Evergreen vs. Live launches: Which is best in your business?

Today, I'm talking about what is quite a controversial topic in the online world, and that is evergreen products versus live launches. What are the pros and the cons and which ones are going to work best for your business? So I'm going to drop a little truth bomb or a little aha moment before I jump into the real content of this blog, and this is something I want you to think about as you're going through, but that is that you don't have to pick one or the other in your business.

 

You might have a combination of both. It could be that you have multiple different products. Like I do, where some of my products are always open and you can sign up at any point in time, and then some like Launch Magic, which I only open doors and live launch twice per year. So it could be that, or it might be that your course or your membership or whatever program you are launching is open year-round, but you have live launches a few times a year as well.

Now that can be really fun because people can join whenever they want, but you still get those benefits of live launching now. I want to talk about something that I tell all of my Launch Magic students and that is that I would always recommend live launching for the first few times. At least before you try to put it on evergreen, this forces you to start sharing the right content in your launch, the content they need to be ready to buy when you open doors.

 

Live Launches

Now, when you are live launching, it forces you to do this. Whereas when you're evergreen, you can kind of forget about your product and that's what a lot of us tend to do. Live launching also means you better understand your audiences' hesitations. One of the things that are more important than your audience size is understanding your audience's hesitations so that you can answer them and preempt them.

And when you go on evergreen, it's a little bit harder to preempt them because you're having to read their mind and you're not there live with them in a webinar or live with them in a Q&A to answer those questions for them when they happen in real-time.

Another thing I would recommend about live launching the first few times is to get more numbers through your launch. You get more people, and more eyeballs on it. So you can see early on how it's converting and you can fix it. You can make tweaks as needed to the areas that are letting the overall Launch down.

Now people often ask me, do I have to do a big live launch for a mini course or a small ebook or a tiny office, some kind of tiny product? Now I want to say that a live launch doesn't mean it has to be this big, huge thing where you're trying to build hype and it doesn't mean you have to do a webinar. It doesn't mean any of these things. It just means that you have that doors open and that doors closed.

There are so many different ways that you can create that doors open-doors closed environment without actually closing doors. So those doors open and doors close are on set dates in a live launch and in the lead up to that doors open, you are nurturing people to the point where they need to be ready to buy from you when doors open.

So, yes, even for a mini course, I would still at least do one live launch. It is so worth it for the intel that you gather in the process.

 

Evergreen

Evergreen means that doors are open all the time. There's no incentive to buy in a shorter space of time and people can buy whenever there's none of that energetic push that so many people try to avoid in launching. Which is I think what is so enticing about the evergreen model.

You can just pre-record everything and you don't have to show up live. You don't need to be on a webinar, you don't need to promote anything. You can just put it out there and it's on evergreen and it promotes itself. This is where a lot of people could go wrong, because if you're not promoting it, if you're not talking about it, if you're not selling it, if you're not putting that energetic push behind it, how are people going to know to come and buy it?

So that's something that I find a little bit problematic with the evergreen approach if it works. If you live launch it, you test it, you tweak it and you get it. It becomes consistent income in the background, but more often than not, I see evergreen funnels not working because people haven't successfully live launched them first and if it's not selling in a live launch, it's not going to sell on evergreen.

Often I see people closing doors on their live launch and very few or no people have bought and they think that by making it available to buy at any time, they'll get more people to buy it. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. It doesn't work like that. Now, some of the benefits of evergreen, it's more chilled than the live launch. Having said that, though, we can avoid the hustle, the manic energy around a launch.

 

Which one is going to be best for your particular product?

Now a couple of questions to ask yourself, to consider which one is going to be best for your particular product, each specific product, because remember this doesn't have to be for your entire business. This can be on a product-by-product basis.

 

1. What format does your audience need to solve this particular problem or achieve the particular transformation that they want?

So if it's something like Launch Magic, the reason I live launched Launch Magic is that it takes 12 weeks to work through the course. There's a lot to get through. Launching is a major project in your business. So I need to make sure my students have that support. They have the accountability of other people going through at the same time. That is why I live launch it and I will never put it on evergreen.

However, if it's something that they can go through, they don't need a huge amount of support and accountability. They can work through it in their own time. Then an evergreen model might be slightly more appropriate for it.

 

2. How do you want your business to look and feel?

For example, I structure my entire business around the two live launches of Launch Magic each year. I plan my holidays around it. I plan everything around it. All of the other things in my business just fit neatly around those Launch Magic launches.

I guess evergreen does require a little bit more maintenance work throughout the year. Whereas live launches once you've finished, live launching, if you need to teach the program, great. You can teach it, but you can have a break in between where you have when you're not launching and you're not teaching. And that gives you a little bit more freedom.

 

3. What's going to be the most appropriate way? What needs you to be live launching and what can you deliver on evergreen?

We don't want to be doing 12 live launches a year. That's exhausting. So they have it evergreen versus live launches.

 

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