If you’ve been following me for at least the last few months, you likely saw that I was launching my Health Coach Accelerator program! And today, I want to give you an update on how that 5-figure launch went.
If you’ve ever wondered what goes into launching a mid-range program, I’m giving you all the dirty details!
In today’s Wealthy Coach episode:
- The inside look at my recent launch – what worked and what didn’t
- How to give yourself permission to sell during webinars
- The follow-ups to those that didn’t buy in
- The silver lining to failed Facebook ads
- How mindset played a role on my launch
To get on my list for my Black Friday Health Boss Training Bundle Promo: kendraperry.net/biz-tips
To get on my list for the HTMA Expert promo: https://long-paper-7772.ck.page/bdd1c3af16
For complete show notes, visit: https://kendraperry.net/inside-my-5-figure-launch/
Connect with me on Instagram: @kendraperryinc
We would LOVE if you showed your love for this episode by leaving us a 5-star review! Not sure how? Here are a few ways to do it.
1) How to leave a 5-star review from your iPhone: https://www.loom.com/share/b187ff4fbfbf4beeb0a42e7b1179f7cc
2) How to leave a 5-star review from your desktop (android users): https://www.loom.com/share/a80c774f0a534f77a42df2f6b46feba7
—
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thewealthycoach/message
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thewealthycoach/support
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Inside My 5-Figure HCA Launch
I am fired up and excited. It is a beautiful winter day. Winter is here for good in Western Canada where I live. I know you guys might not be with me on this, but I love winter. I love it when it’s a cloudy yet sunny day. Cloudy and clear skies at the same time, mixed weather, clouds, and skies. The sun is peeking through the clouds and the snow is on the trees. It is so unbelievably beautiful and the air is crisp and I love winter. I love all the seasons. I love having the change and the difference, putting on my winter clothes and then switching to my spring clothes and the new sports that come with each season. We’re gearing up to go skiing and I’m super stoked. I’m going to go skiing for the first time this winter. There will not be enough snow, but the groomed cat track up to the top of the ski hills. The ski hills are not open yet, but I can ski tour up to the top. I’ll probably ski back down the cat track. Being up there, it is so stunning and beautiful. I’m going to be wildly out of shape for ski touring. It will be good to test out my equipment and my body, so I can start getting into shape. Ski touring crushes me, so I’ve got to start early.
For the topic of this episode, I want to give an update on how my Health Coach Accelerator launch went. I love to give you the inside look at my launch. I’ll talk about my strategy a little bit and what went well and what didn’t go so well. Every launch is a learning process and some things are going to go well and some things are not going to go well. This is my 10th, 15th, 20th launch, I don’t even know at this point in my business. I never have a perfect launch and most of us will not. Come and talk to me when you have a perfect launch. I’m never going to hear that from any of you because none of us really do. I want to go through my Health Coach Accelerator launch. It is my new signature group experience. I’m so excited about it. I’m running it with 21 amazing women. I’m having so much fun. It feels so aligned. I’m excited that I launched this. I hope you too will be a student of mine coming up because we are going to relaunch.
Private To Group
I’m going to talk a little bit about the backstory of Health Coach Accelerator. This is a program I’ve had in the works for a while. What I did was I ran this as a private coaching program. I’ve run this with probably a couple dozen health coaches as a one-on-one program. I used that one-on-one program as the framework for this new group coaching program. This is my first time running it as a group, but I have run it as a private coaching program for a couple of years. I’ve talked about this before on the show and I want this to come up. I was getting burnt out working with one-on-one clients. If any of my one-on-one clients are out there, I fucking love you. This isn’t because I don’t love you. It’s because of my energy type.
I have more energy on live group calls. I get a little bit burnt out and exhausted from a lot of one-on-one. I’ve reduced the amount of that I offer. I was getting so burnt out with one-on-one, so I decided that I wanted to swing far in the opposite direction and go for more of a DIY course business model. Taking my expertise, bundling it into a course and have it be offered with no support. People buy the info product, get the information, and implement it. That’s what I did. I launched a couple of courses that way and I was super excited. I was like, “This is my business model. As soon as I make the sale, I don’t have to do any work. This is great. I have all this time,” and I didn’t like it.
It did not fulfill me because the people who purchased my DIY courses, I had no idea how they were doing. I didn’t know where they were in the process or if they completed the course. I did not like that. I realized that that type of business model was not for me. I realized I wanted something similar to or group course or offer a high level of support. That’s how I landed on the current way that I am offering Health Coach Accelerator, which is as a group or a live group experience. Everyone goes through the program together. I coach and I help people in real-time. We have a syllabus or a process that we go through. I am heavily involved in the program and supporting my students every single day of the week inside the Facebook group and on the coaching calls.
It’s significantly more aligned. It’s been an interesting year of business development for me and learning exactly what I want my business to look like. I am years into my business, which is crazy. I cannot believe how fast this time has passed. I want to let you know that your business is going to be ever-evolving. At this point, I’m still figuring out how I want things to look. I started writing Health Coach Accelerator as a course, and I had everything laid out. I was going to rerecord or prerecord everything, package it into a course. I had this revelation one day where I was like, “I don’t want to do it this way. I should launch it as a live course and see how it goes.” A few weeks before I launched Health Coach Accelerator, I decided to launch it as a live group program. I had all the content and I was like, “I’m going to do this.” That’s what I did. It was a little bit of a last-minute 180, but I am so grateful that I did it because this is the exact way that I want to be offering what I teach.
The Webinar Approach
I’m going to tell you a little bit about my launch plan. It’s a lot of different ways that you can launch a program or a course. I chose my typical strategy. It works well for me. I did create a webinar. I was selling Health Coach Accelerator at a mid-range price point. I sold it for $997. I was going to need some presentation in front of it. That $1,000 mark is a little bit on the edge because I do have a course that I sell for around that price point and I don’t put a presentation in front of it, but with Health Coach Accelerator, I was probably going to have to put a presentation in front of it, so I did make a webinar.
My plan was to run Facebook ads to the webinar, spend a little bit of money, like a few hundred dollars, but primarily I was relying on my email list to pitch the webinar to and ultimately Health Coach Accelerator. I had an email sales sequence to go after the webinar. My social media plan was focused on Instagram since that is the most primary way that I show up on social media. Most of my plan involved daily Instagram Stories with a couple of Instagram Lives. That was my plan and the launch that typically works for me.
I want to talk about what went well and what didn’t. The webinar went well for me, but it took significantly longer to create than I thought. I spent about 4 or 5 times the amount of time to create the webinar. I was getting stuck with what I should teach. This is a common internal conflict that a lot of business owners have with webinars. It’s funny because throughout this, I was having a conversation with one of my online business friends about this. She was having the same struggle with her own webinar.
The struggle is always how much do you teach. There is a school that says you shouldn’t teach too much on the webinar. The reason for that is you want to set people up for the sale and you do not want to overwhelm people. When you overwhelm people and that’s something that health coaches do often. We often feel like we have something to prove or show people that, “We’re super smart and they should invest in us.” Too much information does not necessarily sell. If people feel overwhelmed at the end of the webinar and they do not feel like they can do it, then they are not going to invest. I was walking that line. The truth is I don’t even register for webinars anymore because I’m almost always disappointed.
I find people, there is a lot of fluff and they don’t give away much. I commit 45 minutes, an hour of my time and I don’t get anything from it. I did not want people to sign up for my webinar and feel that way. I wanted them to be able to walk away with something that they could implement, even if they didn’t decide to invest in Health Coach Accelerator. That was important to me. In the end, I did decide to go with a little bit more heavy on information for the webinar than I typically would because I wanted people to feel it was valuable. I said it on the webinar. I was like, “Guys, I’ve been having this internal conflict. I want to make this valuable for you. I’ve decided to go with more value at the risk of overwhelming you. I’d much rather you feel overwhelmed because of all the information I’m going to give you versus being disappointed and being like, ‘That webinar was a fucking waste of my time.’”
Something that I went did go heavy on is giving a lot of valuable information. I did work specifically on objections right in the webinar. This is where a lot of people go wrong with webinars. They don’t address any of the objections on the webinar. When you don’t have people on a sales call, you’re not talking with them back and forth. People will have objections and so they need to be addressed. I sat down and I’m like, “What are going to be the biggest objections to signing up for Health Coach Accelerator?”
I knew one of them was going to be the money. I did provide a robust payment plan which a lot of people went for. I offered $197 for six months which I typically don’t offer a payment plan that goes beyond the length of the program. I decided to try it out and about half of the people went for it, which is atypical for me because usually very few people go for the payment plan, but this time a lot of people did. It was a good call. Hopefully, people don’t default. I’m going to see how that goes and I’ll make my determination if I’m going to do it like that again.
The other objections that I did direct address in my teaching were one, tech literacy and two, no one can afford to work with me because I hear this all the time. People are like, “I’m not a techie. I’m tech-illiterate.” It drives me crazy. I’m like, “Guys, that’s a mindset shift you need to make because if you want an online business, you’ve got to learn the tech and it is a learning curve.” In the beginning, it is going to be frustrating and things are going to take you longer than you want them to, but we all have to go through it. I did not emerge from the womb as a tech genius. I’m pretty good at the tech now, but it’s because I committed to learning it. I knew that I was going to figure it out and now I can figure it out.
You can get there too. That was one of my teaching points in the webinar was like, “You can learn this and you need to commit to it.” I’m going to help you as much as possible in the program. I give you a tech library and if you get stuck, I will help you. I also have a tech woman on staff who can help us. The tech involved in Health Coach Accelerator is relatively minimal because we keep it minimal. That was one of my teaching points. The other one was people believing that people can’t afford to work with them because they’ve heard that a lot. Maybe you have heard that a lot too. Every time I get on a sales call with me, people have the money objection.
The truth is if you’re getting, “I can’t afford it,” a lot, it honestly speaks to your sales skills. It is the most common objection that you will get even when you are a great seller or great at selling. It means that you need to work on your sales skills because people do not understand how the value of what you are offering is equal to the price that you are charging. I went into that as well. I went hard on those objections right on the webinar. That seemed to work well. The other thing that I did with the webinar that worked well is I added a link so that people could add the webinar into their calendar when they signed up.
You can get a lot of people signing up for your webinar, but you want them to show up live. If you can get people to show up live on a webinar, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to sell to them, but people get distracted. People sign up for webinars and then they forget. I’ve done a couple of things. I had the option for people to get a reminder through Facebook Messenger. The app I use is called ManyChat, but Facebook has a lot of weird rules around that. I was like, “If I can get this event into people’s calendar, that’s going to help them show up because they’re going to get a calendar reminder.” I used Calendar Event. It allowed me to put a button or link into the email reminder and on the confirmation page. They could click on it and they could choose their calendar. It would add that event right into their calendar.
I had a pretty good live show up rate of about 30% of people, which is good. Twenty percent is generally what you’re aiming for. That was quite high for me and that went well. I did not add an incentive to stay until the end of the webinars. I like to bribe people. I say, “If you stay until the end of the webinar, I’m going to give you a secret word and you can email that secret word to us. We’re going to enter you into the prize to win this big thing.” I decided not to do that this time and see how it went. Most people did stay until the end of the webinar. I had good retention, so that shows me that people were interested in the content of the webinar and in what I was selling. That worked well.
The other thing that worked well in the webinar. People have a lot of energy as they’re teaching on the webinar, they feel fired up and excited. When it comes time to sell, the energy drops because they’re feeling uncomfortable and awkward. They’re thinking, “People are going to fucking hate me because I’m selling now.” I feel that too. I added a slide into my webinar that asked for their permission. I was like, “There’s a lot more to this and I wish I could teach us all to you in a free masterclass that lasts an hour, but I can’t. I want to give you more. If it’s okay with you, can I please share with you what I have to offer that I know am going to help you?” Asking for permission in that way helped me keep my energy up and my confidence high. It was more aligned, genuine and authentic.
At that point, if people don’t want to be sold to, that is telling them to be transparent so they can get off the webinar, but the people who stay on are there because they are interested in what you have to offer. That helped me. Something different with this launch is that I did not write the sales emails. After the webinar, I always do a sales sequence where I’m sending 1 to 2 emails a day for 7 to 10 days. I would rewrite all the emails in advance and then I would send them along to my assistant and she would schedule them out. I did not do this time. I was dealing with a lot of unmotivation.
Pulse Check
The world was getting to me. I shared this in a very open, raw and personal YouTube video. You might want to check that out if you want to see what my mindset was at that time. I was having a hard time sitting down for long enough to write these emails. I was writing these emails the night before they were going out, which is atypical for me, but it worked in my favor. I was able to get a pulse of how people were feeling as I was writing the emails and on the spot make specific emails that I knew were going to help people with what they needed help with. To explain this a little bit further, people responded to my emails and they were like, “I’m interested, but I’m worried about this.” I was like, “That’s great.”
If this person is worried about that, then there are probably other people. I’m going to write an email to address the objection. I went super hard on objections for this launch, like way more than I ever do. That helped me. One person wrote me and was like, “I want to send out for your program, but I also want to invest in a website. What do you think? Should I do my website first?” I was like, “No, don’t get a website. That’s not going to help you get clients. That’s the worst thing you can do as a new business owner,” which I know is counterintuitive. I made a whole email on like, “Please stop building your website. If you’re building your website, please stop,” or something like that.
That went over well. I had a lot of job objections about time and the fact that I had assignments involved in the program. People were like, “I’m worried about having to do the homework. What if I don’t want to do the homework? I don’t have time to do the homework.” I was like, “Don’t think of the homework, like school assignments. It’s not school homework that is randomly assigned. These are intentionally assigned assignments that help you build your business. You have to do these things. If you want to build a business. The only difference is I’m telling you exactly what to do and putting it into an assignment for you step-by-step versus you having to figure out what you even need to do and then doing it on your own.”
I’m like, “The homework is going to help you save time because I’m telling you what you need to do to build your business.” Writing all the emails last-minute was super helpful. I wonder if I should do that for future launches to some degree, like leave a bit of a few days open in the emails that I pre-write so that I can address these last-minute objections that come up that I may be potentially not even aware of. There was one email specifically that worked well for me. In that email, I wrote, “What is holding you back from signing up for Health Coach Accelerator? Let me know. Let’s chat.” I probably got about 30 different responses, which is super cool because I was able to get into email and have conversations back and forth with people.
I sold quite a few of those people, probably a third of those people into the program, which is very cool. I was excited about that email. It went over well. I learned a lot from it too because there were a few objections that people had that I didn’t even think of. That was helpful. I highly recommend sending out an email like that. The other thing was, I went hard with the fence-sitters. The fence-sitters are people who are interested, but they’re on the fence. They’re not sure. You can always tell who those people are because they’re the people who will go to your sales page, but they will not buy. You can target those people with emails. You can set this up in most good email marketing platforms.
I use ConvertKit. I love it because you can do this and with other ones, but I’m a big fan of ConvertKit. You can create a link in an email and tag people who click. What you can do is when you send out your broadcast, you can send it to everyone who clicked on the sales page but didn’t purchase. You include the tag of people, but you exclude people who have the purchase tag. Those are your fence-sitters. Those people got a higher volume of emails than the people who didn’t even click on the page because I knew they were interested and clicked, but they had not purchased. I sent a lot of objection emails to those people. This is something I always do in my launches. This time I went extra hard on it. That worked well for me.
Social Media Approach
My social media strategy was all focused on Instagram since that’s the primary way that I show up. I also did a YouTube Live. It went okay. In the Instagram Stories, I did show up daily throughout the launch. I told stories and shared testimonials from my private clients who’d gone through the program. I handled a lot of objections. The price, the website, the time, and the homework objections, all of these things also in an Instagram Story. I repurposed a lot of those emails and turned them into Instagram Stories. The other thing, I did go live twice on Instagram.
The first one was at the beginning of the launch and I use that to promote the webinar and let people know that the program was coming. The other one I used to address questions about the course. I pulled questions from emails that people had sent me and from direct messages. I answered those on the Instagram Live. I also answered questions of anyone who showed up and that went well. I had a lot of people who were so stoked that I answered their question live, that they were totally in. Those are all the things that went well. A lot went well with this launch.
I’m going to use this launch as a template for my future launches. What didn’t go well was my Facebook ads. I could not get my Facebook ads to run at all. It was incredibly frustrating. I got a whole bunch of ads going and I press publish. They all got approved and went through. I’d set up a custom conversion and it was not tracking. This is a problem I have had with Facebook ads before. I could tell that I was getting leads or people were registering. I got about maybe 30, but I couldn’t tell which ads were performing well. I had probably twenty different ads. I needed to know which ones were performing. I reached out to Facebook, they gaslighted me and were like, “Everything’s working fine.” I’m like, “It’s not tracking. I’ve had the same situation before. I had the same experience.”
I posted a job on Upwork.com, which is where I find a lot of my freelancers and contractors. I was just like, “I will give $200 to anyone who could help me figure out this tracking issue because I can keep having it. It’s super frustrating and preventing me from running ads.” I ended up hiring this gentleman named Cristor from Sweden or Norway. He was super amazing. He showed me that I was setting it up improperly. I had my conversion set up improperly and he showed me how to set it up, which was awesome. When I restarted the ads, because I had turned them off, when I restarted them, they all got disapproved across the board. It was so frustrating. This is the thing with Facebook ads that makes me crazy is they all got disapproved. The reason they got disapproved was for “multi-level marketing.”
I was like, “Seriously? I don’t multi-level market.” I didn’t understand why they were saying I was multi-level marketing. They send a broken link, but the link worked. I’m wondering if there was a problem with the speed at which my page was loading, but that was super frustrating. I got them reviewed. You can request a review when that happens. They were just like, “Nope.” They would not approve of them. That was crappy because they had already been approved. They were already running. I didn’t end up getting any ads happening for that webinar and it was fine. It went completely fine. The silver lining in that is I did end up hiring this Facebook ads guy. He is now my new Facebook ads manager, which is cool because he knows what he’s doing. He’s affordable.
Post-Launch Practice
I’m excited. We turned on our lead generation campaign so I can build my list for the next Health Coach Accelerator launch coming up in 2021. That did not go well, but I learned a lot. In the end, I found an amazing contractor. The other thing that didn’t go well was after the launch, I love to send an email that says, “I saw that you didn’t purchase. I would love to know why.” What I do is to send out a one-question survey that lists out all the reasons why someone might not buy like, “Too expensive,” “Didn’t have time,” “I want to do this in the future,” “I don’t have or want a business.” All those things.
I decided to create a Google form and insert it into the email. I did that, but the mistake I made was I forgot to change the permissions on the form and the permission was set to only I can open it. I needed to set it to public. I did not do that. It’s really unfortunate because I had an incredibly high open rate. I can’t remember what the open rate was, but it was very high. I had one of the highest click-through rates ever. I had about 60 or 70 people clicking through to the form, yet they could not access the form because the permission was wrong. That was a flop and it’s too bad because that would have been amazing information for me to understand why people didn’t buy.
I am going to do better with that next time. I will make sure to set the permissions properly. A few people did reply to the email, which I highly appreciate. Anytime you’re doing a launch, I do recommend that you send them an email, ask people why they didn’t buy. I always like to use a Google form or something like a Google form that you can take the code, put it into the email so they can quickly click the button. You can learn from that. Most people will say it was too expensive. When you get a lot of people saying it’s too expensive, it always means that we have to do a better job at selling and making the value of what we are offering higher than the price we are asking.
That is the breakdown of my Health Coach Accelerator launch. Overall, it went pretty well. I didn’t feel overly stressed out. One thing is I do think my open cart period was a bit too long. I did about 9 or 10 days. I’m starting to feel like maybe I need to keep my cart that open. I’m in another launch program. The woman who teaches it is like, “You don’t get more sales with a longer launch period.” I’m starting to believe that. It also means that I’m making more work for myself. If I have a longer launch period, I need more content, social media stuff, or emails to write. I came around with this launch because all the sales happened in the last 24 to 48 hours.
I had a few people buy off of the VIP list. Before I opened the cart publicly, I always give an awesome bonus to people who are on the waitlist. I give them 24 hours to make a decision to get some discount that is going to end in 24 hours. I had about maybe 6 or 7 people purchase that way and then a couple of people after the webinar, and then it was crickets. I have never had such a crickets launch. There were no sales happening. It challenged me personally. It is very triggering when you don’t get sales. What can make launching difficult is the feeling like, “No one’s going to buy, nobody likes me. No one’s going to come to my party.” That always gets triggered in me with launches.
I had to focus on self-care and taking care of myself, and not letting my monkey brain get the best of me. I was like, “I know most people will buy it before the deadline.” I sold 21 spots total. I had maybe five people buy off the waitlist. The majority of people bought in that last 24 to 48 hours. People even bought up until I had a midnight deadline. Someone bought it at 11:30. It made me realize that I probably do not need that long of a launch period.
For the next launch, I’m going to try seven days and see how that goes. Depending on how that goes, I might even make it a shorter move to a five-day launch. Honestly is sounds amazing and dreamy because it means fewer emails, content, or showing up. When it is a bigger price point, for example, when me and Christine sold out our Mastermind Program, that was $10,000. We had a six-week launch period. People need more time, but for something that’s around $1,000-plus mark, between $1,000 and $2,000, people don’t need as much time to make their decision.
I hope this helped give you some insight into my launch and it will help you with your launches. If you are launching something, you have something come up, let me know. Send me a direct message on Instagram @KendraPerryInc. I love chatting with you and hearing what you were up to in your business. If you are a health coach, a wellness coach, or some other type of online coach who works in the health and wellness space, personal development mindset, spiritual space, and you want to blow up your business in 2021. If you want to start making consistent income, hitting $5,000 a month, getting consistent clients, feeling confident in what you’re doing in your business, Health Coach Accelerator is opening up in 2021. You can get on the waitlist.
Get on the VIP list if you are interested. If you have learned anything from this episode, I do typically give an awesome price discount 24 hours in advance of the actual cart opening. I would love to have you in this program. The students who have Health Coach Accelerator, our fall experience, are loving it. They are getting amazing results and having fun. They are connecting and you will love it. If you love this episode and you’re an Instagram person, take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram Stories. Tell me what you learned, tell me your take homes. Make sure to tag me @KendraPerryInc and I will share your story to my story and I will send you a personal message and thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time where I help you stop being broke as fuck and start becoming wealthy AF.
