How to Launch: Inside My Recent Course Launch

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

If you’ve been following me in the last month or so, you probably saw that I did a big launch and today’s episode of High on Business, I’m going to be totally transparent on what went well and what didn’t go well with my launch.

I have launched many times and I will tell you that every launch that I’ve done, something has gone wrong. You need to expect this when you’re launching, especially if it’s your first launch. What makes a good entrepreneur is being able to be very good at solving problems.

In May I launched my brand new course Profitable Group Systems that teaches coaches how to create, launch and monetize a group coaching program (interested? It’s still available here). It was actually the first business course that I’ve launched. I’ve launched several business one-on-one programs, group coaching programs, and even a workshop, but never a course, so it was something totally new to me.

I wrote a cheque to myself for $30,000 and that’s how much I wanted to generate in this launch. I am very attached to my monetary launch goals. I always come up with a number and to this day I usually come pretty close to my number, but with this first launch I didn’t hit my goal number. But I was fully aware that this was my first course and I’m launching during a pandemic, so even though I didn’t make the amount that I wanted to, I’m completely happy with the results and the enrollments I received.

So let’s talk about what worked with the launch.

The VIP list

I’ve done this with other launches before, like my HTMA Expert Course. The VIP list works really well if you have a program that is not available yet because it gets people interested ahead of the launch. With the VIP list, you want to make sure you collect their email addresses so you don’t lose them and then close to launch time, you can offer early enrollment, a high discount code for the launch, extra bonuses, whatever you want to give them to make them feel like that VIP. With the Profitable Groups launch, the VIP peeps got me 8 to 10 sales within the first few hours of opening the cart.

The webinar

I got a lot of great feedback on the webinar I did for the Profitable Group launch. I had about 120 people sign up for the webinar and I probably had about 50 people show up live, which is pretty standard.

Something I would probably do in the future that only occurred to me after this webinar was to put a link or a button for people to add the webinar to their Google calendar. I ran the webinar through Zoom and broadcasted it to YouTube live.

And the thing with YouTube live is the link that you give people to sign up for the live is the same link as the replay. There were a few tech glitches when I first shared my screen – for some reason he was sharing both my screens. So I had to kind of figure that out with help from the audience. But overall, the webinar went really well and I got another 5 to 6 signups from the webinar.

Something you should know about launching is that typically the middle section of your launch tends to be kind of slow and that’s totally normal. For me, about half of the sales happened from the VIP people and then I had another few trickle in, but in that middle section there wasn’t much happening. Then last minutes a bunch of sales came in. And when I say last minute, I mean within the last hour of the cart closing.

Overall I had 20 enrollments and generated just over $17,000. But like I said, there were a few things that could have improved.

The webinar sales slide

One thing I did wrong was on the slides for the webinar I forgot to add the urgency and I forgot to even speak of the urgency. After the webinar I gave people three days to take action to get the bonuses and I forgot to mention that! I didn’t write it in the slides, I didn’t tell them so there was no urgency to take action. To make up for it, I made sure to add that in the follow up emails as well as the description of the YouTube live.

The upload process

This course was finished at the end of March, but I needed to get the videos edited. I sent the videos off to an editor and I made a few mistakes with the deadline. I gave her the deadline of the 1st of May, even though we’re launching on the 12^th which didn’t leave much time to go through them for quality control and upload time. But with some weekend overtime hours & the help from my VA we got it done.

The next time I release my next course, which should be coming up at the end of summer, I’m going to make sure that we have a full month once all the edits are to do quality control, upload into the members area and fix any errors that occur along the way.

The social media strategy

I nailed the captions on social media, but didn’t execute my Instagram stories well. Typically in a launch I will pre-plan my Instagram story content in advance but because of how last minute we were doing everything, I wasn’t super prepared with the IG stories. The result was I had a couple days throughout the launch where I didn’t show up on Instagram stories.

I actually recommend that you show up on social in some way every day of your launch. So I know in the future I need to make sure I schedule everything out and give myself enough time to actually execute all aspects of my social strategy.

The down sell

I haven’t really done this before but I know a lot of entrepreneurs that do it. Basically after a launch you offer some sort of cheaper product to try to make a few sales at the end. So I decided to down sell my Define your Profitable Niche Workshop, but I got zero sales on that. Either my audience was a bit fatigued by all the selling I was doing or they’re feeling pretty clear on their niche or maybe they don’t even know they need a niche. So the down sell didn’t quite work, but I do want to try it again in the future.

The after launch survey

So anytime you launch, I recommend that you send out a survey afterwards to the people that didn’t buy it. What I did was create a one question survey through Google forms and added it into the active campaign email, but I didn’t test the email. And the form didn’t work because nobody filled out the survey despite several hundred people opening the email. And unfortunately I’m going to miss out on some really valuable information of why people didn’t purchase. So lesson learned with that, I will definitely make sure to test the email and make sure that’s actually working for next time.

Hopefully you will learn that a lot of things will go right in a launch and a lot of things will go wrong. Neither is good or bad, it just is. And all that matters is that you look at what didn’t go right and you look at how you can improve it in the future.