Today is the first episode of what I like to see as a weekly show, and we are going to talk about funnels, traffic, launching, growing, and scaling your online business. This especially useful if you are a service provider, like coach or consultant and any other services industry, and if you want to get more clients for your services, for your consulting, or if you want to also sell online courses, online group programs, or a combination of those.
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Today, we are going to talk about Evergreen vs Live Product Launch.
This is a question I get asked so many times during the free marketing discovery sessions, where clients are not sure whether It is best for them to just launch a group live program or have a Live Launch for an eCourse, or whether to go for an Evergreen funnel.
There is not a straight answer because it also depends on your business, and here is why.
Live Launch basically involves that you open the cart in a certain day, say first of September, you start the launch, and then on the 8th of September you close the cart, and then at some point later, everyone who bought, they get access to the course so they had get access to whatever you were selling, ie group program.
So you have this very short window of when you need to build all the momentum for your launch and then be able to promote it enough to get enough sales to fill your program, or fill your eCourse.
As you can see, it becomes a lot more risky strategy, because when you are launching, there are several elements that will be crucial to overall success or failure of launching with your course.
The first part is traffic. How would you get enough people to know about your launch?
There might be that you already have a big audience on social media, you might have a big enough list, you might have a big enough follower so when you launch and you tell all those people that, “Hey, I have got this new program coming up.”
You do not have a problem with lots of people straight away going in like, “Yeah. Great! When can I buy? Where can I buy?”
And for many business owners who have been around for a while, or they have already invested a lot in traffic and in building their online presence, this is the situation they are in so they do not have a problem with the live audience.
If you think about any big entrepreneur that you are following like James Wedmore, Marie Forleo, Amy Porterfield, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, Digital Marketer, Ryan Deiss, they all have big audience. So for them, to launch live, it is not so much of a risk. They know they will be able to get enough people. They have enough experience of doing it.
And even if they do not any advertising to cold traffic, the people who have not heard about them, do not know much about them, they already have a big enough presence, a big enough social media followings, a big enough list, in order to get enough sales.
However if you are not in this position and you do not have a big enough audience already, or you have no audience as you are just starting your business, then you will have to rely on cold traffic, people who do not know about you.
You would be using Facebook advertising, Google advertising and other advertising methods. And with advertising, especially if you are just getting started and it is new offer and you have a new business, it is super easy to get it wrong.
You will fill your launch, you will fill your funnel with lots of people, but they are not going to be exactly the right people for your business or exactly the right people for your program. If you are quite new to Facebook Ads, it easy to make this mistake.
So what can you do instead?
If you are not doing a live launch, you then obviously test and adjust so you can say, “Okay, I am not doing it as a live launch. I have ran some ads for a week, I have not had any conversions, I am going to try a different targeting, or I am going to try advertising in a different platform. Or, I am going to try advertising for a different freebie, lead magnet, in order to attract different kind of people.”
So then, you do a change in your funnel and then you can do a different campaign, and you can test it for a couple of weeks and see if it is working or not. If it is not, then again, “Well it did not work this time,” and then maybe you need to try, again, another different free offer or different targeting on Facebook in order to get to the right people.
If you are launch is not live, if you have not got this constrain. “I am starting on the 1st, then I am finishing by the 8th,” then you can do several iterations like this, testing different traffic options until you find your perfect sweet spot with the traffic.
So that is first part.
The second part, where your launch could fail would be the selling system.
There are several ways how you can sell your online program or your online course.
One of them could be a webinar, for a service or live launch. Typically, you will have a live webinar where you would be promoting a webinar on a certain day. So in our example, if you launch it from the 1st until the 8th, you would do webinar on the 1st usually when you open a cart, and maybe you will do another one a few days later.
So then, you will be drawing all your ads in order to fill those webinars to get as many people as possible on those webinar.
But, if you then do not do a very good job on the webinar, so maybe the technology failed, or maybe your presentation was not very good, or maybe your selling was not very clear., then it did not articulate well enough the benefits of your program, or your service or why people should buy. Thus you are not going to get that many sales.
And, it is possible that you had the right audience, but because your delivery of your sale was not very good, that is why people did not buy.
Same could apply to other selling system.
If you are doing a video series as part of your launch, again, you could have some videos in the series better than others, some working, some not working. Again, if it is a live launch, then you would want all the people who are likely to buy by the 8th of September to be able to watch all your videos now. Then, either sign up or not sign up. Again, if your video series are not doing very well, and converting people well, then you are not going to get that many sales.
Another part of selling system is obviously email marketing, where you will be directing people to, either, your webinar or to those videos, following up with them, reminding them about your offers, your products, your services.
Similarly, if your email campaign was not written very well, or if you did not have enough emails, or if you were not sending right, or there were some delivery problems, it would actually get in the way of you being able to sell your products or services.
Then again, people are not going to know about your webinar or they will not get reminders, or they will not get information about your product after the webinar. If this happened, your launch could fail.
That is number two.
The third aspect of a launch and why a launch could fail would be your actual offer.
If you are launching something brand new that you have not sold before in the marketplace, you do not know whether it will be successful service or a successful product, until you have had a successful market test, until you have people actually buying it.
What I know online business owners sometimes do with their courses, they do a beta run where they offer the course for free to their list, and then they get 10, 20 people sign up for free. Some of them will complete the course, and then they will promote testimonials, which is fine for your super beta launch, but this is not an indicator whether you will actually be able to sell the course.
Yes, there is a need, maybe, for some people, and if you want to use this course as a freebie, then you know, people will sign up for it as a freebie.
But you have not got any data to prove that you can now run this launch as a paid product whether you want to charge £47, $97, $497, whatever price you want to put it at.
You have not got any data to say 100% whether you will have a successful launch because of the offer or not. Again, you will have to test.
And if you are doing a live launch, then all your testing will have to happen in this short period of live launching. And either your program will be successful or it will fail.
With an Evergreen launch, you can test and tweak. So, again, you are running ads for a week, they are not converting, you are not getting sales.
So then you can try different audience targeting, see if that works. If that still not working, try changing how you are positioning your offer, what you are actually trying to sell. Sometimes changing a headline or changing some benefits or bullet points, even just rewording using different languaging to express the same idea could make things a lot more clear for your audience.
Then, they will be able to understand exactly the benefits of why they need your product or your service or your course, and therefore, they would want to sign up and purchase your product.
So, my recommendation for you:
If you are just getting started in online business, and you have not got an audience, you have not got a big social media following, you have not got a big list…
… and if you are trying to launch a new product or a new service that you have not launched before, and you have no idea where the people will buy it or not in a way that you have positioned it at the moment, the best place to start is with an Evergreen launch.
With an Evergreen launch, you do not have a fixed start and finish date for your launch. You start when you have the online funnel ready. You start generating some traffic so you invest at a lower rate in the Facebook Ads or any other paid media. Then, as you are generating traffic, you can then see how people filter through your funnel, and at one point, they sign up or do not sign up, what kind of conversion rates you are getting, and then you can test and tweak.
If you see that your audience is not converting very well, converting with the free offers via Facebook Ads, then you could try changing the audience, the ads, creative copy, and placement and so on.
If it still not working, then maybe your actual lead magnet at the top of the funnel is not quite right and it needs to change. Sometimes the headline could make a very big difference.
If you know that people are signing up and you are getting good signup rate from Facebook Ads for your lead magnet, but then you are not getting any sales, it could be either something wrong with the way you are selling it; your selling process, whether it is the webinar or the video series or the emails, or a video sales letter or just the sales page. This might need tweaking, rewording, updating headlines, selling more benefits.
Or the other option is that your offer is not doing that well, so you could, again, test using a different selling system.
Maybe you have tried running in Evergreen webinar, that did not do very well, and now you try video series, it is still not doing very well, so you then you could look at the actual offer. Is it clear? Is it concise? Do people understand it? Do people want it? Do they need it? Get some feedback. Send out a survey asking people why they did not buy your product or your program, which may give you some feedback, as well as to what else you need to change in your funnel.
Is your testing and your online product funnel working?
This is how you test for multiple iterations until you get all the elements in a funnel working together well. And your funnel gets to the point that it exactly is break-even. Break-even means that if you spend a hundred pounds or a hundred dollars on Facebook Ads, your funnel will generate hundred pounds or hundred dollars back to you. Usually, we are looking at getting this return within 30 days. So, whatever you are investing comes back into your business.
If this is happening for you, then it means you are generating leads, and you are getting buyers for your list, for free, because what you are paying to Facebook gets paid back to your business.
So you can continue build the audience of leads, audience on social media, and list of buyers for your business. Anything else that you now keep selling to those buyers, other products, other services, other programs, other coaching, and consulting, – all of that becomes free for you, because you do not have to pay as much for marketing and advertising.
So hopefully it makes sense.
Over to you…
You like this video, and this first episode of the weekly show about launching and growing your business online, then please share on social media.
You can also like my page; I am Tamara Baranova on Facebook and all the other social media platform.
And if you have any questions after watching this on replay, then feel free to just pop to the Facebook page, leave a comment about the video, or message me privately Facebook, and we can chat. If you are planning on launching something for your business, if you have questions, if you are not sure which way to go, how to sell, how to position, where to find the right kind of leads on Facebook, feel free to book at free marketing strategy call with me.
Thank you so much for watching. And I will catch you again soon!
The post [Ep: 1] Live Product Launch vs Evergreen Product Funnel – Pros and Cons appeared first on Tamara Baranova - Online Business Strategist & Launch Manager.