080: 30 Days to Launch

What if you were launching in 30 days? Is there anything that you would be doing differently than you are right now? I've got lots of thoughts for you on what to do over the next 30 days to launch. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. It feels good to be back. I have been vacationing for like 2 solid weeks. It's been fabulous. What's been even more fabulous is that I've come back and it feels like the business hasn't even skipped a beat. Everybody's doing their job. Everybody knows what's going on. And I don't feel chaos and overwhelmed coming back from being off for 2 weeks. So I'm just going to give myself a little pat on the back because that might be the first time ever, but I'm jumping back in to recording on the podcast. Ask this week. And it stems from a conversation that we had in one of the groups this week. So this came from the 100+ group. If you don't know, my membership is called Launch Your Box, but there's also some subgroups off of Launch Your Box. And so I have a group for the newbies. So if you're brand new to Launch Your Box or you're brand new to business, we want you inside the newbie group where you can ask all the newbie questions. That your little heart desires and, and really connect with people in the same season as you are as far as business. And then once you hit your first 100 subscribers, we want you to come join us in the 100+ group. Everybody there has 100 subscribers or more. So it's different conversations. It's very targeted conversations. And our other subgroup is called the 500+ group, and it's for anyone that has over 500 subscribers. So those are the 3 subgroups that we have right now. And I was inside the 100+ group this week. I had a Zoom call just with them. So it was a nice small call with the 100+ group. And one of the conversations we were kind of catching up on what everybody was working on right now. And several of them were planning launches in the next, you know, 30 to 60 days. And so there was conversations like, you know, what would you do if you were launching in 30 days? What should I be doing? What's going on? And so I thought I would just come on the podcast today and record record an episode for you on what you should be doing if you are 30 days out from your launch, because, and that's for new or existing subscription box owners. It's really the same thing. And when I say existing, it means that you have a closed subscription model and that you're opening up to new subscribers. So that's called your launch. Or if you're brand new, you're launching your subscription for the very first time. So when someone says, hey Sarah, what would you do if you were 30 days out from a launch? And 30 days is like time to get serious, right? I'm like the biggest procrastinator. I always say that I work best under pressure because it's true. It was the same way in high school and college. If I had 6 weeks for a project, I'd literally do it 2 days before it was due. I just work better that way. I think I just tend to overthink things or don't do things or put them off because I have so much time. So when I start thinking about launches, like, okay, 30 days out, it's time to get serious. It's time to get to work. It's time to really ramp up your efforts before your launch day. So the very first thing that I want you to really do when you are close to 30 days out is setting that date. If you say I'm going to launch next month, but that actual date is not on the calendar, it's going to get pushed back. I almost guarantee it from whatever date you're thinking right now, but you're not telling anyone. You haven't put the date on the calendar. I guarantee that you're going to push that off because Something's going to pop up. So we have to let people know we're launching in 30 days because we need the accountability. It could be, you know, letting your business friend know, putting it on your calendar, letting social media know, but we have to set our launch dates. And if you're brand new to starting your subscription box and you haven't been audience building or you don't have your tech pieces set up, I would tell you that you need more than 30 days. You probably need closer to 90 days. But if you've been doing those things, you've been working on audience building, you've got all the tech figured out, we need to be launching in the next 30 days. Like we need to set the date. We need to quit telling ourselves that we're not ready. We need to quit telling ourselves it's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect by the way, but we need to start taking some action. And so the best way we can do that is to set a date. So that's number one, make sure that it's crystal clear, because then you can start working backwards and know that you have 30 days to do that. So the first really actionable thing, once you set your date, is that you're going to start emailing your list before your launch. So hopefully at this point, if you're 30 days from launching, you've been doing some list building, and that could be in the form of an opt-in, a popup on your website. Maybe you've had some opt-ins where people opt in by giving their email address to get something in return. And that could be like a discount or a freebie. It could maybe be like a phone wallpaper or a print, maybe a giveaway, some free gifts, some bonuses. I'm thinking tutorials, digital resources, all those make great opt-ins. And that's how we start building our list. So hopefully you've been doing that for at least 30 days. If you haven't done any list building, we need to give this a little more time, but hopefully at this step, you've been trying to grow your list with the high converting opt-in. And those are lots of great ways that you can do that. But once we have those people on a list, we have to be emailing them. We can't just collect them and wait for our launch. So don't wait. Once you start collecting people, let's start emailing them on a weekly basis. And if you are emailing on a weekly basis right now, it doesn't hurt to ramp that up to 2 emails a week. Before your launch. Because if you're following my launch plan, which is inside Launch Your Box in our training library, you know that you're going to be emailing people multiple times a day during your launch. Okay, so they have to hear from you before that date or it's going to affect a lot of things. It's going to affect your deliverability, it's going to affect your open rate, It's, it's going to affect a lot of things. So we need to put those practices in place right now, 30 days out. So if you've been consistently emailing weekly, awesome. You're already one step ahead. Let's push it to 2 emails a week over the next 30 days, next 4 weeks. Let's push it to 2 emails. If you haven't been emailing them anything, let's start with once a week right now. Okay. And you might be wondering, What do I put in these emails, Sarah? I've been building the list. I've been doing the things, but I don't even know what I'm supposed to be emailing them. The trick here is to not overcomplicate it. Your emails are going to contain the same type of content that you put in your social media posts. Work smarter, not harder. I want you to realize how few people actually see your social media posts. So don't be afraid to repurpose that content. I do it all the time. Nobody's called me out on it ever. So you've already created great content for social media. Let's just put that in email form to hit more eyeballs. And so I put together like a small list of 5 things that you could be emailing to your list. So the next 30 days you could send these 5 emails. All right. So this number 1, you could do an unboxing the same way that you would show up live and unbox something, you could do that in picture and text form. You could take a picture of the total box, then you could break it down by item. You could be descriptive about it, tell a story about it. That's a great email. Email number 1, do an unboxing. Email number 2, do a subscriber share email. So this is where you get all those lovely comments on your social media. Maybe people text you, maybe people email you about how much they love your subscription box. We need to start putting those in graphic in text form, and we need to share that with our list. Because when people see other people loving something, they're like, oh yeah, that's great too. Oh yeah, I want that too. They're having that FOMO. So we want to share how much our subscribers love our subscription. So email 2, you could do a full subscriber share email. Email number 3, you could do different ways to use items in your box. So like last month in my box, I had like a microfiber beach towel and I had this wet dry bag. And when I was doing the unboxing, I was telling them all these different ways that they could use this wet dry bag. And they're like, I never thought of that. So I could do a whole blog with like— not blog, an email. It could be a blog as well. I could do a whole email about 5 different ways to use your wet dry bag from the June, you know, monogram box. And I could show them how you could put snacks in it and then it gets wet on the side of the pool, but the snacks don't get wet. I could show them how you could put a wet bathing suit in that bag, throw it into your beach bag, and not everything in your beach bag is wet from that swimsuit. So I could go through a series of showing them different uses that will also help them consume the contents of your boxes. If you show them different ways to use things, it helps them consume them. Like, oh yeah, I have that bag, let me go get it. I could use that this weekend. So Number 3 is ways to use items in your box. Number 4 could be sneak peek for the upcoming box. So really teasing out what's coming for your launch for this next box. Do some sneak peeks, tell some stories about, you know, the theme of the box. So that could be email number 4. And if you don't have a subscription box already, it would be hard to do 1, 2, and 3. So 4 could be your number 1. That could be your sneak peek if you're brand new. And also you could do some behind the scenes. So number 5 is behind the scenes. This could be you prepping items for the subscription box. This could be packing or shipping or something that you're doing behind the scenes to get ready for the mailout or the launch. So those would be 5 emails. If you're brand new and you don't have existing boxes that you could share, you could also do an email really introducing you and your business and really your— the why behind why you created the subscription box. So you could do a couple of those that would replace some of those subscription box emails. But I want you to ramp up your email sending during these 30 days. Okay, we need to get a history established. We need to get the rhythm of this established for your customer and for your email CRM. So that was something that I would do very intensely 30 days before my launch. The other thing that I'm going to focus on quite a bit is going to be increasing video views. So if you don't know, Facebook and Instagram allow you to retarget people who have viewed at least 3 seconds of a video with an ad. So you can retarget them with an ad. So if you know that you can retarget people that are watching videos on your social media Wouldn't you want to do more videos so you had more people that you could retarget? And so I'm talking about these could be short videos, they could be long videos, they could be Facebook Live videos. But anytime we do a video, it creates this know, like, and trust factor. And so they're getting to know you, but you're also capturing them into a bucket. You're collecting them so that you could retarget them. If they're watching your videos, they're interested. Okay. And so I always love to ramp up my videos 30 days prior because those would be the warmest people, the people that just watched my videos in the last 30 days. But I can really increase those by increasing how much video content I produce. So when you think about your schedule for this 30 days, I want you to very intentionally create some more videos so that you have video views. This could be more behind the scenes. This could be more going live, showing different things. This could be talking about your subscription box more, showing different things. They don't have to be long. Remember, people only have to watch 3 seconds of these videos for us to capture them in our video view audiences. So if I was launching in the next 30 days, I'm ramping up my video views. Okay. I want to create more video content. And the third thing that I'm going to focus on, so these are really 3 things to focus on: emailing, increasing your video views, and I want to drive people to my waitlist. All right. During these 30 days, I want you to talk about your waitlist several times a week. This is your call to action. This is the only call to action that you have during this 30 days, okay, is to get people on the waitlist. All right. And that's like, oh, here's a sneak peek. Join my waitlist. Here's a behind the scenes of me folding boxes. Join my waitlist. Let me show you last month's box. Join my waitlist. Anything that you do, it's instantly join the waitlist. That's your call to action. And then when Somebody joins that list, I don't want you to wait to email them until the launch. Like don't just collect them on the waitlist and then email them 30 days later. I want you to start emailing them right away. So you can put them into a sequence, an email flow right away that would kick off as soon as someone joined your waitlist. And that could be like a get to know you post. They've joined your waitlist. Tell them about your subscription, tell them how long you've had it. Tell them your why behind it. Get to know you. You could do a behind the scenes in here too. Here we are prepping subscription boxes for the month. You could do a sneak peek in here of the next month's box, but put them into a funnel, a flow of them getting an email from you. All right. These are people that have raised their hand and said, I am interested in your subscription box. It's not everybody on your general list that have come in through a popup or an opt-in or whatever, a freebie. These are people that specifically said, I want to be on your waitlist so that I am the first one to know about your subscription box. So these are like the VIP customers. These are the people that we need to make sure we treat them like they're in first-class seating so that they will be the ones to buy our subscription box first. And so I need you to drive people to this list. We are posting about our waitlist. More than ever when we're 30 days out. We're talking about people joining the waitlist every opportunity that we get, if that's on a live or a video or a post, but you need to drive people to your waitlist. And so hopefully you've been collecting people through different opt-ins that we already talked about all year long, or the last however many months you've been working on this. Now it's time to drive them to the waitlist. And remember, we've got to give them a reason to get on the waitlist. You're the first to know, you're going to be able to get a box before anybody else. You'll be able to grab the early bird bonus, like whatever that is. We have to tell them the benefits of being on that waitlist so that they'll want to join. So here's really the secret to these things, right? We should be doing them all year long. Your goal really is to fill the top of your sales funnel consistently. And that top of the funnel is collecting emails. It's getting the video views. So we need to be doing these things all year long. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of homework. So this is what I want you to do today. If you have not set your launch date, I want you to get the calendar out and I want you to set that today, whether that's 30 days, 90 days, or 6 months, I need you to get the date set. Set, and then we have to start putting our plan together. We have to start building an audience, nurturing that audience with emails and short videos and lives, and start building up to the launch date. Okay. If we just keep hanging out thinking, oh, I'm building my audience still, but we're not working towards something, We're not going to be as aggressive with it. We're not going to have a strategy with it. We're not going to have a plan. We're just doing things all willy-nilly and we're not really making any progress because there's nothing to work towards. So I want you to get the launch date set so that we have a goal in mind to work towards. And now is the perfect time of year to get that launch date set and start working towards launching. In the next 30 days, in the next 60 days, and the next 90 days. But it's not hard. We just sometimes need the plan to get us to activate the work. Because if you're a procrastinator like me, you're going to put things off to the last minute. But if we don't have the last minute set, we don't ever know it's the last minute. So let's get it set. And then I want you to start emailing that list. We talked about different ways to do that, creating more video views and driving people to your waitlist. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.