Skipping a live launch is not a good idea

Today, I'm talking about why you can't afford to skip the live launch when you are launching your digital product. First things first, what do I mean by a live launch?

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Why you can't afford to skip the live launch

A live launch is a launch that has fixed dates of some kind. So that might be cart open and cart close, which can be doors open, doors closed. It can be a bonus expiring. It can be the price going up. There's some kind of open, close deadline. Now, ideally in a live launch, we would also have some kind of launch trigger like a webinar or a challenge rather than just putting your product up for people to buy on your website whenever they feel like it. Because spoiler alert, they are never going to just randomly feel like it.

Your audience may likely think, “Well, you know what? I'm just going to try and figure this out on my own and because this product is always available I can always come back to it later once I've tried to figure it out on my own and I've failed.” And they're going to go and they're going to start trying to figure out on their own and then they're going to forget about it. So having those fixed dates gives that deadline. It encourages them to make that decision consciously and it really gets them off of the fence. It's not about pressuring people to make a decision, because there's a big misconception that having deadlines is unethical and it's really not. The whole concept behind a deadline is that the pain of making a change is pretty painful. Spending money hurts.

So does committing to making whatever change it is that you're committing to making when you buy the product that you're selling. So, if you were a nutritionist selling a program on how to quit sugar, it's not just the pain of handing over their money, it's also the pain of breaking that sugar habit. And until the pain of not moving, of not taking action is more than the pain of taking action people generally will put off taking action. And that's why we add a deadline to really up the pain of not taking action, to put it frankly, we're upping the pain of not taking action so that people can't just keep going with the status quo and so that they have to make a conscious decision, “Do I want to buy or do I not want to buy?” That's the gist of how deadlines work. It's not about pressuring people to buy. It's about encouraging them to make a conscious decision.

So where I see a lot of people going wrong is they want to skip this live launch. They want to just go straight to evergreen. They want to put their product up on their website, never do a webinar because webinars are fricking scary. They never want to do a challenge because what if nobody signs up and nobody interacts and what if it's a lot of work? And they want to go straight to just evergreen, straight to having their product available on their website all of the time. So here is a little truth bomb I'm going to drop on you. If it's not selling in your live launch, it definitely won't sell on evergreen. When you are live launching, you get the opportunity to answer questions and address objections in that real time scenario. So, for example, if it's on a webinar and somebody asks you a question about your product, you can answer it straight away.

Whereas if it's available on your website, they might not go to the effort of filling out the customer support form or emailing you to ask the question. They just won't buy. It also adds that deadline and if there's no deadline that's going to reduce the number of people who are buying as well. So there are a bunch of benefits to selling it in a live launch first. That's not to say evergreen doesn't have its place. Absolutely, it does. And it can be a great model for your business, but I would always recommend live launching the first few times.

 

5 reasons why I recommend a live launch

 

Validation

Firstly, it's a great way to validate your product idea. You can find out whether people would pay money for it without actually having created the product yet.

Allows space to pivot

Secondly, it's really good for you to be able to pivot as needed. So if nobody's buying in your live launch, you know straight away, “Okay, let me go back and tweak the messaging.” Whereas if nobody's buying on evergreen, it takes a lot longer to figure out that the funnel isn't working and then to go back and tweak everything and redo all of the things that are supporting that evergreen funnel takes a lot of work.

 

Live feedback

The next reason is that it gives you live audience feedback. So you can have that two-way conversation with those people who are showing up live rather than just relying on the faceless numbers of people who are coming to your website and looking at the product to give you their feedback, which they probably won't.

 

Get better numbers

Number four is getting the numbers. It's a lot easier to get a lot of people through a one-off live launch than it is to consistently try and get people through an evergreen funnel.

 

Address objections

And the last one, I briefly touched on this one before, is it allows you to address objections and questions as they come up, as they arise while people are going through that buying process. Because the first time or the first few times that you're launching a product, you're never going to be able to predict all of the objections that could come up, all of the hesitations that people might have about buying your product. So being there live with them gives you that chance to see what's coming up so that in the future you can tailor your copy, you can tailor your messaging, your content to address these objections before they come up.

So there you have it, a couple of reasons why you can't afford to skip the live launch. I know it's scary. I know live launching is scary, and believe me, I also wanted to evergreen all my products before I live launched them and I actually did with one and it didn't work out well so let that be a lesson from my mistakes.

 

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