Live launching is both nerve-wracking and exciting. It’s a powerful and effective way of selling, yet, when done incorrectly, can also set your marketing far back. How can you avoid falling off the pitfalls of live launching and effectively enrolling your clients? In this fourth episode of the Master Your Marketing Series, Kendra Perry shares all things live launching and equips you with the insights to prepare the right way. From clear definitions to the how-tos, Kendra shows you what it takes to create successful live launches. She sets your expectations and provides a checklist for pre-, during, and post-live launching. Join Kendra and learn how to fortify your marketing for extraordinary results!
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How To Enroll Clients With Live Launching — Master Your Marketing Series # 4
I am so excited for episode number four of the Master Your Marketing series. I’m so pumped. We are going to be talking about one of my favorite topics. I love talking about launching. I find launching fascinating. I have a love-hate relationship with it. I’m sure anyone who’s done live launching will agree with me. Live launching is a good way to generate sales. In my opinion, the best way to sell. It’s my most effective way of selling.
You might be wondering, “I thought we were talking about marketing.” Yes, we are talking about marketing in the Master Your Marketing series, but there’s an intersection between marketing and sales. What I’m trying to show you the difference here is that sales don’t work without marketing, but marketing is pointless without sales.
What we have talked about in episodes 1, 2, and 3 of the series is we have talked about the type of marketing that you do leading up to a promotion. Your promotion is still marketing, but there’s sales infused into it, which is where we get into live launching, which we are talking about. We will then be talking about automated launching in the next episode. If you haven’t read episodes 1, 2, and 3, I highly recommend that you go back and read those because I will be referencing those as we talk.
Remember that everything builds on everything. You will never be successful with episodes 2 and 3 where we talked about organic marketing and paid marketing if you don’t have Episode 1 in place where we talked about messaging and the communication you use in which to speak with your audience. In terms of making a live launch work, a live launch isn’t going to work if you don’t have marketing in place or you don’t have audience building in place.
To properly live launch, you are going to need an email list. We talked about email lists in Episode 2 when we talked about organic marketing. I gave you my email nurture strategy that’s working well for me. I gave you that. We need to have a certain number of people on an email list before we can live launch. How do we build that email list? That comes down to other forms of organic marketing like your social media content, collaborations, SEO, but also paid advertising, which can help make your launches bigger and help you make more sales.
What Is Live Launching?
What do I mean when I talk about live launching for anyone who is brand new? I’m essentially talking about different events. These live events that you can put on to create buzz, excitement, and engagement around your offer, and then make a pitch. Some examples of live launches are things like live webinars, live masterclasses, maybe a workshop series, a live challenge, and a video series. I have also done virtual summits.
In the past years, I have hosted two different virtual summits and those are also live launches that I have done. What I want to let you know is that a virtual summit isn’t always a live launch. A lot of people will do a virtual summit to build the email list. I have always launched HC on the back end of it and it’s always been a profitable and successful launch.
Live launching is important if you are doing any one-to-many program. If you are doing one-on-one, I don’t think you need to live launch. You are selling all the time and you don’t need as many sales when you are doing a one-on-one program, so you don’t need the complexity of a live launch. I would dissuade you from doing that if you were doing a one-on-one program.
If you were doing a group program, maybe a course, a membership, or a hybrid program, which would be a combination of group coaching and one-on-one, then I highly recommend doing some live launch. What a live launch does is a whole bunch of people together, it creates all this excitement. It showcases you, your personality, your expertise, and what you do. It can lead to a big cash infusion.
This is my love-hate relationship with live launching. I love the big cash infusion. It feels like it gets you ahead. You get this big chunk of money in your bank account. I get this big influx of students who are excited and there are lots of good energy and I’m always super pumped to support them. That’s exciting for me, but live launches can also be stressful and a lot of work in terms of preparing for them.
The other thing that a lot of people don’t know going into live launching is they can also be emotionally draining, especially when they are not going as well or you are not getting sales. This other thing that happens is called the mid-launch lull, it’s this time in the middle of a live launch when you are not getting a lot of sales and you can go to a dark place. I call it the dark place because it’s the place where you can get in your head and start to feel down on yourself and you can feel like, “I’m not going to make sales. This is a disaster. I’m horrible.” All of a sudden, you get an influx of sales in the last day or two. Honestly, a lot of people will buy towards the end of a launch, so that’s very normal. I want to throw that out there.
A Marketing Strategy
In terms of live launches, live launching is a marketing strategy. It’s a condensed marketing strategy that always leads to a sale or always leads to you pitching something or pitching to sell. A lot of people, when they think about this, they think about that launch period. Essentially when you make the program available, and then when the program is no longer available or some promotion goes away. That’s the least important part of the launch. This is a big mistake that I have made in my business and I have seen a lot of my students making their business is that they don’t do all the legwork that goes into making a live launch very successful.
In terms of live launching, I love live launching, but I don’t want to only rely on live launches because that can be stressful. Some people might run a one-on-one program or maybe they have something like a membership, and that’s always available. They then have this program that maybe they want to run once or twice a year. That is going to be reliant on a live launch. Some people like to run their business that way because they don’t always want to have the program available.
If you have a program that can be made always available, then I don’t recommend only relying on live launches. I recommend having a combination of live and evergreen because the evergreen or the automated is what sells your program all the time in between launches. It helps bring in sales and it means that you are not completely reliant on the live launch in order to make sales. That will make it less stressful. If you were only selling via live launches, then you would be reliant on making sales. If you had a bad live launch, that would be crappy for your income because then you wouldn’t have anything to sell in between launches.
The caveat to this or another way to think about this is if you are someone who’s bringing in consistent leads to your email list like maybe you are bringing in 500 to 1,000 leads a month, you could do a live launch monthly and you could only be live launching. You wouldn’t need to necessarily have anything between because every month, you are going to be bringing in sales and that’s something you can do. Although I probably wouldn’t recommend doing something like a monthly launch unless you have a team because it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of prep. There’s a lot of room for error, so I wouldn’t do that until you have someone to support you.
People are doing launches every three-ish months. That’s why I recommend doing a live launch every three months. I have done a monthly live webinar in the past, but keep in mind that I run ads to bring in new leads to my list. I also have a great support team who handles a lot of the tech and a lot of the admin stuff so that I can show up for the live launch and everything’s good.
Successful Live Launching
Coming back to being successful with live launches, a lot of the success of your live launch has to do with episodes 1 through 3. It has to do with having good messaging and good organic and paid marketing that is building your list and warming up your audience before you launch. I used this example on a previous episode of the show, but I remember having a student and I believe it was like the end of May, and she wanted to launch mid-June or something like that. I might be a bit wrong on the dates here, but essentially she wanted to launch 5 or 6 weeks out from the date that we were chatting. She wanted to launch a group program.
I asked her, “How many people are on your email list?” “There were several hundred.” I was like, “Have you been communicating with them regularly?” She was like, “I haven’t emailed them since January.” I essentially said, “We can’t launch in June, but we could launch maybe in August or September.” If you launch into a group of people who you haven’t been regularly communicating with, honestly, they are not even going to remember who you are. If you haven’t been sending regular emails to their inbox that are getting opened, there’s a good chance that when you do send out those launch emails, they are going to end up in someone’s spam.
We need to be creating relationships in between launches, sharing relevant content that is very aligned with what we are ultimately going to sell. For example, if you are selling a group coaching program that helps someone solve their acne, we don’t want to be sharing a bunch of recipes or smoothie guides. We want to be sharing content that is relevant to acne. We also want to be continually letting people know what’s coming.
We don’t want to do something I call a surprise launch on our audience. A lot of people do this where they want to keep it secret and then they are like, “Surprise, I got this program.” You want to tease the offer and you want to seed it into your content. Constantly letting people know that it’s coming and potentially even giving them a waitlist that they can join in order to get something special.
This is something that I have done with cohort-style programs. This doesn’t necessarily work with evergreen programs that are always available and that people can enroll at any time. When I say cohort, I mean there is a start date and an end date. I used to run the Health Coach Accelerator 3 or 4 times a year. There would be a start date and an end date. It was a 90-day program. In between the availability of the program, I would have a waitlist. I’d say, “Hop on the wait list if you want to join the next round of HCA and you are going to get access to discounts and bonuses that I won’t be offering to anyone else.”
I gave people some incentive. Usually what I do is I would do a VIP launch first. I would open up the cart 24 hours early to everyone on the waitlist and I would give them an additional discount and an additional bonus for that 24 hours. They could get that. If they didn’t, they would get re-offered at the higher price point without the bonus. If you are going to create a waitlist, you do want to make sure you give them some incentive. Otherwise, why would you want to be on the wait list?
Marketing and this intersection with sales always go together. There’s no point in marketing if it’s not going to lead to a sale. Sales isn’t going to work without marketing. That’s why I can’t pull these apart. During a live launch, you are doing a lot of marketing. It’s not the start of your marketing. It’s like the tail end of your marketing.
When we are using our organic and paid marketing, we are building the audience and we are warming it up because to live launch, I would say you probably want to have at least several hundred people on your email list. I usually give a minimum of about 300 email subscribers that are targeted, that are aligned that fit into your audience, and that would want the thing that you are going to offer. I would say 500 is a little bit better. It depends on what style of launch you are doing.
What does a live launch look like? There’s an open cart and that means the day that your program, course, or membership becomes available. There’s a closed cart or the day that the cart closes. That might mean that enrollment closes in the case of a cohort-style launch where there’s a start date and an end date or there is a price promotion or some bonus that is going to go away or potentially, there are limited spots. In the case of a hybrid group program, you might say something like, “I have 10 spots.” Once those 10 spots are gone, they are gone. Enrollment is going to be open until October 25th, I’m using a random date or until I get those 10 spots filled.
Creating Urgency Or Scarcity
In a launch, you always want either urgency or scarcity. This is a tactic that makes people take action because human nature means that we don’t take action without a deadline or some incentive. You can imagine when you go to the grocery store, the bananas aren’t on sale forever because if they were on sale forever, you wouldn’t take advantage of it. Certain times a year, bananas are 50% off and you don’t know when that’s going to end. You are like, “I’m going to buy more bananas right now,” because you know that that’s going to go away.
This is not a new tactic. It’s not sleazy. Every business does this. Your local spa has spa deals. Seasonal deals. “It’s the fall. Laser hair removal is going on special for a month. You can get 4 for the price of 3.” Just to use an example. These are tactics that all businesses use and that’s because without these incentives and deadlines, people don’t take action. It’s easy to create urgency. Maybe what I will do first before I get into this is I’m going to define the difference between urgency and scarcity. Urgency means that time is running out. Scarcity means that there are limited things.
Urgency would be enrollment closes or this bonus is going away. Scarcity would be more like there are limited spots. There are only 5 or 2 more spots. You are going to want at least one of those or both. It depends. I’m usually working with urgency because I don’t cap the number of my programs. My program, HCA, we don’t cap it. That’s how we can keep the price lower because if we had to cap it, we’d have to make the price go way up. We don’t typically have scarcity, but we always have urgency.
As my program is ongoing enrollment, what that means is it’s a price promotion with some bonus that is going away. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and then the price goes up. You will want one of those things. Depending on what you are selling. If it is ongoing enrollment, then you are going to use a price promotion with some bonus. A bonus could be some special resource, added masterclass, or something that they would be excited to have.
If you have something that is cohort style, it means that there’s an open cart and a closed cart, meaning that it starts and ends. Once enrollment closes, people can’t enroll anymore. You probably don’t need anything extra. A lot of times, the closed cart is enough to make people take action. This is something I have seen in a lot of my launches because I have done launches where I have had a fast action bonus.
For the first 48 hours, they got some additional bonuses or maybe an additional price promo. People will miss all of the bonuses and all of the price promotions, but because the cart is closing, they will still buy. The cart close where the enrollment legitimately closes and they can’t get in is honestly one of the most compelling forms of urgency.
I have done three different types of live launches in my day. I have done webinars, challenges, and summits. Most of what I have done is live webinars, but moving forward, I’m going to stick more with the challenge or the 3-day live event because I just did my 6-figure wellness offer challenge and I loved it. I had so much fun and it was the most profitable, most fun, and enjoyable launch that I have ever had. I’m going to be sharing with you next episode, a little behind the scenes of that, be very transparent, and give you all the ins and outs of that. A lot of people love hearing how I make money and how I run these things. I like to be very honest and transparent with how I make money in my business.
What Is “Too Much” In Live Launching?
We talked about how often you can live launch. If you don’t have a team, I probably wouldn’t do it more frequently than every three months because it’s a lot of work. You could potentially do it every two months, especially if you were doing the same launch over and over and you were rinsing and repeating. If you are going to do a monthly thing, you are probably going to want a virtual assistant and someone to help you out. Hopefully, you can see how this all fits together. We can’t live launch without organic and/or paid marketing. We are not going to be successful with organic or paid marketing if we don’t have good messaging.
Something I will tell you. I’m going to give you a little bit of a tip with live launching. One of the big mistakes I have made with live launching in the past is I have given away too much. I have talked about this on the show before in terms of webinars. A lot of times we overteach and we think that by teaching and giving a lot away for free we will make more sales. The more we teach, the more we get into the how-to, and the more we go into the nitty-gritty details, the less sales we make. That’s because we tend to overwhelm people. After all, there’s only so much we can teach in a 1-hour webinar or even in a 3-day event.
In terms of building your business, there’s so much that goes into it. My HCA course is very comprehensive. We have dozens of hours of video and tons of resources. There’s only a little snapshot that I can teach you within that training. It’s still very valuable. People get a lot out of it. People often leave my webinars being like, “This was the best thing ever.” We want to stay away from getting too much into the nitty-gritty.
I’m going to talk a little bit more about my challenge in the next episode when we get back to regular programming of the show. I took the webinar that I typically do and I broke it up into a three-day challenge. Three days of education with a little homework task at the end of the day. I would typically teach this in a 1-hour webinar, but this was a 3-day event and I was live in the group for 1-hour each for those 3 days. Did I teach more? Did I give more how-to? Not really. A little bit, but mostly, what I filled up the time with was engaging with the audience telling stories from my own experience and showcasing my personality.
It’s amazing because you’d think, “You are not giving away much more. Do people want to hear about you and your experience and hear you talk to them?” They do because we love stories. We love seeing ourselves and other people. We love knowing that we are not alone. We love hearing other people’s experiences because it’s inspiring. What we are doing with our live launching is we are giving away value, but we are doing so without going into the nitty-gritty details of the how-to.
In my last challenge that I did, I did it differently. I’m going to talk about how it was very different in the next episode. I did it differently. It was longer. I did 5 days, I put a lot more into it, and I was working 12 hours a day. I was super overwhelmed. It was exhausting. It honestly didn’t increase my conversion. This is a big reason why I have been hesitant to do another challenge. This time, I was like, “I’m going to do things differently.” I shortened the time. I gave away less how-to. I told more stories and connection content, which we talked about in episode two of the series when we talked about organic marketing. I made more money, I made more sales, and I enrolled more students than I did with the first challenge at a higher price point.
That goes to show that it’s not about giving away more. Sometimes it’s about giving away less and trying to connect more deeply with the people whom you are serving. These are different ways that you can create buzz around group programs, courses, memberships, or whatever it is that you are selling. You can get a huge influx of sales, which honestly is fun from a monetary perspective where you get to see a whole bunch of enrollment notifications and make a bunch of money. Also, from a serving of the client’s perspective. You get an influx of people who are jazzed up, they are excited, and it’s honestly fun to support them.
Automated Live Launching
I love it when I get an influx because there’s always so much good energy coming into our group, and it’s the most fun for me to be able to support these people at the beginning of their business journey. What I mentioned before is we can’t rely on live launching. Sometimes we can. If we have a team, that loves live launching, and we are willing to do it every month or two, then we could rely only on live launching. For a lot of us, we don’t have a team, or live launching might be exhausting. We want to have a way to sell automatically when we are not live launching.
That’s where we are going to talk about automated launching, which is our final day of the Master Your Marketing series. I’m very excited to talk about this. I’m going to bust a lot of miss and I’m going to give you an honest behind-the-scenes look at what automated launching looks like. Stay tuned for that. Before I pop off, I want to tell you about something very exciting that I’m going to be launching in January 2024. I know January is a few months off, but honestly, it’s going to come so much quicker than you think.
If you are a coach, professional, healer, or practitioner, you are making at least $5,000 a month, and you want to grow to high, multiple 6 figures and beyond in your business, I am, for the first time since 2020, launching a mastermind program for higher level practitioners. This will be a six-month mastermind that is going to include a combination of community group coaching and one-on-one, which is crazy. I haven’t offered one-on-one in four years. It’s going to be very specific to you and your business. This isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. This isn’t a step-by-step method. This is me helping you with what you need help with in your business and your goals.
A couple of the people who we have had enrolled need help with team building or they need help with automation or they want to learn how to sell without sales calls. If you are someone who wants to learn how to sell off a webinar without a sales call, then that is something that we will be covering in that program. I know that because I know some of the people who have enrolled and I’m going to be helping the group with what they need help with. Six-month high touch program. Very excited to launch it.
If you are interested in applying and being a part of this, you need to generate at least $5,000 a month, so you need to have a business of at least $5,000. You need to have that goal of building to high multiple six figures. You can go to KendraPerry.net/Apply. I do have some special founding member pricing until November 15th, 2023 before the price goes up. I’m going to be taking a very limited amount of students for this. Very limited amount. Maximum of 10, maybe less than that, maybe as low as 5. It’s going to be very intimate. You are going to get a lot of access to me and it’s going to help you explode your business in 2024. That is all I got for now. I’m very excited to see you in the final episode when we talk about automated launching.
Important Links
- KendraPerry.net/Apply
- Episode 1 – Past episode
- Episode 2 – Past episode
- Episode 3 – Past episode
