#200 - How to make sales the minute your launch starts

Hello, hello, guys, it is Kate here from hello, Funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Now, I have a question for you. What if I could pretty much guarantee that the next time you launch one of your online courses, you make sales, and I'm not just talking about one or two, but you make a flood of sales within the first 60 seconds? Would that sound exciting? Would that sound like something you would love to know exactly how to do? Amazing. Because that exactly what we're going to be talking about inside this episode. So let's dive right on in.

Okay, guys, so let's take a second and get real now. Right now in 2024, launching is tougher than it's ever been. And it's always been pretty tough. I mean, that's why we love funnels, hence the name, right? So what can we do that's working now? We could all sit around, we could win, we could complain, we could blame the economy all or we could start to try out some new things to try to breathe some new life, test out some new strategies and get the sales moving again. And I don't know about you, but personally, that is what I love to do. And the strategy I'm going to be taking you through today is a strategy that is not only one we've been using with our clients actually for years. So it gets our tried and tested tick of approval. But it's one that seems to be working even better right now, which is why I really wanted to share it because I know there's so many strategies out there that have just plain stopped. And so what is the problem? What is the problem we're trying to solve here? So first of all, one, launching right now, harder. Yes. But two, and this is something that I've always hated and it's such a mind f, I would swear, but I know sometimes people are driving with their kids in the car. But when you put your heart and soul and your energy and your effort into not just creating something like creating an online course or a program, but then the whole thing of creating your. Your online promotion for that course, right? Like it takes time. And then the day comes, you're all nervous, you're excited, probably didn't sleep that well the night before you send out your first email, cart is open. And then you wait and you wait and you wait and it doesn't seem to matter how long that wait is. If it's anything more than 10 minutes, it is excruciating. And the thing that I'm seeing, the trend that's kind of happening, particularly right now, is that that waiting time, like it used to be pretty normal for it to. Particularly if your list is on the smaller side or if it's a new offer or, you know, this isn't something that people have had in their calendars. It's not like an event launch that happens like once a year. It's been pretty standard for people to wait a couple of hours for their first sale to come through. Now it's getting pretty standard to wait a couple of days. And that's even if you had like a really great early bird offer and things like that. People are just behaving a bit differently. They're a little bit bored, I guess, of the standard sort of launch trope and the standard launch schedule which they've seen and they participate in a hundred times. So that period of time, that waiting, as it gets longer, particularly if it's more than a day. Oh, my God, the stuff that goes through your head. The amount of times that I will have clients come to us and say, maybe it's not working, should I even bother sending the rest of the emails? I'm just going to like pull this one back because it's a bit embarrassing. I haven't sold any. I'm not going to bother doing social media on this. I'll just let it be whatever. Like all of that stuff. That's what I kind of want to prevent and why, you know, one of the reasons why we want to make sure you're making sales as quickly as possible is like one so that you can get that initial endorsement often. Hit that initial gold star of like, okay, the work was worth it. I've got some sales in now. I can relax now. I can show up with a different energy, less of a stressed, desperate energy, because, you know, when you're doing a live launch, you've got to be able to show up, You've got to be able to bring your A game. And if you're sitting there smiling and grising into the camera going, please, will someone just buy my freaking thing, it suddenly, you know, it comes across and that's not going to help with the rest of your conversions, right? So that's reason number one, like, let's. Let's get the good energy happening right up front. Let's make sure you feel good. Let's make sure that that then flows through to everything else. The other thing that I think is really important is that usually again, when you've done a launch, and particularly if you've been around, you know, around this online world for a while, you've probably invested a bit of money in setting up your launch. So whether you ran ads to build your list beforehand, or maybe you paid like a contractor to help you to design a new sales page or to write some of your copy, whatever it is, most people go into launch day in the negative. They're like, so far, I haven't made a sale, and this launch has cost me however much money. Which means that those first few sales coming through like, their goal is to just get you to zero so you can actually start making profits. Obviously, you want that to happen again as quickly as possible. So it just shifts that energy away from, oh, my gosh, what if I just waste all this money? What if this was all, you know, wasn't even worth it? Like, again, I'm not a mindset coach here, I'm not an energetics coach, but I know there is something to this stuff. So. So that's the second problem that we want to make sure that we are fixing, is that you are covering any costs, any investment you've made into your launch, it gets covered really, really quickly. So again, you can sit back and relax and start being profitable much faster. So with those couple of things in mind, what can we do? How can we, in this market, in this 2024 stage, get people to be more excited and actually literally virtually lined up? Like, if you had an actual physical store, they would be standing at the door, you know, wanting to be the first person through the door. How can we create that excitement now in 2024 in an online environment, when people are sick of challenges, they're sick of most of the things you do in your launches, like, what can we do to excite them? Okay, so the big answer is to have a wait list. But before you all go and click away because you're like, wait list boring. Don't work. Done them a thousand times, we're going to be talking about doing a wait list in a very different way. Okay? It's simple, and when you do it right, it just works so damn well. And we've. We've had clients come back to us and say from implementing this strategy that, you know, the goal was 20 and they ended up with 68 sales or they sold out within 10 hours. And it was like the most relaxed launch they've ever done. So bear with me. Let me break this down for you. So talking about wait lists, right? We're talking about a special type of wait list. And the reason, and I want to also kind of, before we go into this new cool thing that you can try. I also want to cover off why a lot of wait lists. Like, if you have tried wait lists in the past, why a lot of them don't work. And I think the main problem with waitlist, like, there we all agree that it's a great idea. Like, who doesn't want to have, you know, a list of people really excited and lined up ready to buy? But however, I think most people say if they've tried a waitlist in the past, the results they've gotten from it, and again, particularly right now are probably have made you go, well, that wasn't really worth the extra effort. So the main problems that we have with how people are traditionally running wait lists is, number one is the waitlist is way too long. So if you're opening cart on your offer, I don't know, two, three times a year, and then you have a wait list in between, that means you could have people on this wait list who've been there for months. So in that time, they have completely lost interest. They have gone and bought someone else's program. They have forgotten that they've even joined your wait list. Okay, so they went to buy, or they were interested at the time, they couldn't. They said, join the waitlist. Like, okay, that would be great. That will remind me. And then after that, you've lost them because it's been too long. People just do not have the attention spans to be sitting on wait list for months anymore. Next problem with a lot of wait lists is they become kind of an afterthought. Like, people like, I should have a wait list, right? Because if they can't buy, I've got to do something with them. So I should get people on a waitlist. And then when it comes to launch time, like, oh, what do I do with the people on this wait list? Right? Like, oh, well, what I'll do is I'll send them like two emails the day before and let them know that they can get in early. Or I'll give them like one extra bonus or something. Like, it becomes this real afterthought. It's not particularly exciting. These people have already forgotten they're even on the wait list. So they get this email saying, hey, you can come and give me money soon if you want. And it's slightly better than if you give me money two days later. And they're like, oh, no thanks, it's not exciting enough for them. And then the other thing is that, you know, again, with all the stuff that goes into creating launches is that sometimes it can just feel like, oh, my gosh, this is just another thing I have to be creating. I'm basically creating this whole other launch on top of my launch that sort of eats into your time and that can actually take away from, you know, what you're creating a main launch. So we don't want any of those problems anymore, right? We want to have a waitlist strategy that is going to make sure that the people on that wait list, they're super excited, they're super engaged, they're sitting there on your website holding their credit card, waiting for the doors to open and not going to be something that every time you do a launch is going to be like another six weeks of work on top. Okay, so let's make sure we're taking all of those boxes. So how does it work? The easiest way for me to explain it is to give you an example. Okay, so if, for example, there was a online program that you wanted to buy, even it could be anything, right? And someone came up to you and said, did you know that the first person to buy will get a million dollars? Right. But you have to be the very first person to buy, would you be somewhat more motivated to make sure you attempted to be that first person? You're like, this is the thing I wanted to buy anyway. And if I'm the first person to buy, I get a million dollars. Oh, my God, of course. You are going to, you know, you're going to put it in your calendar. You are going to set alarms and reminders. You are going to make sure no one is in your way, and you are going to sit there like Taylor Swift style, refreshing your damn page. Actually, don't refresh your page because that was my mistake. Trying to get Taylor Swift tickets just waiting for the doors to open. And the second they're in, you're in there. You're putting in your credit card details and then you're like, please, please, please let me have been the first. So what we want to do, because obviously we can't be giving a million dollars away, but what we want to do is we want to recreate that same excitement. We want to recreate a situation where someone is like, I need to be the first person. Because the first. First person get something so damn cool that I would want that just on its own. All right? So that is what we need to create, and that is where the magic happens. That is where you go from having people going like, oh, I've got a slightly better offer and I've got Like two to three days to take you up on it. So yeah, looks good. I'll come back to it maybe later if I remember. Like that's kind of what most people are doing on your wait list right now to having people go, I need to be the first. I need to be the first. And this is how you make sure that literally within 60 seconds. And I would say it's quicker, but just depends on how fast people can type in their credit card details. Right. But usually within 60 seconds you will get multiple, multiple sales. So inside our programs we have like a step by step calendar for how to do this. The emails to send to invite people, the pages you need, the tech setup, all of that stuff. And if you would actually like to steal that, because normally we only give this to our clients inside our premium programs, but the moment we have broken it off in a special little bundle and you can actually jump in and grab it, just head to hellofunnels.com forward/magic and it's got all the details, you can jump in there and get it. And it's got like literally the promotion calendars, what to send on what day, swipe files for emails. The whole works, like, makes it super easy to literally plug this in for your next launch and start making sales like in the next week. It's really, really, really simple. But like the main thing, like even if you go and try and do this yourself is coming up with that offer, coming up with like, what is that thing that you can do to make sure that the people want to be the very first person through the door. And it makes it feel like fun. It makes it feel like that energy of the day that the Taylor Swift tickets go on sale or the day that someone like if you've got any sneaker heads in your world when something like the new design drops, it's a way of doing that. Now you don't want to do that every time. It does lose its specialness if you did it on every single launch, but if you did this twice a year and it kind of became again an event that people were looking forward to, it's fun, it gives you something to be out there promoting. It's really high energy. And it means that launch open cart day, rather than being a day that you dread, rather than a day that gives you like a bit of indigestion, it can actually be a day you really look forward to. And you sit there yourself looking at the clock and going, oh, car's about to open. And you know you and your team can get together and celebrate as those first sales in. Because you know they're coming. Because how could they not? Because that offer is just that down. Good. So anyway, guys, that is our waitlist magic. As I said, if you want to actually get this full breakdown to get the day by day, what to do, what to send, what pages you need, how to set it all up tech wise to make sure that this works super smooth, you can just like plug and play it in to your next launch. Head over to hellofunnels.com magic. You can grab it all in there. We take you through it step by step, piece by piece. Every template, everything you could absolutely need is in there. You're going to love it. I can't wait to hear about how this works for you. I hope it takes away some of the bloody launch day stress I know it has for so many of our clients. I hope you love it. Again, guys, if you have loved this episode, if you love this strategy, let us know, leave a comment or share this with someone who you think would also get some great value out of it. Otherwise, we will see you next week, same time, same batch channel. Guys. I'll see you then.