Behind The Scenes of a $513K Online Launch
Hey everyone!
So today I wanted to do a little Behind the scenes of a $513,000 online course launch.
These are real numbers from a relaunch we did for a client this year. This is actually a third launch for a single program - created this year, launch this year, and then relaunched 2 more times.
And with each launch of this program, things are just getting better and better. The launch goes more smoothly, word spreads more quickly, and we get even more people signing up.
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A total argument for re-launching a stellar program versus launching brand new things all the time.
And I’ll just tell you now because I’m so excited and I can’t wait, but we actually got within 50 new members of our stretch goal for this launch.
Our goal was 250 new members, our stretch goal was 500 new members, but we were planning to launch again later this year to hit that number.
And we actually got 432 new members total, which means that we don't need to launch again this year. So actually this launch created less work for us which is really incredible.
So with 432 new members at the price of this program… this launch will make the business owner $513,000 over the next 12 months. And that’s not even including the hundreds of other members in the program right now who have been there since the first or second launch.
All together… this launch has helped us cross over into a million-dollar program. And it’s still growing!
Launches are this really interesting thing energetically and when it comes to business. There’s always the strategic and practical side of a launch… and then there’s the energetic & magical side to a launch. And me and my team really believe that you need BOTH to be aligned to have big success (whatever that success might look like to you specifically).
Memberships have blown up over the last year because of Stu Mclarens tribe program. You’ve probably seen more and more online businesses launching their own memberships, maybe you’ve even joined one or considered joining one. And maybe you’re wondering if it’s time for you to launch your own.
Hopefully this episode can help you answer that question and give you some insight and ideas into how to have the super successful launch and program of your dreams.
Some #BTS on Online Memberships
First thing’s first: I honestly don’t recommend starting an online membership unless you have a large audience and a team. It’s a ton of work to implement, and the more you grow and scale, the more work it becomes.
And just to clarify - a membership is when someone is paying you month after month for a set amount of new things month after month - whether that’s calls with you, new content, products, whatever. This is different than a course in that, in general, a course is something you create once, and maybe you add to it and make it better over time, but you’re charging your audience a set price for a set amount of stuff.
While memberships have been made sexy… There are downsides.
As I said, you do need a big audience to hit the monthly revenue to make it worth the amount of effort in general takes.
There’s also churn.
People who are canceling every month.
So you have to be constantly bringing in new people to cover the costs of the program & to keep a good profit margin.
Now I’m seeing a trend of people selling a full year of membership - which is not really a membership. Because you’re not just launching to get people for a short-term program, you’re not even really trying to lock people in for a year, you’re trying to lock people in for life or for however long you plan to have this membership last.
If you have a year-long membership, that’s really just a slightly-longer than usual but still short-term program. At the end of that year you are going to need to re-sell the program to the people who just completed it to try to get them to stay in.
So. Unless you have the team in place to continually launch the program… AND keep the current members happy and well cared for… AND continue to scale your business… this is not the time for you to start your membership program.
But I’m not here today to talk about memberships.
Now, let’s dive into the nitty gritty details of this past launch we just orchestrated here at Dirty Alchemy and look at why it was so successful.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me say before that I recommend relaunching a program over launching a new program. And this launch is a great example of why.
This was our biggest launch ever for this program — and the best part is, it wasn’t even supposed to be! We really didn’t expect this launch to be as big as it was. But that’s just what happens when you’re able to learn from past launches exactly what your audience wants.
Not to mention, it can be way less work to relaunch a product!
For this launch, we already had the sales page made. So while we did add to that sales page and edit it based on what seemed to work (or not work) during our past launches, most of the copy and the website building was done before we even started this relaunch. And the entire marketing funnel into the program was already established and well underway.
Getting clear on the offer
We were already super clear on what our offer was. Which is actually a really big deal.
The very first time you launch a product, sometimes there’s a gap between what you as the business owner are offering to people and what your audience understands about your offer. Or even a gap between what you think the offer will be & what it really becomes!
This is just classic communication issues that can totally be resolved and prevented, but I believe a lot of it comes from the business owner not always being super clear on what the execution of their brilliant ideas are.
They know exactly what they want to give their members in terms of what transformation they’re offering. But they don’t know exactly how that will look in practice.
So the awesome thing about re-launching is you already know exactly what the inside of your program looks like. You can tell people very clearly what they can expect because you’ve already seen it all play out in real time. And that helps to make it super clear who you are and what you’re all about to people who think your program might be for them.
Also, and this is big -- you can learn so much about your customer avatar by looking at who’s already in your program. By using social listening inside your program, you get crystal clear insight into what your ideal customers want and how they think your program can help them get it. Because ideally there's an open forum in your program where they're already talking about that amongst themselves. And so as you're trying to sell your program to new members, you can use all of this insight from your current members to say, “okay, I know what people want, I know how I can help them get there, and now I know exactly what I need to tell them to give them an understanding of how my program will help them get there.”
I've said this before but it’s still so true that…
you need to be the unicorn.
Your customers are going to flock to you when they feel like you are fitting exactly what they need, their niche interests. So the more clear you are on your offerings, and what the members get from your offerings, the more like a unicorn you'll be.
Another thing about a membership program is that your offerings can change.
Obviously you don't want to welcome people into the program on one premise and then completely change that premise. It's also a ton of extra work for you if you decide halfway through that something isn't working so you're going to completely change it.
So you do want to be super clear about your offerings and why those are your offerings and how they can help people before your program even begins.
But once your program has started, you can use feedback from current members to make your program even better. And that can help you continue to scale your program and improve your program in a way that's going to make current members stick around, and is actually going to help you get new members as well.
By the way, if you’re still trying to figure out exactly what your program should look like, check out episode 7 on how to distill your message and make truly transformational programs.
In that episode, I go in-depth into how to get people to join and stay in your program, and there is sooo much incredible information there so check that out.
Put Fresh Eyes on your Sales Page
Anyway, back to the behind the scenes. One thing we did during this launch was we had fresh eyes review the sales page.
We had feedback from past launches into what was working and what wasn't working on the sales page, because we could see what questions or misconceptions people were coming into the program with. So of course we did our best to update the sales page to address any of those questions and misunderstandings so that that wouldn't happen again. Again, we want to communicate as well as possible what the program is all about.
So this time around, we had three new people who had never heard of this business before look at the sales page and tell us what they thought the program was all about. And in the places where they were like, “Um, what does this mean?” or “What am I really getting here?” we used that to update our copy and clarify our message.
Onboarding new customers
We also asked fresh eyes to look at our onboarding material.
Because we want people as soon as they’re in the program to have a pretty clear idea about what they're in for. We want them to know when the calls are and how to access them, where to find the replays, what email addresses to whitelist, basically how to not miss any information. A lot of memberships have a few different things going on at the same time, whether it's different homework and life calls that are happening, so you really just want to make sure that people know exactly where to find what they need to find.
I always say to act as though your new members have no idea what this program is. Because it's really easy on the backend to just kind of assume that other people also know everything that you know about the program. But when you act like your new members just signed up for the program while they were sitting in their car at a red light, and then immediately totally forgot they signed up for it, and didn't even really read the sales page, but just made this decision on a whim… then you’re able to come from a place of trying to answer every question and not leave anyone confused as to what they signed up for.
And you’re guaranteed to lose people if they never go through the program because it seems too complicated from the get-go. Which is also why you need to have an internal team in place that is big enough and has the time to field all the questions and concerns from new people while also taking good care of people who have already been in the program for months or years.
Ideally you’re giving your new members enough information that they don’t even have questions. They have everything they need right in front of them.
That is definitely something that was hit home for my team during our first launch, and with every launch since the first we've been able to address that better and better.
We are just getting super clear about our onboarding material and what people need to know right off the bat, and we’ve seen a definite decrease in the questions and confusions that were coming up right after the first launch.
And on the team side of things - this takes a bit of stress off your customer service person or team.
Using past buyers as your sales team
Another plus side to relaunching is that if you have members who have been in your program for months or years, who are really excited about your program, they can act as teachers to the new members.
One way we did that was to invite our seasoned members to come to the webinars surrounding the relaunch of this program.
We had dozens of members who have been in the program since the beginning of this year, for about 8 months now, who were in the comments just responding to people’s questions and answering concerns from potential new members.
It was this really beautiful thing to see how these seasoned members have learned so much and grown so much from this program, and then to see how excited they are to share that with new people.
And to give them the space to step up as leaders and welcome a new generation of members into this program.
Note here that this means that your webinars should be so juicy that even people who are already in the program want to attend them.
Don’t follow the standard webinar structure of intro, give 20 minutes of value, then straight into the pitch. Teach, give, transform people through your launch material alone. Blow their minds.
Anyways - the side effect of past customers showing up at the launch events, the webinars in this case, our clients job became easier. Because we had these really knowledgeable people to share their experience and answer questions in the chat, create hype, create this feeling that if they join, they’ll be apart of something.
And in the process the new people definitely feel like they're getting something more authentic.
It’s like the power of a live testimonial talking directly to you.
Im sure you already know this, but people hearing positive things about your program from people actually in your program, is way more potent than people hearing you talk positively about your program...
Getting Testimonials & Using them well
So Testimonials were really big in this launch. We use videoask to request testimonials from people in our program about how certain specific practices have helped them, and how the overall program has helped them in their life. And we did get dozens of videos from people whose lives had been changed by the program.
If you’ve ever requested video testimonials from students before, this is a gamechanger. It’s free, and it’s a platform you can send out that people can right there shoot a short video + it’s just kept in the video ask.
So much better than asking people to shoot a video + send it to you.
Where do they post it? As an unlisted video on youtube? Such a bigger task.
The magic of a video testimonial is that in written testimonials you lose a lot of the energy. Even if there were lots of exclamation points and emojis, you're just not getting to feel the excitement. But with video testimonials you can see people’s huge smiles, you can see the excitement, you can actually hear how impacted the person has been in a way that would otherwise get lost in a text testimonial.
And in using our video testimonials on the sales page and on social media, and also transcribing them and using them just as text, it becomes content that you can share over and over on multiple different platforms. And then you’re getting the people who would rather watch a video and the people who would rather read a quote to see the testimonials.
Using Instagram during the online launch
Instagram was a huge key in this launch. This business has over 10 thousand of followers on Instagram, which isn’t a ton, but it’s definitely not nothing.
Before this we were relying more heavily on the more traditional set up of email marketing. And with this launch, partly because we didn’t have to completely start from scratch on the sales page and funnel, we had the time where our small team could really invest in spending time hyping this launch up on Instagram.
So here’s what we did…
We posted video testimonials as IG Stories and IGTV videos.
We also posted written testimonials as IG stories.
We used IG Stories stickers to have our audience vote on which webinar topics they wanted us to cover during the launch — and because of this we had record rates of people showing up and really actively wanting to attend the webinar.
We created program-specific content posts for Instagram where we addressed some of the FAQs and made it super clear what was in the program.
We also have a relevant free Facebook group where our community manager fielded almost 50 questions from people wanting to join.
And… in our welcome letter into the program, we included an image for them to post on social media celebrating their acceptance. So we had hundreds of people sharing their excitement about the program with all their followers (and definitely communicating the FOMO of not signing up)!
We saw dozens and dozens of questions about the program streaming into our DMs on Instagram so we know the hype was working!
In addition to all that social media hype… There was the hype that existed simply because this program has been around for a while.
This is the third launch.
So there were people who already knew about the program but during the previous launch either couldn't commit or didn't have their finances in order, or maybe they just didn't get into the program in time…
… but they knew they wanted to join, they were talking to their friends about it, and they were waiting eagerly for this program to reopen.
Use a waitlist
We had a waitlist with over 500 people, and we opened up enrollment a couple days early to those people with an incentive to join the program early.
We were able to convert almost 20% of the people on the waitlist. and had over 70 people join before we even officially opened the doors, because we offered them an exclusive masterclass presentation on a topic related to the program.
This may have been my favorite upgrade from previous launches. A simple decision of having a waitlist & giving them early access, got us 30% to the entire launch’s goal before we even started. It felt soooo good.
All your launches energetically build upon one another. So all that energy and time you spent putting into your first launch isn't lost as soon as that launch is over.
It's tapped into again and again with each consecutive launch.
And it becomes stronger every time!
I do believe that's why relaunches are so powerful, because magically you are building upon this store of energy that’s just waiting to be used.
And this membership program is such a magical program. It definitely has its own soul. Which is why members who have been in for several months are still so excited about it, because it is still growing and amplifying and becoming more magically potent.
So it's definitely worth noting that if you want your program to be super successful it has to be unique and magically powerful in its own right. It has to be magically transformative for its members.
I hope you learned something from this episode about how a successful launch looks behind the scenes, and gave you some ideas to implement in your own business.
This has been a really powerful lesson for me in why relaunching is such an incredibly energetically and magically powerful event. It’s gotten so clear this year.
Beliefs for You to try on for a Successful Launch
And I want to finish off with some beliefs that you can try on yourself to transform your own outlook on launches and make sure that your business is as successful as possible.
My business gets easier as it grows.
This is not one a lot of people think, but it can definitely be true! When you're able to do the hard stuff upfront, like plan the launch and get your funnel down, you can then relaunch it in a way that makes your job so much easier.
And because you already have the team in place, you have trusted people around you that can help make your business grow and scale without giving you a headache that also grows in scale as you do.
Launches can be easy and fun.
This is another thing that most people don't really believe.
But it definitely can be true. Because launches are really this incredibly potent time to engage with your audience and get to know them and get to know how they want to receive the gifts that you are here to give them.
So it is really magical time as a business owner, even if it does feel kind of exhausting.
(P.S. if launches do feel totally overwhelming and exhausting for you, my episode on The 8 Phases You Need for a Numinous Launch is exactly what you need).
More than just being magical, launches can also be fun and easy.
When you see your hard work paying off, when you're looking at those testimonials from people whose lives have been transformed by your work, and you know that you're about to transform even more lives…
… I mean you just can't put a price tag on that.
And as you're able to look at launches as something that can build on one another so you're not always starting from scratch, it will get easier and easier.
Let’s stay in touch!
Head on over to @thedirtyalchemy on instagram and tell me about how your business is going in 2020. We’re in Q4! This year is wrapping up! How are the 2020 goals you set in January lookin?
Music: Gaena by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.
