by Jeff Walker
If you’re selling a lower-priced product, say a $27 ebook, then I would tend toward the short end—seven days or possibly even five days. If you’re selling a higher-priced product, say a $297 training course on getting a job on a cruise ship, then I would move toward the longer end and go with ten days.
A typical seven-day sequence might look like this:
Day 1: Release PLC #1
Day 3: Release PLC #2
Day 5: Release PLC #3
Day 7: Open Cart
A ten-day Prelaunch Sequence might look like this:
Day 1: Release PLC #1
Day 5: Release PLC #2
Day 8: Release PLC #3
Day 10: Open Cart
The important thing to remember is that the timing isn’t nearly as important as the Prelaunch Content. Deliver real value, follow the formula I just gave you, and you’ll be fine.
One Critical Thing That Makes This Work
Okay, by now you’re probably deep into thinking about all the nitty-gritty details on how to make this work. But let’s step back for a second and look at the big picture. Sometimes when people first look at this Product Launch Formula process, they think it’s a bunch of marketing tricks. A big basket of psychological tactics that cast a spell on their prospects. Now, I won’t deny that you can truly cast a powerful spell when you put it all together, but that’s not what really makes PLF work. That’s not what is going to grow your business over the long term.
The way you put together a great Prelaunch Sequence is by delivering massive value to your market. If you focus on only one thing, it should be creating value for all the prospects going through your Launch Sequence.
That doesn’t mean you’re giving away the farm. That doesn’t mean you’re catering to a bunch of freebie-seekers who will never buy anything. It doesn’t mean going broke as you use all your resources to give away everything you’ve got for free.
What it means is giving real content that creates real value for people. Don’t just tease them—give them some substance. Teach them about the opportunity in your first PLC, but go beyond the opportunity. Teach real content that people can actually use. Every time I do a launch, I get comments from people who are shocked at the amount of content I give out. With Product Launch Formula, I have hundreds of people who have done successful launches just based on the free material that I’ve given out during my prelaunch. And I think that’s awesome . . . because there’s no way I’ll ever sell to everyone, so I might as well create as much value as I can as I move through my life.
In the end, your success and the success of your business is going to be closely tied to the amount of value that you create in the world. And putting together a rocking Prelaunch Sequence that delivers lots of value is a great way to create a lot of value—and you won’t have to wait long until the payoff. That comes on the launch day when you Open Cart . . .
Show Me the Money: It’s Time to Launch!
Chapter 8
Susan Garrett is a very competitive person, and she was in a race. She had signed up for my Product Launch Formula Coaching Program, and her husband didn’t know exactly how much money she had spent to join the program. Susan was determined to make enough money to pay for the program before her husband saw the credit card bill. And since she had no list and no product—and the bill would come through in less than a month—she had some challenges.
Susan is a dog trainer who is passionate about helping dog owners and dogs lead better lives. And she’s one of the best dog trainers in the world—especially in the hyper-competitive sport of dog agility. In fact, Susan has won more than 25 U.S. and Canadian national championships and multiple world championships.
Her success and her skills helped her build a successful international business as a dog trainer, sending her to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand to work with her students. For someone who had a huge desire to help dogs and their owners, this was exciting and fulfilling work.
But it also meant that Susan (who lives just outside of Toronto) had a grueling travel schedule. And she couldn’t help her clients on an ongoing basis; when she gave a workshop anywhere overseas, it was a one-shot deal. So Susan was already looking for a way to cut back on her travel schedule—and then her husband suffered a heart attack.
As so often happens, that health crisis brought their life into focus. Susan wanted to drastically cut back on her travel, but she needed answers to two big questions: How could she continue to reach her clients who were spread throughout the world? And how was she going to replace her lost income if she stopped traveling to give training workshops?
At that point, Susan had created a few training DVDs, but sales had never really amounted to all that much. They provided a nice supplement to her income but certainly weren’t going to replace the income from her workshops.
And that was about the time Susan found the Product Launch Formula. She signed up for my PLF Coaching Program in 2008. And since doing so required a substantial investment, she was determined to do a launch and pay for her entire tuition before the credit card bill arrived (and her husband saw how much she had spent).
Of course, there were a few obstacles in her way. The first two, as I mentioned, were that she didn’t have a product or a list. And the third was that Susan had almost no technical skills whatsoever. But the one asset she had was an enormous will to succeed—the same will that drove her to win all those dog agility trophies.
So Susan started with her past clients—she had email addresses for about 1,200 of them. And from taking my training, she knew she needed a list host, so she signed up for my hosting service at ProFollow.com (http://www.profollow.com). She was able to get about 700 of her former clients to join her new email list.
Then she pulled together a product—an ebook she based on some old articles she had written. She compiled the articles and formatted them into an ebook, and she priced it at $14.97. Then it was time to launch.
Susan put together a very simple prelaunch. Since she didn’t have tech skills, her prelaunch was entirely email-based. Instead of putting together a sequence of prelaunch videos, she sent out a series of emails that provided real value and led into the sale.
Susan winning one of her many championships
The results were immediate and breathtaking . . . the launch brought in $27,000 in sales. That easily paid for PLF training, and it also set her up in her new business. That successful response also sold Susan on the value of PLF. After all, her DVD sales had never amounted to more than $10,000 in a year, and they required a lot of work to put together—including buying inventory, working with a distributor, and shipping product. This launch had nearly tripled her best year of DVD sales with almost no costs—and she had pulled the entire launch together in a matter of a few weeks!
Of course, that was just the beginning. When you do a launch like that, it’s never your last launch. Since that time Susan has built out an entire line of dog training products, and they’re priced anywhere from $47 on the low end all the way up to $4,997. She’s done a launch for each new product, and her results have gotten stronger with every launch. Susan’s training products are completely online, and she has students around the world. She also has one of the most loyal groups of clients I’ve ever seen in any business, and she’s become one of the acknowledged leaders in the dog agility training market.
It’s an amazing success story—the business that was started in a few days with a $14.97 ebook (and a vow to pay for PLF before the credit card bill came in) has grown up. Susan now has a team helping her build her business, and they’ve made the lives of tens of thousands of dogs—and dog owners—a whole lot better. Along the way, Susan’s launches have become legendary in the PLF community, and she’s had some of the most successful launches in PLF history.
You can see my Case Study with Susan at this link: http://thelaunchbook.com/susan.
An Astronaut’s Perspective
Okay, it’s time to LAUNCH!
If you made it
to this point, you recognize one big component of a PLF-style launch—there is work involved. I wish it weren’t so, because everyone is always looking for an “easy button.” Well, PLF is an easy button for creating a great sales process for your product, but you have to put in the effort. The results are worth that effort, however, and your launch day is where all your hard work pays off.
It’s hard to describe the exhilaration of launch day. This is the day you’ve been building toward for weeks or even months. Launch day makes me think back to something I did as a kid. I would take a magnifying glass out in the sun and focus the power of the sun on a piece of wood. Eventually the focused sunlight was strong enough to burn the wood. Your launch is similar. You’ve focused a lot of energy on this day. In fact, that’s the entire point of the launch—to get the attention of those people on your list and in your market and have them anticipating this day. If you’ve followed my formula, you’ve raised their interest level to a peak state. And naturally, your emotions and energy are going to be in a peak state as well.
You are never going to forget that first time you push the “send” button and open your cart. I have a friend who is an astronaut and has traveled to the International Space Station three times. He’s described for me those first few minutes of liftoff in a space launch—that incredible rush of power and acceleration. As silly as it might sound, his account reminded me of the feeling that comes with a well-executed product launch, where you can get a similar sensation of almost unbelievable power and acceleration.
“They’re Heeeeeeere . . . and They Want to Buy”
I can remember one launch I helped a client with. We had a strong prelaunch, and we were pretty confident we had a winner on our hands. All the early signs had been good. About 36 hours before launch we started getting a lot of people asking detailed questions about the price and the offer. In fact, on the last day of prelaunch the whole tone of the comments coming in on the launch blog shifted from questions about the content to questions about the offer. That’s always a good sign.
But no matter how good a prelaunch is, you always have a few doubts in the back of your mind. You can’t help but wonder: Are people going to open their wallets and buy?
Earlier in the morning of that particular launch, we had sent out the sales page link. There was no actual sales page there yet, just a timer counting down to the open. As the visitors to the site sat and watched the timer, we sat and watched the server stats. Those stats told us how many people were sitting on that page waiting to see our sales video. We had stats on how many people were on the site, what page they were on, and how long they had been on that specific page. The numbers continued to climb. With 30 minutes to go, there were 100 people sitting on that page, waiting for us to open. With 20 minutes to go, 300 people. With ten minutes, we were up to 600.
That’s when we saw the load on our server begin to kick up, because the people on the page were starting to hit the refresh button in their web browser. They couldn’t wait until we loaded the sales page. Right about then I sent out an instant message over Skype to my launch team that said, “They’re heeeeeeere and they want to buy!”
A few minutes later we went live right on time. The reaction was immediate. We were over $100,000 in sales in minutes, we hit $500,000 in the first hour, and when we closed down the launch a few days later we were over $3 million in sales.
Of course, not every launch will do $3 million dollars. In fact, I did dozens of launches before I got my first million-dollar launch. But even if the scale of your success isn’t that big when you start out, the huge rush of momentum when you open your cart is just as big.
And frankly, I get more excited hearing about my students whose first launch did $3,000 or $8,000 or $27,000 than I do with the million-dollar launches. Hearing about those “smaller” launches when people are just starting out is a lot more exciting than hearing about the million-dollar launches by established companies, because I know once my students do that first launch, their lives are changed forever. They’ll get to the bigger launches soon enough, but they’ll never forget that moment when they pushed that send button and saw their first orders coming in.
Launch Day Nitty-Gritty
So first off, the term we generally use for launch day is “Open Cart” day, because that’s the day you open your shopping cart and start taking orders. And as you might guess, the day your launch closes is called “Close Cart” day. Although you’re often not technically closing your shopping cart on this day, you still need a clear end to your launch. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll get to that in a little bit.
So if you’ve followed my formula so far, you had a strong Prelaunch Sequence that led into your Open Cart. Your PLC connected with the people on your list. You hit the mental triggers to create a lot of authority, social proof, and community. And in the last few days of prelaunch you’ve started to hit on the scarcity trigger. Your list knows that you have an offer coming. Your final piece of PLC had a strong pivot where you started to foreshadow your offer. In other words, your prelaunch has already completed most of the heavy-lifting for you in terms of making the sale.
Now, the actual mechanics of opening your launch are pretty simple. You need to have a strong sales page. This is typically done through a sales video or a sales letter. And even though the people who have been through your Launch Sequence have already been pre-sold, it’s important not to skimp on your sales message. You have to start with the opportunity, and then you need to tell the entire story of your offer.
Once you have your sales page ready, no matter whether you’re using a sales video or a sales letter, the next step is simply a matter of sending an email to your launch list to let them know you’re now live and open for business. This is a short, simple email with a link to your sales page. By now you’ve spent enough time and energy priming the pump, so you want this email to get right to the point.
Here’s an example of an open cart email that I’ve used when I opened up my Product Launch Formula Coaching Program:
Okay, I just opened up registration for Product Launch Formula. We’re now live:
CLICK HERE for Product Launch Formula
http://www.productlaunchformula.com
(I opened it up a bit early to avoid any bottlenecks and spread the load on the server.)
Best regards,
Jeff
P.S. Remember . . . you don’t need to panic. I don’t expect to sell out immediately. However, if you want one of those spots at my PLF Live Workshop, then please don’t delay. They’re going to go fast.
Here’s the link:
CLICK HERE for Product Launch Formula
http://www.productlaunchformula.com
As you can see, the email was short and simple. The open of the email had just one sentence before I gave the link to the sales letter. And, of course, when I sent this email, the link was clickable.
NOTE: The “PS” is often the single most read part of an email, and I used it to hit the scarcity trigger, warning my readers that they shouldn’t delay or they risked missing out on my live workshop.
Before You Hit Send
At the risk of stating the obvious, before you send that open cart email, make sure you’ve gone through and tested—even retested—every step. Is your sales page live? Are all the links on the page working? Is your order form set up and proofread? Have you gone through the entire order process thoroughly? Do you know firsthand what happens after an order is placed? What about the thank you page after someone buys? The confirmation email? The fulfillment process?
If everything is tested and ready to go, it’s time to send that email. And I have to tell you, no matter how many times I’ve done this, I get nervous every single time. I still hesitate before I hit that button to send the open cart email. It’s a big moment, so expect to have some butterflies and feel some strong emotions. But once you’ve done your final checks, it’s time. You are ready to launch.
Watching the Orders Roll In
After that, I usually spend the next hour or two watching stats. I watch the traffic on the site, the traffic to the actual order form, the opens and clicks on the launch email, the number of orders, and the details behind the orders (which option people are choosing).
There’s plenty of data, and you can make it a nearly full-time job to watch all of it. But after an hour or so, it’s important to pull yourself away from the stats and get back to work, because your Open Cart has just begun.
(On my Resource Page I’ve got links to my favorite statistics and data tools. You can access that page at http://thelaunchbook.com/resources.)
Your Open Cart Strategy
So your open is certainly a big high point, but it’s just a part of your entire Launch Sequence. Typically, you will want to keep your launch open somewhere between four to seven days. Sometimes my personal launches are shorter. There have been times I’ve completely sold out all of my product in as few as 24 or 36 hours.
But you should probably avoid doing a hyper-compressed launch like that until you’ve gone through a few launches and you have some experience. With a short-fuse launch, you have little time to recover if you make any mistakes. For your first launch, just plan on keeping your cart open for five days.
Your results will vary dramatically based on your market, your offer, and your entire launch strategy. However, typically you’ll get about 25% of your orders in the first day and about 50% of your orders on the final day. The big first day is because you’ve built so much anticipation. The spike at the end of the launch is the scarcity trigger kicking in. Obviously, the rest of the orders will trickle in between your open and close.