#218 - Stopping launching is not the answer... THIS IS

Hello, hello, guys, it is Kate here again and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I have another little tasty tidbit for you which is a sneaky peek behind the scenes of our recent UFW live event. This is a three day live event that we ran and it was so much fun and it was so value packed and we're still getting messages from people saying how much they loved it. And so I want to make sure that you didn't feel like, like you'd missed out. And I'm sharing some of the biggest aha moments from those three days. And if you didn't hear the last two episodes, I go back and have a listen because I shared some really, really juicy, actionable little tidbits in there that you can literally take pop into your business and it's going to help you to start making more sales. So today's tidbit, I'm really excited. It's quite a juicy one and it's definitely a very much a listen and go and take action one. So I hope if you are out walking or driving the car that you are able to saf, take some notes whether it's on your phone or whatever you're doing, because I think you're going to love this one. So inside this next little tidbit coming up. Just a second, I'm going to be sharing the remedy to all the suckiness that is going on in live launching right now and exactly what you need to do instead. So are you ready? Let's dive right on in.

Let's dive in. Before we start kind of talking you through the system, I wanted to talk you through the three, sort of like three of the common problems that that is happening right now in sales that are kind of being summed up so beautifully by these emojis that you guys have shared. So number one, and as we go through, guys, if this sounds familiar, just go, yep, that's me. Like let me know in the chat. So number one, most launches these days are using more time, more effort and more revenue that they are giving back or just so close to it that it's just like you kind of go, where's the payoff? Like, where's the roi? Like, I worked so hard, I put in so much energy, I invested, you know, money, even if that money was just like your time, like as a business owner, because every hour you spend on something that is a cost to your business because you're not spending it elsewhere, you're not, you know, being paid by someone and then you Go out there and there's like, oh, like, say you got sales back. You kind of went. It's just. It's not weighing up right. Like, you're putting out so much more than what we're getting back. Sales problem number two with the increase. And I also say the complexity of ads and the increase of the ads cost. The days of one funnel being able to click in and just be ramped up instantly, like, yep, you get it working, and then you just start pouring money into it, and it's just going to be able to be scaled to the moon that day has passed, and usually that, like, adding in just like one funnel, it's not going to be able to fully replace launches, which is where a lot of people want it to do. Like, they're like, I'm sick of launches. I'm going to add a funnel. And then they add the funnel and they go, huh, Maybe some of the stress is gone. Maybe some of the effort is gone. But now I'm kind of cutting at a point where I'm like, I can't actually make more sales because if I spend more on my ads to put more people through my funnel, the costs go up and the profit disappears. So then you can't. A lot of people can get stuck on, like, this one level where they're going, I'm getting sales, I'm happy with those sales. I need more, but it isn't replacing my launch income. So again, it's kind of like the payoff's just not there. And that is a cost. You know, like, we are the most important assets in our business, and we can't be just, like, pimping ourselves out, not getting the return on that energy. Like, that energy, your. Your mental brain space, when it is full, when it's taken up with something, you don't have time and space for those moments of inspiration or to be able to do the other stuff. So that's how you end up getting stuck on this cycle of. Of launching that you kind of can't get off because all your time and all your effort is spent on the launch. You do it, it kind of gets you back to break even, and then you've got to go straight into the next one, and there's just no. There's no space for anything else. Okay, Sales problem number three. Your potential buyers, like, your potential idea clients, are human, which means they're all actually very different. And there's no one magic strategy that can convert them all. And I think this is something I almost, like, I need to Say this twice, because I think it's something that's often overlooked when we are looking to find that one magical thing that's going to solve all our problems is you have an audience. Regardless of your audience size, you've got an audience made up of all different types of people. And those different types of people have different buying preferences and also different levels of problem awareness and solution awareness. So. So to just go, I'm going to just do this one thing, whether that one thing is a launch or I'm going to do one thing, as one thing is a. I'm just going to do a funnel. I'm just going to do this, or you're only ever going to be able to speak to one portion of your market, which means you are essentially repelling or ignoring all of those other people who would be. If you spoke to them differently or gave them a different way to connect, then be like, oh, actually, oh, that I've been waiting for this. Right, like, so we have to kind of like, let's just throw away this idea that there's like one magical thing which is going to solve all of our problems. It's really more of a matter of like, how can we fit in a couple of things in a doable way. That means we're going to speak to more people. That means we're going to have, you know, have our income spread out over more things. Things. So it's not all eggs in one basket like we've talked about before. Like we talked about that on day one. And it just means we're going to be able to speak to more people, we're going to be able to have more consistency and everything's just going to, like, yet we're going. It means we're probably going to lose that super high excitement of open cart day where you go to, like a ton of sales and you're like, wow, I've made more money in one day than I have the last 90 days. That's because you haven't been making any offers those other 90 days. So we're going to swap the crazy, like the insane high and insane low for stability. And can we, you know, I don't know if anyone else feels this, and it almost makes me feel like I'm old, but I'm like, maybe in my early 20s, the super highs and super lows and where I could stay up all night on caffeine and whatever and power myself through, like, yeah, that was probably fun. But the adrenaline junkie side of me is gone. I want stable. I Want plannable. I want reliable. So that is where I think you're probably feeling the same, right? Like, let's ditch the adrenaline. Let's save it for, you know, if you ever want to go jump out of a plane, go, go get your kicks. Adrenaline kicks that way. Okay, so what was the plan today? Let's work backwards, right? Let's start with the sales every month. All right, so how do we do this? We do that with something called Evergreen Launching. This is basically the remedy to that quarterly launch stress. And it's not by stopping launching completely because you never turn off an income source until an income, that income source has been replaced. Otherwise, like, you're just adding way more stress. And as soon as you add more stress into something, it makes it much, much harder to be able to focus, to be able to concentrate, whatever. Like, you want to be able to keep that at bay so you can show up as your best self. So, yeah, the remedy to your launch issues is not to stop launching, but to embrace lower stress, easier to create more frequent offers. So what does this look like? Why do we do it? So, first of all, one thing again is that particularly those who have maybe been considering ditching launches for a funnel, is the thing to remember that most funnels, like the ones that, when I talk about funnels, it's usually, they're usually like 80% of the time, they're designed for new subscribers. If you're going out there, if you maybe set up an amazing funnel that converts really well, you're running ads to that funnel, you're usually running those ads to cold traffic. So it's people who don't know you. So these are new subscribers. They come in, they discover you, they go through this sequence. Some will buy, majority won't. Like, that's just how it works. Like, even the best funnels in the world, if converted it 10%, which would be fairly unheard of, it's still 90% of people who go through this are not buyers. They land in your main email list and now what? Right? So these are people who were not quite ready to buy immediately. They. Or maybe the way that you were selling is not the way that they want to be sold to. Maybe they need something else. Maybe they need a couple of touch points. That's one of the things I've noticed, particularly with our programs is very common for people when they've purchased. If you go back and have a look, and we do like, we stalk everybody when they join. But you're like, they watched that webinar, they joined that event. They did that thing. They did that thing and then they've come and joined us. So while some people, and these are obviously, I call these Buy now buyers and they're our favorite because they are ready to go, they are the people who are currently looking for a solution. Generally they're googling around or whatever and that lets the algorithm know to show them your ad. They see your ad, they click on it, they go, yep, I resonate with this person. Yep, this is the problem I have. Yep, let's go. So that's the percentage of people who will come through, usually from the first piece of your funnel. Right. So for Evergreen launches, like these are designed to make sure we're not just leaving money on the table. We're not abandoning and forgetting about the people who are on our email list. So this is how you are going to make offers to that list. And the goal with Evergreen launches is that you're wanting to bring in similar levels of revenue as your big live launches, but at a significantly lower time. Stress, energy, investment, like that's the goal here. And then obviously, as your business grows, as you have more time and capacity, like, they can grow too. But the real goal is basically if you went, all right, so normally on a big launch, maybe you make 30 sales. So on your Evergreen launches, you'd be aiming to make like 10 per launch, but you're doing them one a month rather than, you know, one big one every 90 days. So, yeah, the goals is that they are going to help you to maximize the sales from your list. They are going to be roughly every 30 days and they're not all public. That's the other thing. If you were launching stuff to your list all the time. And to be honest, like, if you think about anybody other than a personal brand, if you're on the email list, they're pretty much launching to you all the time. Like, I'm on a bunch of email lists for various things and the ones that make it through my spam filter, they're sharing offers all the time. Like, oh, now it's 20% off, now it's two for one. Now it's this, now it's that. And you know, with E commerce brands and things like that, we kind of expect it and we don't get mad about it. And I think that again, because we are personal brands, we are small business owners, we sort of have this thing, it's like, oh, gosh, I can't be out there just selling to people all the time. They're going to unsubscribe so it's about. We wanted to find that happy balance. But I think for most people, you definitely, particularly if you're only sort of feeling at the moment like you can make an offer to your list once every 90 days, which is like four times a year. I think majority of people, you are totally fine and safe to be able to make more offers more often. But because we do want to protect your list, we do want to make sure that you are still maintaining those subscribers that you've worked so hard to get. You're going to make it that not all of these are public. And this is one thing we like to help people to map out is to choose the right types of campaigns for an evergreen launch. Because you're probably thinking like going, how do you do this? So that it's easier, right? And we'll talk about in a sec. But there's different types of campaigns that you can do to your list, some to social whatnot and some just to a segment of people. And one of those examples is something that we would call a secret launch. And I just want to show you an example, like a very high level example that looks like. So a secret launch is one type of campaign that you can use if you switch to the evergreen launching way of life. And that would look something like this. So you would send three value emails to your list maybe over about a week with something, some really juicy call to action, like maybe there's like a. You've recorded a special little training for them or there's something for them to download, like an extra freebie or something and they click and they download. But these are like emails going to the list on a particular topic that have got something really valuable and they have to click to take action. So that click lets you know they are interested. It's like them putting their hand up going, I'm interested in that topic, right? I'm interested enough to click on this free thing, right? And the people who click, they kind of become a segment in the. Well they do. They become a segment. And what you would do inside your actual software is you would add a tag if somebody clicked and then you now have this little like mini list within your list who you know are interested in this topic and then those people. And depending on the size of your list, you might want to send it to the people who've opened the emails as well. If your list is quite small. But because if you've got a list of like a hundred people and you're only getting like 10 people clicking that's a very small list to promote to. Again, up to you. Like look at the size of the list. You want to obviously be still putting best foot forward, but you'd create your segment based on people being interested in that topic and then you would send them a follow up sequence to an offer that is related to that topic. So I want to give you a couple a quick client case study here. This is our lovely client, Kylie. Kylie came to us and she used one of our campaigns which was a combination of a waitlist campaign also with a beta launch because she was actually launching a whole new program at the same time. Her goal was 65 students. Kyla's got a pretty decent sized social media following and she actually sold 150 spots using these two simple email campaigns with a total of $220,000 in sales. So this is on a brand new program. And the thing was that she then emailed us once she'd completed the program, finished setting everything thing up and she said basically she's now making like using these systems, she's now making about $70,000 every single month, whereas before she'd made $50,000 ever with her business. And this is not just like this one thing. It's not just adding the right email campaigns. She made sure her offer was right, she made sure that, you know, her marketing was right and then she made sure her selling was right. And these three things together made a huge impact to her business. Okay, so next part of the process is how you make sales every week. So this is with what I call the email engine. It's actually had a million different names over the, over the years, but I've settled recently on email engine. I feel like it rolls off the tongue nicely. So the real reason most funnels don't work is that they are too short and that they are only aimed at one type of customer, as we already discussed and that is the ready to buy now customer. So and when I say don't work, I mean don't mean they don't work at all. I mean is that they're not able to be scaled and that usually it requires like a quite obsessive level of optimization to get them ticking. All the benchmarks that you need to kind of get beyond that, which most people just don't either have the desire to do, the expertise to do, the team to do or any of that stuff. And that's fine because there's no point of going like, hey, here's this strategy, right? It works amazingly well if you've basically got a PhD in online marketing to make it do that. Like that's. Who does that? Nobody. Right? So we want things that somebody who's an expert in anything other than marketing can come and put it in well enough that it is going to still work and be, you know, useful and profitable and all the things that they need it to be without them having to either pay someone, you know, tens of thousands of dollars who is an expert to come in and do it for them or for them to have to get to that expert level themselves. And how what our original, our OG version of our email engine, as I said, was a 14 day webinar based email sequence. Because again, the same with the campaigns is the same with their email engine. Different types of mini funnels, different types of funnels work better for different types of offers. So for example, we have one version of the email engine sequence for memberships, one version for premium offers, one version for online courses like 200 to $2,000. Like the how the types of the actual structure of it and what goes into it. Like whether it's a webinar, whether it's a, you know, just a purely an email sequence, whether it's a wait list, like there's different things to kind of click in here and that is based on what your offer is. But the original one as it was just webinar, 14 day email sequence. And you find people, they kind of get to that point, they go okay, I want to scale it. What now? So that was one thing that I noticed and we experimented with ours was to actually go okay, that sequence, that first 14 day sequence, which is a very standard email funnel. Right. That's what a lot of people think of roughly 14 day email funnel, whether it's a webinar or something else that is going to appeal to and convert one type of customer that ready to buy now customer. But a lot of people aren't. They may have seen the thing that brought them into the funnel and been like, oh, I'm interested in this. But they're still further, still further back on the buying journey. They might need a bit more trust, they might need to know a bit more first. They might not be fully like problem and solution aware yet. They might be still going like I'm struggling but I'm not sure why. So those people generally need bit more value, bit more connection, bit more trust building and potentially a different sales mechanism. So a webinar is one type of sales mechanism, but there's other ones. That was one thing that we started to do was go well, actually, to solve this problem of having the funnel not be able to scale, what we need to do is we need to have other opportunities for people to purchase within the funnel. So we took the funnel originally 14 days, I made it 60 days. Now, I'm not saying anyone needs to now go and make a 60 day funnel because that's a big job. But what it is, it's actually a stack of three to four little sequences which you set up one at a time, let one run, and as you add each next one, like the percentage of conversion goes up. So that's how I would recommend anyone to start with. If you don't have anything, just having one is going to be great. It's going to help you to make some sales and hopefully it gives you a taste. But then if you really want to be able to scale this, if you really want to have that rock solid level of revenue coming in every month, you need to have more because again, it's that all eggs in one basket thing. You don't want to ever have it just to be one thing. Does that make sense? So final piece of the ecosystem is making sales every day. And this one is like if the email engine is the cake and the evergreen launches is the icing, this is the cherry on top or the sprinkles or whatever. Like this I think is like the fun part. And this is having a social sales system. So this is like, imagine that you had a lever in your business that you could basically pull at any time to make more sales. And you can choose to do this in lots of different ways. Like some people might choose to go like, hey, I want to have this as a lever, I want to pull a couple times a week. And other people it might be like, you know, I want to just have this in my back pocket for if, you know, I've had a slower month. Or I want, you know, it's something I want to invest in, I want to bring in some more sales. I know that I have this at my fingertips and it's something that I can go, I can make a 60 second reel. It's maybe going to take me 20 minutes if you're being fancy, five minutes if you're not. And I can put it out there, I've got the other pieces in place and I know that will bring in revenue. It's one of the things that I find really frustrating with our kind of business model is any other time where you go, oh, I need to get an extra $2,000 into the business, you're like, okay, well what am I going to do? Am I going to go spend two and a half weeks creating a webinar or going to go sit down and write a sales sequence that's got 10 emails in it. It's going to take me a day and a half or again, it's that whole like time effort spent versus reward. And most of the time we don't have these like an easy option or easy to wrong with quick. Like an option where you go, I want to make sales tomorrow. What can I do? So this is one of those things and this is basically using the power of social media, using your existing social media list and a tool called ManyChat, having a couple of sequences and a little engine built out there so that all you need to do is just create a piece of content, put it out and there's certain types of content obviously that you're wanting to put out and that will bring you in sales. And then having, because I'm all about obviously the follow up, it's not just about that initial thing. You also want to have a little follow up sequence there as well to really maximize that. But it just is so empowering to know you can do this. And this works with low audiences as well. So we did a test at the start of this year where we went and started a Instagram channel from scratch. That is not an easy thing at all. We got a whole 200 followers but we still made sales from it. Even from those 200 followers, I think we made a couple thousand dollars worth of sales. So, you know, still very doable with a smaller list you don't have to have a big list to make it work. Which is one of the reasons why I love it. And also because it's so quick like this system, like we actually everyone to do this first because you can usually get set up in an afternoon and then it's just again it's like a button you now have to push. And then once you get the basics, of course you can start to optimize it. So and there's one thing I did forget to mention with the social sales system is the other goal of the social sales system other than it being fun and other than being like a thing that's in your back pocket that you can go, I need some extra sales this week. I'm going to do some extra reels. And this is one of those little ninja hacks that can really, really such a big difference to your business is just like the email engine, the goal is for that is to cover all your expenses. The goal of your social sales system, if you choose to is optional, is is to give you a marketing budget. So if you say spend afternoon, set this up and then decided to do like two reels a week or something like that, that was going to be pointing to one of these and then say, okay, any revenue from this, any sales that come through from that is going to be my marketing budget for next month. And then you start reinvesting that, which then starts meaning that you will start getting more sales and that gives you a bigger marketing budget. And then that starts meaning more leads and everything kind of grows and grows and grow. That there's a big game changer and that's where things are, you know, really sort of start to shift quite quickly. So that's it, that's the system, that's the three puzzle pieces. And as this is not going to go and get set up next week, but that's okay because this is your business and your business is going to be around for years. So it's okay that you can set this up over the coming months and you do it piece by piece and each piece makes it get better and each piece adds another layer and then you can look back in six months time and go, wow, my business is completely different and look how far I've come. Thank you so much for joining me for this. I really hope it's been valuable, guys. I hope that you've got at least like one thing that you're going to be able to go away, put into action and that's going to help you to move the needle forward. Please let me know when you do start implementing. Make sure you let us know over hello funnels on Instagram, like shoes, a dm. I would love, love, I always love hearing how when people start implementing things and seeing how it's all working in their business. And of course, if you want to come and join us inside ecourse Empire, this is what we do. We're a pretty lovely group of people on here that, you know, we've got some lovely Empire people here. They're generally the best people on the Internet. You know, is that very unbiased opinion is a lovely group, super supportive. We've got everything you need, templates, amazing calls, hot seat calls three times a week with myself and my team. And if, yeah, if you're wanting to help to implement this, there is no better place to do it and we would love, love, love to have you. You just can go check out Empire on the website. It's by application, but yeah, we would love to hopefully see your application and have you come and join us. So anyway, guys, hope you have amazing rest of your day. VIPs. I will see you tomorrow. And yeah, enjoy the rest of your day, guys. Bye.