My recent course launch: What worked, what didn’t work and what I learned from it

I just finished launching my 4-week crash course called “Boost Your Brand's Superfans”. And just like every launch, I do a review afterwards. In today's episode, I'm sharing what worked, what didn't and my key takeaways for next time.

– The numbers I look at when reviewing my own launches to really hone in on where and what I can improve (including a non-buyer survey).
– Why reviewing what *didn't* work is just as important as what *did* work.
– The importance of being really clear about what you learned so that you can take everything on board for next time.

 

 
Today, I'm doing a mini debrief of my most recent course launch. What worked, what didn't work and what I learned from it. Because I think sometimes you can benefit from listening to somebody else break down the behind-the-scenes of their business and their launches.

What did I launch? What are we reviewing? So I recently launched my four-week crash course to fill your audience with people who can't wait to buy from you called Boost Your Brand Superfans. And this course is always open. This was a particularly interesting launch because I had previously live-launched it back in 2022, but I hadn't had time to launch it since.

So this time I ran a live launch because doors are always open. It wasn't a “doors-open, doors-closed kind of live launch, but there were bonuses and a live Q and A, four of them, and if you wanted to attend all four calls, you had to sign up by a particular date. 

Now those calls aren't usually part of the program. So that was like a nice juicy bonus for somebody to sign up. 

 

How I review a launch.

When I'm reviewing a launch, I want to look at a couple of key points and I do this with my launches, but I also do this with my strategy-intensive clients who have launched previously and they're coming to work with me for a launch strategy on their second launch or 10th launch, right?

So I look at a couple of different things. 

First of all, I want to look at all of the numbers in a spreadsheet. So everything from how many people viewed the webinar registration page to how many people signed up for the webinar. 

Registration, how many people attended live? How many people converted live? I want to look at all of the numbers along the entire launch journey. Not just that final number of how many people signed up or what that overall launch conversion rate is. And then at each step, I ask, okay, what could we do to improve this? What worked? What were the strong points? And then what were the weak points that we can improve upon? 

Because it's no good to just say, well, I need to make my launch convert better. Because your launch has so many different parts to it. There are so many moving pieces and each of these moving pieces can influence that overall conversion rate. So instead, we need to narrow down which parts specifically we need to improve upon.

 

Review it and improve it.

And once we know where to improve, then we can improve it. But we first need to know where. So I always send a non-buyer survey to everyone who clicked through to view the sales page. So clicked on an email to view the sales page, but didn't end up buying. I sent them a non-buyer survey to find out what stopped them from buying and some interesting things that came up in this one that we just sent out.

One big common thread that came up was I'm doing too many other courses at the moment. This came up multiple times and it shows me that I need to be really clear on my courses, anyone who's done my courses will tell you they are action. They're not long training videos where you have to sit for 40 minutes at a time to learn something. It's like five to ten minutes and then go and implement this. That's how I teach. 

So I know I need to potentially demonstrate that a little bit more in future launches. I need to show them how it's not about learning, but it's more about guiding your actions so that you are getting those great results and potentially even including extra bonuses that would help somebody to make implementation easier or save them time in the process of implementing what they are learning.

Another one that came up was interesting. A couple of people said something along the lines of, well, You're anti-social media, or you're not a big fan of social media. And yes, I'm not a huge fan of social media, but still, what I teach in Boost Your Brand Superfans can apply to any platform.

So the reason why I say, well, you don't have to be on social media is because I genuinely believe you don't have to, but if you want to, or if your audience is there, then you can still apply the structure and the frameworks that I teach in the course to whichever social media platform you are on.

And those couple of sentences that I had from those people show me that maybe my messaging wasn't clear enough on, Hey, this can be used regardless of what platform, it's not platform specific. 

So those are some of the core messages that came out of that non-buser survey. And you can see from that how I've realised that these are some of the things I need to improve in my messaging next launch so that my audience can understand if this is a good fit for them and their business.

 

Analysing what worked.

Okay, so what worked in this launch? Now, this launch in general, I'm pretty happy with it because after having had this course available for 12 months, I haven't had time to launch it and tell anyone about it. So it's just been sitting there on my website and hardly anyone had bought it in between launches. 

So it was quite nice to see like, Oh, actually people do want this. I just need to tell them about it. I just need to launch this a little bit more often. 

So we had over a 30 percent live shop rate, which I consider a good live show-up. So 30 percent of the people who registered, attended live and at the moment I've noticed, even in my paid programs, live show-ups have been down quite a lot because everyone just has so much in their calendars.

Another thing that worked quite well was not showing up on Instagram during the launch. So, I came into this launch pretty exhausted from a few massive months and social media just exhausts me so much. I just didn't have the energy to show up on Instagram in this launch. I didn't even have the energy to brief my team on what content to create for me. 

We really just shared masterclass promo and then relied on cart open emails to the email list to sell this course and it worked. So yeah, maybe we could have converted a few extra people if I'd been active on Instagram.

 

Analysing what didn’t work?

I know we can learn a lot from the things that worked, but sometimes the more painful aspect of the launch is to look at what didn't work. What can we improve next time? And the second half of the cart open just didn't convert as well as the first few days. So cart open was seven days long and most of our sales came in the first two or three days.

Now, this could be for a couple of reasons. It could be that my most engaged people, didn't need a whole lot of selling to be ready to buy because they've been in my other programs or they've been listening to this podcast for a long time. They were already engaged. They were like, yep, I'm going to buy. So they didn't need a lot of time to make that decision. 

But it could also be that maybe there were some additional objections that my audience had that kept them on the fence and stopped them from signing up. 

 

Analysing what did I learn from this launch.

Something that I learned was it wasn't a new lesson, but it was a nice reminder. This came because about 50 percent of the people who signed up had already bought another offer of mine before. They might've bought “Offer less, Sell more.” Some of them had done launch magic. 

And this was a great reminder that, well, firstly, people don't know about your offers until you tell them about them. This offer had been available for over a year and my most engaged students who had bought all of my other offers hadn't bought this one because they didn't know about it.

And then the other thing to keep in mind is it's always easier to keep helping existing clients than it is to always try and get new ones, right? This offer is different from all of the other things that I sell, but it's still a pain point that I know my audience has. And it's going to help them to get better results from my other offers as well.

 

Pin it?