How do I launch if I want product cart to be open all the time?

I have heard from my audience, “Well, Steph, I want doors open all the time. I can't just launch it. I can't do a proper launch because I want it to be a product that people can buy all the time.”

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Why you still need to launch for an evergreen product

Now, that's fine. Where I see people going wrong is having a product that's available to buy all the time on their website, and then they don't do any live launches and they wonder why not many people are buying it. Then they think, “Well, nobody wants this product.” So, they think the solution is to create another product, and another one, until they have this whole library of products that nobody's buying, and they've created all of this extra work for themselves, when they could have just doubled down on the one product and launched it a few times and made a lot more money and helped a lot more people with just the one product before they moved on to the next one.

Use live launches

The solution is to incorporate some live launches. You can have a product available all the time, absolutely, but I would also incorporate a few live launches. Once you've live launched it a few times, then you can evergreen the launch, which I'm not going to go into here, but basically, when I talk about evergreening, it's available to buy all the time, but there's a funnel that flows into it so that you've always got this flow of customers coming in, but you have to live launch it first.

Create urgency

And you need to have some kind of urgency for people to buy. Otherwise, they won't. And I'll jump into that. I'll dive a little bit more into urgency in a second, but first, I want to talk about how you can have doors open all the time and still do live launches with a cart open and a cart closed date. The difference is that, instead of shutting the doors at cart close, like you might with a traditional course that's only available at certain times of the year, instead of shutting doors, you're removing bonuses or you're increasing the price or you're removing something else that made it appealing for them to buy now.

Without a compelling reason to buy right this minute, your audience will put off buying from you probably forever. And now you're probably thinking, “But surely if they just want my product badly enough, they'll be excited to buy it right away.” And yes and no. This is somewhat true, but here's the thing, buying a digital product is painful. You're asking them to hand over their hard earned money and you're also asking them to commit to learning and taking action on your digital product.

Let's pretend that you are a nutritionist teaching a course on how to quit sugar. Someone who's buying your course, they have to pay for it, which hurts, and they also have to commit to changing their bad sugar habit, which also really hurts. And that's a really big commitment. Now, our brains are wired to resist change and, the bigger the change, the more likely we are to delay it for as long as possible because we want to stay comfortable. We want to stay in our comfort zones, rather than changing.

Even when we know that this change is going to have a positive effect in the long term, we tend to prioritize short term comfort. We'll put off making that change until the discomfort of not changing is more than the discomfort of changing. And that's where a deadline comes into your launch. By giving your audience a deadline, you're forcing them to stop procrastinating and make a decision. Are they in or are they out?

 

Add a deadline ethically

Now, I want to make a little side note here because I have seen deadlines used unethically, and that's not the purpose of what we want. It's not about pressuring someone to buy from you because that would be unethical. This is about interrupting their procrastination pattern and encouraging them to make a conscious decision to buy or not to buy. Once you add a deadline in, that challenges them. That says, “Oh, okay. I can't just keep putting this off forever. I need to make a decision.” And then, they switch into decision-making mode.

Now, one way to add that deadline is, of course, having doors open and doors closed, where you're only selling your product at certain times of the year. Maybe you launch it twice a year, like I do with my Launch Magic course when I launch it in November and May each year. But if you want your product available all the time, there are other ways you can add deadlines to your launch.

 

Use a strategic bonus

My favourite one is strategic bonuses, bonuses that really compel somebody to take action.

 

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