Should you live launch your offers or skip straight to evergreen? Here’s what you need to know

Is an evergreen course really the “easy” solution? Something you can automate and then forget about it, hoping that people will just magically buy it? Well, it would be great if evergreen courses worked like this, but they don't! In today's episode, I am sharing the real differences between a live launch and opting for evergreen, and what you need to know about both.

– The true differences between evergreen and live launching and the benefits of each.
– When creating evergreen offers is costing you sales—and the two most common mistakes I see course creators making.
– How live launching gives you essential intel for a highly successful evergreen course.
– The two misconceptions about launching and how these affect your sales.
– How building an automated evergreen funnel is not always the best first step, and what to do instead.

 

Today I am talking about live launching versus evergreen. I've been hearing this a lot lately where people are saying, I don't want to launch, I just want my offers on evergreen. I just want them to sell themselves without the stress and the pressure of launching now. 

So in today's blog, I'm going to break down what evergreen really is versus what live launching really is, and some of the biggest mistakes that I see course creators making with evergreen offers that are costing them a lot of sales. 

So to kick this off, I want to share a little bit about my own experience with evergreen. So in 2018, I had a Facebook ads course. It's now retired, but back then I had this course and I had launched it once.

And I tried to put it on evergreen after that one live launch. I recorded the webinar, I set up the deadlines, I created the ads, and I did all of the things. And if anyone listening to this show has set up an evergreen funnel, a proper evergreen funnel with deadlines, you'll know that it's a lot of work that goes into setting one up.

And I'd set it all up. I poured a few thousand dollars into Facebook ads to get people to watch the recorded webinar, and it just didn't convert. So for two years after that, I told myself, evergreen just doesn't work. It doesn't work for me. I don't think it works for anyone. Instead, I dove headfirst into live launching everything instead.

And that was until I created and launched my podcast Launch Plan. And I realised that the live webinar was converting really, really well. But I didn't want to keep doing multiple live webinars every month because who has time for that? And also, I'm an introvert. I love teaching webinars, but they are exhausting.

So I started to think, maybe I need to put this onto evergreen. Maybe I need to stop just running these live webinars and I need to find a way to record the webinar and deliver it on evergreen. But I was still feeling pretty scarred from that last experience with the Facebook ads course, where I spent this money on ads and nobody was buying.

So I really wanted to make sure that it was converting the absolute best that it could before I automated the entire funnel. So I taught that same live webinar and sent those same cart open emails to the people who registered for the webinars about seven times.

Before, I was confident that it was converting well enough to record the webinar and put it all on evergreen, and then I started plugging Facebook ads into it and I was measuring it. I was so pedantic about measuring it this time because of what had happened with the last round and the first week I spent $300 on Facebook ads and made I think $450 in sales, which is a pretty decent return on investment.

And then, I think it was within two months, I was spending $10,000 a day on Facebook ads and making 15 to $20,000 in sales. And that never would've happened if I hadn't live launched it a few times, if I hadn't spent that time gathering intel to make sure that my webinar, my sales page, my emails, all of those things were a perfect match for my ideal client.

 

Two massive misconceptions about launching.

Number one, launching is something you do when you have created your offer and you want to announce to the world that it just happens at one time and that you need to do a lot of teasing and hyping it up, and getting people excited about it so that when you release it, they buy it.

That's a big misconception. 

And number two, that launching is this big stressful event where you are getting your audience excited about your offer and you're hoping to build enough hype to get them to buy. It's not something you do just once and it doesn't have to be this big stressful event.

 

What is launching really?

Launching is actually just free content that nurtures your audience or bridges the Magician's Gap, as I call it. It's a limited-time promotional period, also known as cart open and there's a deadline to sign up. At its core, launching is just a sales process. It's just one way to sell your offers.

It's a vehicle for the system, and the system is a strategic, repeatable process for selling your offers. And here's the thing, that same system can apply to evergreen as well. It doesn't just have to be live launched. 

 

What is evergreen…

Well, evergreen has a bunch of different meanings depending on who you ask, and to me, evergreen is just an automated sales process with a deadline based on when someone entered the funnel.

So for an evergreen funnel to be effective, it still needs to have those same three ingredients that you have in a live launch. It still needs to have that free content to bridge the magician's gap and nurture your audience. It still needs to have a limited-time promotional period, a cart open of some sort, and there still needs to be a deadline to sign up.

The only difference between evergreen and live launching is that all of these are automated. So the deadline then depends on when someone signed up for the free webinar or the free lead magnet, rather than on a particular date as you would have in a live launch. 

 

Two big mistakes from creators…

So two big mistakes that I see online course creators, group program creators and membership creators making with launches and evergreen.

Number one, online course creators who put their courses up in their shop or on their website, and then they say, oh, I'm selling it on evergreen, and then they wonder why nobody is buying. The reason people aren't buying is because there isn't a sales process. There is no strategy behind how you are moving them closer to buying.

There are no cart open emails addressing the objections and the questions that somebody has about the offer, and there's no deadline for them to buy. Humans are procrastinators without a deadline. We'll just keep putting it off. 

And then mistake number two is building an automated evergreen funnel without ever having live launched the offer and they're putting all of this effort, sometimes they're paying somebody a lot of money to set this up for them, and they're creating this automated webinar funnel with an email sequence and all of the things before they've even tested it in a live launch. 

And generally, a launch will convert better live because you are there to answer those questions, those objections that pop up in real-time. And you are missing the opportunity to be live with your audience and discover what those questions and objections are in real-time. 

Plus, there is a lot of tech setup that goes into creating a true evergreen funnel with a deadline. Not one with a fake deadline, but with a real automated deadline. And once it's set up, you don't really want to change it.

Even re-recording the webinar and having it one minute shorter than the previous one, mucks up all of your timing. It makes it really challenging to set it up again, so you're much better off live launching it a few times, gathering the intel from your audience, making sure that it is as good as it can be, and then turning it all evergreen.

 

Now another question that pops up a lot is, do I have to do a big live launch for a mini-course? 

 

Now, a live launch doesn't mean that it has to be this big, huge thing where you're trying to build hype and there's going to be champagne and confetti, and you do this big webinar and all of the things. A live launch just means that you have doors open and doors closed on set dates, and in the lead-up to that, you are nurturing people to the point where they need to be to be ready to buy from you when doors open.

So yes, even for a mini course, I would do at least one live launch because you'll gather so much more intel. You'll find out what questions somebody has rather than just putting it out there and leaving it, putting it up in your shop and hoping people will buy it and not addressing all of their questions and their objections along the way.

 

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