What does launching over a holiday weekend do to your sales?
We will talk about that today in part 8 of our behind-the-scenes on our biggest launches, where you can learn even more about what’s worked for us in the past and we can continue to tell you that our new class, BIG LAUNCH, is open for registration. (But it closes on Thursday.)
In case you haven’t seen the class details yet, here is a very big button you can click to discover what’s under the hood.
Now, on with the show.
Today we’re going to talk about the Your Next Six Months class.
This was one of my favorite classes to run because it had a lot of the classic IttyBiz flavor to it: Do something no one else is doing at the weirdest possible time, and name it something obvious.
It happened to be coming up on June (right at Memorial Day weekend), and we had been thinking about what we were going to be doing for the next six months. We’d had a lot of recent clients talking to us about how to decide what to do for their own next six months.
So we thought we should make a class about that. (This is how we generally decide to make classes or products – we keep our eye out for the things clients mention again and again in a short period of time. Essentially it’s zeitgeist for fun and profit.)
The working title for this half-year planning class was Your Next Six Months. As with most of our working titles, we kept it as the final title.
A side note on naming the products you launch:
People often ask us how we come up with the names of our products, and we tend to do it one of two ways. The first way is to use everything in our copywriting arsenal to come up with the most compelling title ever.
The other approach comes from the 80’s sitcom “Three’s Company.”
They’re both equally effective, when it comes down to it.
In that old television show, there was an episode where Jack and his two roommates were obsessing over what to name his new French restaurant. No name was good enough. Nothing seemed “just right.” It seemed hopeless.
Then their landlord (Mr. Furley) was passing by and said something like “Wow, I didn’t think it would be so hard coming up with a name for Jack’s bistro.” Poof! “Jack’s Bistro” was born.
So sometimes, you can get a title just by coming up with the most obvious description of what it is.
Here’s what we decided to do.
So, back to the story. We’re getting ready to do something no one else is doing at the weirdest possible time, and name it something obvious. Check.
Dave had been more or less off the radar since The Big Scandal, and frankly, so had I. So we decided to make Your Next Six Months a live class with the two of us being involved in it.
Dave had never done a live class before, and I hadn’t done something live in years, so it seemed that the facts that a) Dave was back and b) IttyBiz was having it’s first live class in forever would do a good job of handling the “why we’re making a fuss about this” part of launch.
The class was also limited seating – 200 spots, because that’s what our teleconference provider capped out at. So the scarcity was inherent, not contrived. We ran out when we ran out.
The urgency factor was also natural – class started after registration was over. So instead of an arbitrary end date, which you often have to do with products, the end date was right before class began. That’s a good way to provide urgency in a way that intuitively makes sense to people.
We also decided to add an upsell option to the class – take the planning class by itself for $99, or pay $199 and add an hour of consulting to get feedback on your plan from Dave or myself. There were only 40 slots available for this – again with an “it makes sense” kind of scarcity – there’s only so many business plans we can evaluate.
(Adding consulting as an option is a great way to incorporate an upsell without having any weirdness involved. It’s especially effective if it’s tied to what you’re selling specifically. In our case, it wasn’t just general consulting – it was feedback on the plan you created as a result of the class. Relevance = higher conversion.)
How we launched it.
We decided to pick a launch window of three days max (more on why later), with registration happening right as Memorial Day Weekend was beginning. When everyone in the States was either taking a vacation or travelling to do so.
The reason we chose this was that no one in their right mind would be selling something at this time. Everybody always says that “nobody buys in summer” and to compound the “problem,” this promotion was over a very specific holiday.
We’re contrarian. If everybody says that no one buys in summer, it’s like a dare. We have to find out. So we ran it when everyone should be gearing up for a tailgate party.
The promotion itself was very low key. In fact, the sales page had the headline “The most boringly informative page you will ever read.” And the copy was basically, “Here are the details of the class. You can buy it now.”
(Normally Dave writes the copy and takes ridiculous amounts of care with every headline and subheader, but I vetoed him and just wanted it straight to the point. People were travelling. This was no time to pour on the dazzle.)
The class itself was straightforward as well: We will give you a process to decide what to focus on for the next six months. And we will call it “Your Next Six Months.”
No magical business plan, no million-dollars-by-Wednesday offer, just a planning class. Just “here’s how to decide what you should do next.”
The premise here is that a business planning class cannot be dressed up like a magic bullet. It’s boring. So we designed it to be appealing to the people who thought boring was just fine by them.
Here’s what the launch sequence looked like.
This was probably the most simple launch we’ve ever run. We sent three emails.
The first one said “The class is open.” The second said “Registration closes tomorrow.” And the last one was basically “Registration closes tonight.”
Normally we send two emails on the last day – one in the morning and one in the evening – because your last day is almost always your highest day of sales, period.
But for this one we only sent the morning email.
Here’s why.
When you’re selling a product, you generally want to maximize sales, so two emails on the last day makes sense. For a live class, with limited seating, you don’t want to maximize sales – you want to get as close to full seating as possible.
So if it looks like your class is on track to fill up on its own before the deadline, you don’t necessarily want to send that second email on the last day. Otherwise you’ll have a lot of people feeling disappointed that they didn’t get in the class. We were 80% full by the morning of day three, so we just sent the morning email.
(Incidentally, you can get a branding bump from not mailing on the last day. If you’re have to shout “Hey! Time’s almost up!” on a limited seating class, it can indicated that you’re not close to filling the seats. But if you don’t send it, the implied message is that you’ve either sold out already or are damn close. If your class isn’t limited seating, though, send the second email.)
How it all worked out.
All 200 seats sold out around 1pm on the last day of registration. Dave forgot to take down the upgrade option (feedback on your business plan) down and so instead of the 40 upgrade seats selling, we ended up with over 70 people coming in for the feedback option. So the next two months of our life were a bit of a living hell sorting out the timing for everyone’s feedback. Thanks, Dave.
Key takeaways:
1. Launching at weird times is a great way to take advantage of launch windows that your competition isn’t using. However, this is not guaranteed to work – it depends how connected your audience is to email or social media at those designated weird times.
So you’ll want to picture the people in your audience and ask yourself if they’re likely to be online late at night or during holidays or whenever your weird time is. We sell primarily to people running online businesses, so for us, the answer is yes. Your mileage may vary.
2. Live classes promoted in a low-key fashion can perform just as well as all-out launches. In retrospect, what probably made this one work is that the class was very simple in concept. This wasn’t a change-your-life class. It was “we’ll help you figure out a very specific thing.” It was also $99, so no one was buying this with their rent money.
It also helped to limit the registration period to a very short window. The offer was very easy to understand, and was very much a “you want it or you don’t” kind of thing. You didn’t need a long time to ruminate over whether you were going to get it or not. If you have a more complex offer, three days would likely work against you (unless your offer details were available well ahead of time.)
3. When you’re running a limited seating offer, you actually can’t predict when your “last day” will be. If you plan for a week, and it sells out halfway through, you’re going to look pretty weird if your launch content consists of a four-part series. There’s no reason to keep going after part two (what are you going to do, send them to a “you CAN’T buy now” page?) – but you can’t stop it without looking weird.
So if you’re running limited seating and there’s a fighting chance it can sell out early, you may be better off running straight promotional emails during your “cart open” period and saving any sequential content for pre-launch, because you can’t actually plan for what day your “last day” ends up being.
Drum roll, please! (Or, here’s what’s coming your way tomorrow):
Our final installment of the behind-the-scenes series on how we launch will talk about the launch we’re running right now our 12-month class called BIG LAUNCH.
(Yes, we’re still using Three’s Company to name our classes.)
We’re going to walk you through why we decided to use almost two dozen pieces of launch content for this class, which is ridiculous even for us.
But it’s working. Current numbers indicate this will be our biggest launch so far. (I should hope so. The class is called BIG LAUNCH, for crying out loud.)
We’ll have more for you tomorrow.
In the meantime, check out the class details. Registration closes in two days.
xx
Naomi and Dave