The big mistakes that cost you sales in your second launch (and beyond!)

Have you launched any of your offers before? Especially if they're a course, program or membership? If so, there are a few mistakes that you can avoid along the way if you want to maximise sales in the future. In today's episode, I'm sharing 5 mistakes that *will* cost you sales in a launch.

– Why making mistakes is part of the process and how you can use these to change how you approach launching in the future.
– The importance of reviewing your launch and making changes for the next one.
– Why ditching the whole launch and starting again from scratch is not just unhelpful, but unnecessary too.
– How growing your audience with the right people between launches will help you to prepare for the next one.

 

The big mistakes that you are making in your second launch and beyond.

 

I'm a big fan of launching your offers over and over and over again, especially if they are courses, programs, memberships. I believe that if you are only launching them once, if you're only doing that one launch and then putting them on your website for people to buy at any given time, I believe that that is leaving a lot of potential sales on the table.

 

What is a live launch?

Now, to recap a little bit about launches, I've talked about them a lot over the last few weeks, but if you haven't been here for those episodes, a live launch, isn't this big hype building campaign where you tell your audience that something brand new is coming and you tease the offer and you try to get them excited about it.
And then you do this countdown where you're say, doors open in five days, doors open in four days. That to me is not what I consider a live launch. A live launch is simply a limited time marketing and sales campaign. It's a limited-time push where you're sharing free content that is designed to grow your audience with the right people for that offer.
You're nurturing them across the magician's gap. So you're giving them the things that they need to decide whether it's the right fit for them. And then you're addressing any hesitations that they have about whether your offer is going to be right for them or not. And lastly, you give them a deadline for them to decide by.
And that deadline doesn't necessarily have to be doors are closed and you can never sign up again, or you can't sign up until the next time I launch. The deadline can be that a bonus you have added is removed. A limited time bonus expires. That can be enough of a deadline, especially if you have a program or a course or a membership that you want to be always open, but you still want to be able to use live launching as a sales process for this.

The great news with live launching is that you can repeat it over and over and over again really easily. You can do it a couple of times a year like I do with Launch Magic, for example, where I launch it twice a year and I teach it live or teach the Q and A's twice a year. I run it for 12 weeks live twice a year.
Or you can launch it multiple times until that sales process is dialed in, it's converting really well, and then you can turn it into an evergreen funnel, an automated funnel, whatever you want to call it, an automated sales process where the deadline is actually based on when they entered the funnel, it's not a deadline that is the same for everybody.
And this is a lot more complicated to set up. That's why I always recommend live launching a few times first, because once it's set up, you don't want to have to go back and tweak all of the things and redo it.

If you have launched any of your offers, especially if this is a course, a program or a membership, then in this post you're going to learn some of the big mistakes to avoid if you want to maximize sales in the future.

And if you have made some of these mistakes before, I want you to know that I have made most of these mistakes myself. You can't go back and change what you've done in the past, but you can use it as a lesson to improve your launches in the future. And. I really would encourage you to give it another go.
Even if your first launch didn't go well, give it another try knowing what you know now and see what happens differently.

 

Mistake #1. Moving straight on from your last launch without looking back and reviewing it in full.

Even the most successful launches have some parts that maybe could be improved. Some parts that maybe weren't as successful as they could have been. But if we're only looking at the bottom line, if we're only looking at the total number of sales or the number of buyers, then we miss out on a lot of value that's in the details. For example, How well did our launch lead magnet grow our email list and how well did it nurture them through the magician's gap to the point where they were ready to buy when we opened doors?
How well did our pre webinar emails work for getting the people who had registered to show up live? How well did the live webinar convert? Which cart open emails worked well? Which ones didn't? Which objections or hesitations could we have maybe addressed better? All of these things can point us in the direction of improving our launch next time.
And this is why I'm a big fan of creating a launch review spreadsheet. And that just means that we can look at each part of the launch in detail, rather than just looking at, Oh, five people bought the launch must've been a failure. I also recommend sending out a non-biased survey. This will help you to identify what parts of the magician's gap were maybe not bridged effectively and what questions or hesitations or objections we didn't address. Or we didn't answer completely. If you have a team, it could be worth running a launch review meeting with your team. If it's just you set yourself a little launch review meeting. And in its simplest form, this meeting is just what worked, what didn't work. What am I going to change next time? That's really what the simplest form of it is.
And you can go a little bit more into detail if you want to, but even just asking yourself those three questions is going to set you up for a much better launch next time.

 

Mistake #2. Repeating your last launch without making any changes.

Even if your launch was super successful at each step, every single launch that you run of the same offer is a great opportunity to test and try out new things.
Maybe you can try a different launch lead magnet and see how that grows your list better than the last one or if it doesn't. Uh, you could change up your free content, see if you can bridge the magician's gap a little bit more effectively. Maybe you could try a new webinar topic, see if that Get more signups or more conversions.
Maybe you could try different pre webinar emails, or you could change the timing of them and see if that affects how many people show up live. You could tweak the sales page. You could add or remove or change some of your cart open emails. And if you pay attention to what your non buyers said when you surveyed them, then you can make some changes to your messaging and your content and your copy based on that.
And you might be able to convert some of those people the next time you launch. But the key to all of this is tracking everything, all of your numbers so that you can compare between the different launches and you can see whether the things that you tested were effective.

 

Mistake #3. Changing absolutely everything from your last launch.

While we want to change and test a couple of things, we don't want to change everything because if we change everything, then we can't actually find out what's driving the improvements. It's also a lot of extra work. And most of the time you don't need to completely reinvent the wheel every time that you launch.
Even if your first launch was an absolute flop, come back to that launch review spreadsheet and ask yourself what parts of this did work because maybe the lead magnet signups were the right people. And if it was, you don't need to go and redo that. Maybe your pre-webinar emails meant that a lot of people showed up live and they were great.
Keep those then for next time. You don't really want to create all of this extra work for yourself if you don't need to. And like I said, if you're changing everything at once, it's really hard then to know which of the variables that you are testing moved the needle. If you drastically change your sales page and your sales pitch from your webinar and your conversions increase, How are you going to know which one had the impact, which one made the difference?
So your goal here is to find the balance between changing everything and just changing a couple of things between launches.

 

Mistake #4. Not growing your audience between launches.

This mistake is super common and it leads to what I call the second launch slump, where your first launch was really successful. It converted people who've been following you and been in your audience for so long that they were so ready to buy from you because they knew you, they liked you, they trust you. But now everyone in your audience who was ready to buy has bought from you. ─ And if you don't grow your audience in between those launches, then you don't have anybody new to nurture and sell to.
So you do need to get in front of some new people and grow your audience with these people. And this is where it can be really important to have a compelling launch lead magnet that attracts the right people and get in front of The right people for this offer, not just getting in front of as many people as possible, not just talking about it on social media and hoping that people find it, but actively, proactively getting in front of the right people, identifying who the right people are for this offer, where they are, how you can get in front of them and what lead magnet to get in front of them to grow your email list with those people.

 

Mistake #5. Assuming that the new people in your audience are as warm as those who bought from you the first time around.

The people who bought from you the first time you launched your offer, they've probably been in your audience a while. Like I said, they knew you, they liked you, they trusted you.
They had probably been consuming your free content for a very long time. And they were ready to buy as a result of that. Someone who is just joining your audience now, they might need a little bit more nurturing to get them to the point where they are ready to buy from you, ─ right? Because they haven't been on your email list for months and months and months.
For example, with Launch Magic, on average, somebody has been on my email list for 183 days before they sign up. Now, part of this might be because I only run it twice a year. So if they miss the first launch in March, then they have to wait until July, August to sign up. If they miss August and they have to wait until the next one in March.
So that does add a bit of a lead time onto how long they hang around before they buy. But on average, somebody has still been in my audience for 183 days. That is six months of getting my emails, listening to my podcast episodes, maybe consuming my social media content. Six months of being in that content before they buy from me.
So when somebody is just coming into your audience, what do they need from you? And you can speed this up a bit. If your content is strategic, if you are intentionally bridging the magician's gap, which is the gap between where they are now and where they need to be, to be ready to buy. So asking yourself, what do they need to know to be ready to buy this particular offer and sharing strategic content around that?

So there you have it five mistakes that I see very very very frequently with people who have launched something once before, twice before, five times before and It's causing them to miss out on potential sales each time that they launch.

Pin this?