at least 3 ETH, with one Mega Mutant Serum sold for 1,542.069 ETH ($5,907,542.97) later on.
Executing an airdrop
Planning the process can get complicated but it’s worth it.
Step 1: Planning
The planning stage is important to be taken seriously to achieve the desired results. There is a massive number of aspects to think through:
Objectives
Define the goals and target audience for your campaign. Think through what are the objectives you’re looking to achieve executing airdrop: whether they are to increase your social media presence and followers engagement, increase awareness, get more token holders, reward the existing ones, or else.
Having defined the goals, pick the type of airdrop that suits you best, or combine some of them.
Timing and Distribution
Plan an airdrop execution roadmap: define the starting, open, and closing dates as well as snapshots and token distribution events. Don’t forget to check the market conditions since the industry trends might also impact the campaign results.
Decide the reward pool and allocation per participant or the ratio (for holder airdrop).
Campaign promotion
The next step is to plan a marketing campaign. Think through, how to reach your target audience and engage them to participate. Will you reach them through partnering with other projects, influencers, or paid ads, but the announcements on media platforms or is there another better channel to reach the participants that you’re looking to attract. Make sure to always alert your community and investors first.
Step 2: Implementation
Now let’s take the process of organizing a holder airdrop as an example. First, you have to plan so-called snapshots. The amount of tokens sent out is based on the balance of each separate address at the snapshot time. The snapshot stands for a record of each holder’s balance at a specific moment.
From the settled holder’s balance at the snapshot, the date counts the rewards for each participant. If the ratio is 2:1 and the hypothetical investor is holding two tokens of a partner project, they will get one token dropped in their wallet.
The final step of organizing the process of token distribution includes planning the technical side of it.
There are different methods of doing so:
- Choose a smart token distribution tool
Airdrop service is one of the most commonly used mass token distribution tools among projects due to its high usability, simplicity, and seamless experience.
The use of the service eliminates the need to write and deploy smart contracts or to send tokens to many addresses manually, saving the project’s resources, time and funds. The amount paid in gas fees goes down due to token distribution in batches of over 1000 addresses per one transaction depending on the chosen network.
2. Create an Airdrop Smart Contract
Airdrop smart contract is a program that allows the distribution of tokens to multiple addresses in one transaction. While some projects still need to create their contract for an airdrop, it requires skills and resources. This brings time and cost challenges since creating a smart contract requires hiring a developer with Solidity skills (or another programming language if your token runs on a non EVM compatible network) that will also work on testing and auditing said contract.
3. Manual airdrop
If you are not ready to hire developers, you might choose to transfer rewards yourself. Talk about time-consuming. Just a thousand wallets will take days to complete even with a team. This choice may also result in errors, leading to extra costs. Additionally, picking manual airdrops means that you will have to pay separately for every transaction. Such a method will be very costly.
There are various projects providing airdrop services on the market, we have outlined a comparison of some of them: MyWish, MultiSender, and BulkSender. Before picking a tool to use, remember to DYOR
Step 3: The final message
It’s important to make one final announcement after the airdrop to thank your community for taking part in the airdrop and welcoming new holders. Here’s one last piece of advice — make sure to keep all records of transactions. This will help you solve any problems you might face in case some investors won’t see tokens in their wallets.
About MyWish token distribution tool
MyWish has been one of the leading smart contract generators since 2017 with more than 38,000 smart contracts launched and almost 50,000 pleased users on the platform. Thanks to overwhelming market demand for an easy-to-use airdrop service, MyWish introduces an airdrop tool optimized for efficient token distribution.
One of the best features of the service is, of course, no need for generating a smart contract. This resulted in significantly reduced costs for automated token distribution. Users just have to pay gas and platform fees to send their tokens.
MyWish offers airdrops on Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, and TRON. The process itself takes just a couple of steps to send out tokens with the number of addresses fitting in one transaction increased to more than 1,000 per transaction. The service has been recently improved to support deflationary tokens too.
The convenient address list editing function, as well as the support of various wallets, including Metamask, Binance Chain Wallet, and WalletConnect, allowed MyWish to become one of the most effective and easy-to-use token distribution tools on the market.
To set up an airdrop with MyWish, you just have to choose the needed blockchain, fill in the token address box, and the service will be ready for sending out tokens. You can see how simple the process is in this tutorial.
To sum up
There are many token distribution tools. However, airdrop has proved itself to be the most effective marketing strategy for promoting crypto projects. Programming a functional script is a slow process — and you do not want to waste time on coding while you could busy yourself with marketing the event.
The slow and meticulous task of sending out tokens has been left in the past too, thanks to MyWish’s airdrop service that makes airdrops easy for everybody.
