#169 - What do I do with my funnels when I am launching?

Hey, hey everybody, it is Kate here from hellofunnels and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I'm going to be answering a question that I recently got asked inside our EcoSysempire members community and that was what do you do with people who are currently in your funnel when you're running a live launch? And I think that's such a good question because. And I think it's also something a lot of people get wrong or they overcomplicate. And so I want to walk you through exactly what we do. How you can add a simple automation that I call the sorting hat automation. How it can really, really help to just streamline things to prevent massive stuff ups which is what some more complicated routes can end up being. And you know how exactly you can add this into your business right now. So if you are ready to find out exactly what to do with people in your automations when you're launching, let's dive on in.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Okay guys, as I mentioned, I got asked a question the other day inside our wonderful community and that question was now that they have, you know, their, their automation set up, their nurture sequences set up, their funnel set up like their, their three part ecosystem that we take them through. Which means that there's going to be constantly people who are getting onto their email list and then moving through different sections of the automation, getting sent a bunch of different emails, potentially getting sent different promotions and different offer like what do you do with those people when you're going to run some kind of live promotion to your list? Because I do think is very important. It's part of what we teach is that once you've built your ecosystem, once you've built your funnels and you have those running that you still need to be going out there and providing offers and creating engagement and having experiences and events and things like that done in a non crazy way though, done in a as funnel like as possible way for your list. Because when you think about it, your funnels and your nurture sequences, they are for new subscribers and the way that we teach how to do it, it's usually around about 60 days that people are in that sequence and then they get added into your main, main email list, your newsletter list, whatever, your VIP list, whatever you want to call it. And if you're not making offers to that list, then there's like a whole ton of people, like, best case scenario, maybe 10% of people coming through your funnel are going to convert. That means there's 90% of people who are just getting added to your newsletter list. And then what? They're never hearing from you again. So you definitely have to do both. You know, we teach lazy launches as a way of doing it. But then there's that next question that comes up, like, okay, well, if I'm doing both, what do I do to try and eliminate these people getting sent like three different offers at the same time, or just getting sent a crazy amount of emails? And the first thing that I said when this came up was like, just so you know, and you've probably experienced this yourself, like even some of the biggest people in the industry, like people who have got multiple, multiple millions of dollar businesses, they don't really actually care about this. And you'll see that they. There's seems to be two sides of the argument. Like one side people, they get insanely complicated, thousands of tags and all kinds of exclusions and stuff like that. And that's where people normally get into trouble. And they. That's kind of. I don't recommend that. Or as what a lot of people do is they're kind of like, they get two offers. Oh, they get two offers. They might like one of them more than the other. So they seem to be the two sides that most people take when it comes to this problem of, you know, what do you do with people in a nurture sequence versus when you're doing a live launch? I like to kind of go somewhere in the middle. I very much think that anytime you're doing anything live, that's probably the thing that you want people to have their eyeballs on. Because you, particularly if you're then also talking about on social media, they might also be seeing ads about it. It tends to be a bit more of an engaging experience for them. It generally tends to convert at a higher rate than something that's evergreen because you get that sort of FOMO factor. You get that sort of, you know, everybody kind of getting excited and talking about it and, you know, people sort of seeing that things are happening and it just does create a bit more momentum. I really believe that if you are going to go to the effort of having some kind of live whatever, it could just be you're running A webinar. It could be you're doing a free challenge. It could be doing you some whole big singing, all dancing launch. But whatever it is, I think that you probably, that you definitely want to get the eyeballs, even the new eyeballs, which I say even more even, particularly the newer eyeballs, because newer eyeballs are generally people who are more engaged, more actively looking for a solution than people who've say, been on your list for like a year and a half. You want to get them involved. Like, you want to always put your best marketing foot forward. So as I mentioned, like, there's different ways than of making sure that they're not getting sent, you know, the nurture sequence as well. And a lot, what a lot of people do is because again, it depends on what your tech is that you're using is they might just go, all right, well what I'll do is I'll send my launch emails and I'll just have all these exclusions, like send it to everyone on this list as long as they're not in this and they don't have this tag and they don't also have this and this. And this is where people can really get themselves into trouble. And you end up spending way too much time then trying to troubleshoot like, oh, which should have be an if or an and or an or and it's just craziness. And if you've never set anything up like this, you're probably going, what is she talking about? Just, just trust me. Trying to exclude people who have received certain emails and haven't received others. It's just a bit of a nightmare. So, okay, so what is the simple way then of when you have people coming through a warmup sequence? It doesn't matter how long that warmup sequence is, but you have them in there. You don't want to like pull them all out, but so you kind of want to be able to stop them where they are, let them go through your live promotion sequence and then pick back up where afterwards, like so continue through the nurture sequence, the evergreen sequence. Like that's what I is what I think is like, is the better experience for them. They still get to make sure they are getting those great value emails, all that great engagement, all that stuff that you've included, as well as offers inside your evergreen sequence. But they also get the fun of joining in of the live experience. So how do we do this? Well, what we do is we have created what I call originally it was called the waiting room automation, but I've since Changed it to the sorting hat. And what it is, is it's a really, really simple automation that acts as, you know, a waiting room and a sorting hat. So what you do is you for each of your opt ins, like any place someone can opt in any of your lead magnets, like we always recommend that you have them in their own little mini automation, right? So someone opts in for a lead magnet, fills out a form, they come into that first little mini automation where they get sent that email to get that freebie. And then you'll probably add a couple of tags, maybe add them to a list like any of the other sort of like admin stuff happens in there, maybe if you're doing some tracking, you add them to a spreadsheet. All that like that happens inside that little mini automation. And then traditionally what we would teach you to do is to then add them all into your warm up and welcome sequence. So it means you have like multiple little mini automations, but one for every lead magnet that just sends the one email, it does all your tagging stuff. And then the final trigger piece is to add them into your email sequence, your warmup nurture email sequence. But if you're planning on doing live launches as well, we would recommend you add something in between. So instead of adding them to your warm up sequence, you add them to this waiting room sequence. And then the waiting room sequence, usually all it has is a timer. So like a little wait timer and that wait action is usually just set for five minutes. Like when you're not launching, it's just set for five minutes. So people, they get added in and then they inside that waiting room sequence. The only other action is to then add them into your warmup sequence. So normally if you're not promoting anything live, people, they would opt in, go through that sequence, get added into the waiting room sequence, wait for five minutes. Just because you have to have, usually with a timer it can't be zero. And we use ActiveCampaign and five minutes is the smallest wait time there is. And then they fit, you know, they go through after five minutes, they get added into the warmup sequence, continue on as normal. Now when you have a launch coming up, what you're gonna wanna do is gonna change that wait time and we put it in something ridiculous like 999 days kind of thing because it's just a temporary change. So that means anyone who opts in, they come through, they get added to the list, they get all the tags, they come into this waiting room and then they wait until Basically after. And it means they don't get added to your warmup sequence until after your live promotion. So that means you can send them all those live promo emails. So while your live promo is going on, they're, they get sent those emails like normal. And then at the end of that live promotion you come back to the waiting room, you change that wait back to five minutes and then they get added into the warmup sequence. The second piece of this is that you have to like deactivate your warmup sequence. And when you do that it means the people in it will stay where they are. They won't keep moving through it, so they won't keep getting sent emails. And then again it's like it's two things you have to do. When your launch ends, you change that wait down from the 900 days or whatever it was down back to five minutes. And before you do that, you reactivate your warmup sequence. So then that means that the people inside it will keep moving through and the people who hadn't joined it yet will get added to the start. So that's kind of like the cleanest and easiest way that we've found to do this. Just make sure. And we've have this as said, nothing is human, totally human proof. We have found that it's definitely has been more human proof than trying to have a whole ton of exclusions on your promotion emails like that. I remember once we tried to do that and it came up saying be sent to six people. I'm like how did we make that? How do we stuff it up that badly? So this has definitely helped with that. But you know, obviously you have to remember to turn your warm up funnel back on. So just make sure there's a big high importance on your, you know, post promotions checklist that that is job number one. That always happens. But other than that it's, it's, yeah, it's really a quite simple clean way of, of being able to do get the both the best of both worlds. The sort of advanced strategy on that is where I changed it from the waiting room to the sorting hat as I mentioned is if you have any kind of segmentation going on, that's one thing we love chatting about inside the Equals Empire program is how to do some really simple segmentation. And what this again means is that all these people can come in from your different opt ins and then if you did have some kind of qualification question on your opt ins or some other kind of segmentation tool or metric that inside again rather than every single One of your opt ins having to have some kind of like if else split or you know, just making it too complex and meaning that there's multiple places you have to be editing. They all come into this waiting room slash sorting hat automation and they sit on a wait and then when the wait finishes you can have just one little simple branch there. It's like if they're you know, segment A, go over here and this happens. If they're segment B, go over here and some people use that for simply if people are opting in a second time, you know, they've opted, you know, they're already basically they're already on your email list, they've already gone through your warm up sequence, you don't want to put them back through that same sequence again. But they have shown an extra level of interaction, engagement and potentially sales intent. So maybe you want to send them a secondary sequence or maybe you have a, you know, two separate markets and you've been able to based on what they've opted in for. Or again you've maybe you've got a qualifier question on there. You're able to segment them out and say okay, well I want to make sure I'm sending them the most relevant information, the most relevant offers based on this segmentation. So this you're able to then go all right, add you to sequence A, add you to sequence B and then the people, doesn't matter what they sort of opted in in for, they're all getting filtered and ending up in the best place for them. So that's the kind of I suppose the more advanced extra strategies you can take on. But really at the end of the day adding in a waiting room or a sorting hat automation, it's one simple thing that you can set up once. It's going to just help to simplify everything for you. It's going to prevent a lot of human based stuff ups and it does mean that you do get that best of both world scenario where you are able to be sharing your awesome live promotions, live events with everybody without either sending them a thousand extra emails or messing up this wonderful funnel that you've set up as well. So tick, tick, tick, super easy. Like literally we should take about 5, 10 minutes to set it up and then connect everything in and then feel free to DM me and say thank you. So that was it for today, another short and sweet one. Make sure you DM us over @ hello Funnels if you're going to try this out. If this has been useful, we would love it if you could share it with any other nerds you have in your life because it helps us to get the message out. But otherwise, guys, I'll see you same time next week for more nerdy goodness. See you.

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Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@stealmyfunnel.com Sam.