7 Lessons From A $472,377 Launch

A few weeks ago, my team and I wrapped up our first official membership launch, bringing in just under half a million dollars in total annual sales in just eight days. And let me tell you, we learned a lot in this video. I'm going to break down the seven wins and the lessons that we learned from this launch. What worked, what didn't, and what we are definitely going to do differently next time. Keep watching. Hey posse, what's up? It's Alex and I am really excited to be giving you this quick behind the scenes review of our recent launch for Spark a membership for copywriters looking to grow their confidence, grow their client list and grow their business to hit predictable and consistent income. In total, this Launch generated about $472,000 in sales for the year. When you combine launch week revenue and future payments, making it one of our most successful, successful launches to date. And just let me say it again, we learned a lot and I'm really excited to share what we learned with you. We made game time decisions, we tried things we have never done before, from new pre launch content to segmentation strategies to live launch week bonuses and so much more. And today I am giving you a little peek at some of our biggest wins and lessons. In fact, inside Reign, my marketing mastermind for entrepreneurs and freelancers. I do deep, diverse dive reviews of every single launch I run here at the Coffee Posse. Every single one where I break down every aspect of the launch including the metrics, the marketing angles, email strategies and everything in between. And my rainmakers absolutely love these sessions and I think they're my favorite too. So I hope you enjoy this mini launch review as much as they do. And if you want more videos like this, comment below and let me know. And while you're down there, don't forget to subscribe to my channel and ring that bell to be notified when my next video video goes live. All right, now we have a lot to cover in this video, so let's dive straight in with lesson number one. Urgency works. I know, I know, it's obvious, but this is really a trend that we have noticed with all of our launches over the years is that we always, always, always get the majority of our sales on the very last day. So it typically looks a little something like this where we have a decent number of sales on the first day when all those eager beavers like to buy and then we'll have a pretty consistent middle of the launch slowly escalates followed by a huge spike in sales on the last couple of days of the launch. In fact, Almost all of our launches have followed this exact same bell curve. And the reason for it is actually pretty obvious. People buy on the last day because it's the last day. We know that urgency inspires action, but with this launch, we actually did something a little bit different. And we created urgency at the beginning of the launch too. So. So we actually decided to offer a fast action bonus for the first 48 hours of the launch. And hey, what do you know, it worked out great. We actually got the most sales on that first day, followed by the second day. So we succeeded at reversing when the majority of people purchased. But, but, but, but as you can see, once that fast action bonus expired, we had like a major dip in sales mid cart. Like, literally, sales just like fell off a cliff. So then on the 29th, I went live and you can see that sales kind of spiked again that day, followed by an even higher spike right before doors closed on the second, but not as high as those first two days still. So while the fast action bonus absolutely 100% worked, we still really experienced a bit of a lull in sales mid launch, which was not ideal and it was a little bit stress inducing, if I'm being honest. So something that we'll experiment with next time is adding a mid cart bonus to give other people a reason to buy sooner and maybe not wait until the end. All right, moving on to lesson number two. Stay agile. Now, this is something that we have always done. I mean, I always did this too, back when I was working with clients, but it really bears repeating again. During our promotions and launches, we consistently monitor the feedback we get from our audience and customers, from Facebook groups and comments and DMS to replies to our emails. Then we adjust our messaging and our email copywriting based on that feedback in real time. And this is something. Something that I seriously cannot recommend highly enough. Of course, it feels really nice to have all of your launch emails written out ahead of time and like, loaded and scheduled, right? And yes, it does add like a little bit of stress and pressure when we're updating and changing emails right before they need to go out. But hear me out. Agile copywriting is the best way to make sure your emails are actually hitting the mark and saying what you want them to say and overcoming the objections that your audience has. Because the thing is, no matter how much research you do before a launch, and no matter how well you think you're addressing everything that might come up in the minds and hearts of your customers, you can never really predict how they'll react. To your offer or what objections they will have. Sometimes just like one phrase or a few words can really keep them stuck. So by keeping a pulse on what people are saying, you can address these concerns and objections and questions directly in your emails in real time. And that really gives your launch like a fresh and personalized approach where they really know that you're listening to them. Because let me tell you, if one person has an objection and they're vocalizing it, you can be sure that there are a lot more people on your list or in your audience who are wondering the same thing and just not saying it right. So we actually pivoted our messaging twice during this launch, and on both of those days we did see a small little uptick in sales. So don't be afraid to change up messaging mid launch in order to stay agile and it's really great to get that data and info from your audience. All right, next up is lesson number three. Build a launch list. This was a big one. Okay, so something that we did for this launch that we have never done before, which is kind of wild when I think about it, was that we built a dedicated launch list specifically for this offer. But what you might not know, maybe you noticed it, was that right before our launch we actually migrated email platforms from Mailchimp to ConvertKit. And by the way, that is a whole other video for another day. And if you want to learn more about what we did and why, comment below. And I'm happy to do a video on it. So it would have been nice to not have been planning a launch during an email migration, but we were able to do some pretty in depth segmentation in ConvertKit, which was really, really cool. So during our pre launch we actually created a sub list of leads who show interest in our Spark related content. So those are people who downloaded our free guide on 101 Ways to Find clients, or took our fun Client Attraction quiz, or signed up for our 10k action plan masterclass for freelance copywriters. And by the way, I'll drop the links to those below if you want to check them out that way. When it came time for our promotion of the Spark membership, which is for freelance copywriters, we promoted heavily only to the leads on our launch list and we left the rest of our list alone. I mean, don't get me wrong, we didn't like completely neglect the rest of our list. We still sent them out some regular content emails, but we suppressed them from our launch emails because maybe they're business owners, not copywriters or they simply didn't resonate with the Spark content or they just, you know, weren't interested in the offer. And this was a game changer for us and for a few reasons. First, even though the launch list was only around 11,000 people, it pulled in more revenue than many of our other launches where we emailed the entire list, literally the entire list. Our value per lead was over $40, which is amazing because the offer was targeted to exactly those people who were interested in it. And as a result, our open rates were higher, our CTRs were higher, and we were able to maintain high deliverability, which was really great because we had just migrated to a whole new platform. And of course we were able to avoid a lot of unsubscribes in the process. So it was like a quadruple win. And another thing that we did to avoid unsubscribes was we actually put a link at the bottom of all of our launch emails that g people the option to pause promotional emails. Now, if you've been on my list for a while, you know we have always done this back when we were on Mailchimp 2, and I am a big believer on giving people the opportunity to opt out of promotional emails without unsubscribing from your list. So here is what that little footer copy said at the bottom of all of our emails. If you no longer want to hear about the Spark membership, just click here to stop receiving these emails. Don't worry, you'll keep getting our other emails with marketing and copywriting tips. So that was it. Because even though we spent months building a launch list, right, not every single person who landed on that list was actually interested in that offer. So by adding this pause option at the bottom of the email, we were able to save a lot of unsubscribes. And to give you a little bit of a comparison and context, during the Spark promotion, We only had a 2.34 unsubscribe rate from our entire email list compared to another promotion that we ran last year to a similar audience where we didn't have a launch list and we didn't offer a pause and we had a pretty high unsubscribe. So the lesson here is actually like a 2 for 11 build a launch list and to give your subscribers the option to pause promotional emails. Now, if you're wondering, okay, but how do I create a launch list with pre launch content? Well, that is going to have to be a whole separate video because there is a lot of strategy that goes into It. So if that's something you'd be interested in learning more about either for your own business or for your clients businesses, comment below and I will definitely whip something up for you guys. All right, now on to the next lesson number four, Increase customer value at the checkout. So this is another thing that we haven't been that great at doing consistently, which is so silly because it is such low hanging fruit and it is really simple to do with most checkout tools or softwares depending on what you use in your business or your clients businesses. So the first thing we did was we added an order bump. Now that is a small offer that you include right there on the checkout page and it allows people to check a little box to simply add something to their order. Just a little order bump. You just need to add a little blurb about another offer you have. Usually something low ticket that compliments the front end offer being purchased. And the goal here is to make it an easy decision with minimal copy of course, because there's really not much space there. So as you can see here on the Spark checkout page, we added this little blurb here for our look legit website toolkit. It's easy to understand, it was really clear what you were getting and that was just a little order bump that we included. But we also added an upsell offer. Now an upsell offer is another complimentary offer that pops up after the checkout page, AKA after the order is placed and before the thank you page. So during the Spark launch we actually added our email marketing program own the inbox as a one click upsell. We just had a headline, a video and some text to support that. Now this offer is higher price than the order bump, but it's still complimentary to the front end offer and it is a great way to bring in a little extra revenue and increase that average customer value with every purchase. Now these offers already exist. All we had to do was slightly tweak the messaging to make sure that the order bump and the upsell actually made sense and flowed right with the Spark offer and copy. And in total we had about 64 people take advantage of either the order bump or the upsell or both, which added almost $7,000 to our bottom line. You know, maybe not a massive number in the grand scheme of things and I really want to try to optimize that in the future, but it's something I'm never going to be mad about. More money right now. Moving on to lesson number five, Rest send to an opens. So this is Another email marketing strategy that was made a lot easier after we migrated to convertkit. All we did here was resend the same email to the people who never opened the original one, right? Pretty simple. Now there is a caveat with this one. You don't necessarily want to go out there and just start resending every single email you send to every single person who didn't open the first one. I mean, that would be pretty annoying to your audience. And it's a sure way to get new unsubscribes. If you always got like double emails, right? Or worse, you could get flagged as spam, which is just like no good for deliverability. So you want to be very selective with what emails you're actually resending and to who. So what we did was we chose a couple of emails that were really important and had time sensitive information and we resent them only to people who were on our hot leads list. And I'll talk more about that in a second. But these are people who had been opening and engaging with our previous emails, but for some reason they just missed that email and they never opened it. But we think, you know what, I bet you they'd want to actually read this. And because these leads were hot and we knew they were somewhat interested, it was really worth that time and effort to actually resend and try again with a juicy subject line. So you can see that we resent two emails and this only hours left email had two segments, which is why it's listed there twice. But then you can see how effective that email was. None of these people opened the original email that went out earlier that day. But then these resends are getting 20 to 30% open rates and the clicks are pretty decent too. So we also, as you probably gathered from this religiously speaking, split test subject lines during this launch. And if you want another video on this along with the results, then let me know because I freaking love testing subject lines, you guys. All right, now on to lesson number six and kind of just playing off the lesson we just talked about, give those hot leads some extra love. All right, so as I mentioned, segmenting our audience played a huge role in this launch. And it's why I believe we saw such great results from just really like an 11,000 person launch list which is not that big. So as our promotion was running, we created a new segment called Spark Interest and this is where we put all of our hottest leads. These were the people who were opening our emails, clicking links and engaging with our content, but they just hadn't Made a purchase yet. Right. So clearly these are people who are interested in what we have to say. They're opening, they are reading, but for some reason or another they are just not buying yet. So we really wanted to make sure to give those people a little TLC and a little extra love to see if we could help them make a decision, move them over the threshold. But we didn't just resend a couple of emails to them, we actually went further and created original content for them. So I actually hosted two live events towards the end of the promotion window just for them. This invite only went out to this list. I went live once to give a sneak peek of the Spark membership program just so people could see really what it was like and what it was like being on a live coaching call with me. And then I went live again 24 hours before we closed the cart to allow people to ask me anything. It was like an office hours session. And these were promoted to our Spark Interest list like I said. And you can see that these emails had great engagement with 48 to 58% open rates, 10% click through rates, which are awesome. And you can see that we actually split tested that top email we had with a clear winner with that first subject line. Anyway, all of this extra love paid off because we ended up getting 16 sales, 6 upsells, and making almost $20,000 in extra revenue from this segment after these live events. And all just because we gave this small group of people some extra attention. All right, now on to lesson number seven. Survey the non buyers. So for all of those hot leads that we had on our Spark Interest segment, right, who did not end up buying from us, we actually decided to send them a simple non buyer survey. And again, this was the first time that we actually have ever implemented this into a launch. And all we did was ask them two simple questions. We used airtable, we created a form. The first, we asked them to describe themselves, right? So we get a feel for who they are and what they want. Are they copywriters or business owners? Right. Then we asked them why they didn't buy, aside from the financial investment. Because of course the financial investment is always going to be the number one objection. Well, we got almost 400 responses from this survey, which is awesome because it allowed us to really learn more about those 400 people so that we can segment them better next time. And I really wonder how many times I have said segment in this video. It could be like a new drinking game. You have to drink every time I say segment. But it really is the lesson that keeps on giving. So another thing that we did with this non buyer survey was we actually offered a downsell to anyone who didn't buy if they said that they were just not ready yet. In other words, they felt like they still needed to learn some foundational copywriting skills before they were ready for Spark. So what did we do? We offered them our eight week copywriting course instead. Now technically this wasn't a downsell because it was actually like the same price. But we did bring in a few extra sales with this approach. Now that I'm thinking about it, like if the downsell had been a real down sell, you know, something that was actually priced lower than the original offer, I'm sure it would have converted better. So again, just a lesson for next time. Next time we'll plan further ahead and be more targeted and strategic with this downselling process. All right guys, and that's that. As you saw, we tried and learned a lot with this launch and I really hope you learned something from watching this too. Make sure to subscribe to my channel below for more real time marketing insights like this and I will see you next week with a brand new video. Until then, I'm Alex I and ciao for now. Alright guys, if you enjoyed that video, make sure to check out the next one from me right here. And you can click right here to get a free gift. A few months ago, I made $96,924 in seven days from launching one product. And in this video I'm going to break down the biggest lessons I learned, what worked, what didn't, and what I wish I would have done differently. That way you can take these lessons and apply them to your next launch or promotion to see even better results.