A few weeks ago, my team and I wrapped up our first “official” membership launch.
Bringing in just under half a million in total annual sales in just 8 days and – let me tell you – we learned a LOT.
In this blog, I’m going to break down 7 wins AND lessons from this launch…
What worked, what didn’t, and what are we definitely going to do differently next time.
Hey Posse, what’s up? It’s Alex.
And I’m excited to be giving you this quick behind-the-scenes review of our recent launch for SPARK…
A membership for copywriters looking to grow their confidence, grow their client list, and grow their business to hit their income goals.
In total, this launch generated about $472,000 in sales for the year, when you combine launch week revenue and future payments…
Making it one of our most successful launches to date…
And, let me say again… we learned a LOT.
We made a lot of game-time decisions…
We tried things we’d never done before…
From new pre-launch content to segmentation strategies to live launch week bonuses and more…
And today I’m giving you a little peek at some of our biggest wins and lessons.
Inside REIGN – my marketing mastermind for entrepreneurs and freelancers, I do DEEP DIVE reviews of every single launch I run here at the Posse…
Where I break down every single aspect of the launch, including metrics, marketing angles, email strategies and more…
And my Reignmakers LOVVVVEEE it.
So I hope you enjoy this mini-launch review as much as they do!
If you want more tutorials like this, comment below and let me know!
And while you’re down there, go ahead and join my newsletter to be first to know when the next blog goes up.
Alright, now we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s dive right in…
Lesson #1: Urgency Works
A trend we’ve noticed with ALL of our launches over the years is that we always, always, always get the majority of our sales on the very last day…
Typically, it looks a little like this…
Where we have a decent number of sales on the first day – when all the eager beavers buy…
Then we’d have a pretty consistent middle of the launch that slowly escalates…
Followed by a huge spike in sales on the last couple days.
In fact, almost all of our launches have followed this pattern…
And the reason for this is obvious: people buy on the last day because it’s THE LAST DAY.
Urgency creates action.
With this launch, we did something different and created urgency at the BEGINNING of the launch too.
So we decided to offer a fast-action bonus for the first 48 hours (aka scarcity!).
And hey what do you know, it worked GREAT.
We actually got the most sales on that first day.
So we succeeded at reversing when the majority of people purchased.
But once the fast-action bonus expired, we had a major dip in sales mid-cart.
Then on the 29th, I went LIVE and you can see sales spiked back up on that day…
Followed by an even higher spike right before doors closed on the 2nd, but not as high as the first 2 days.
So while the fast-action bonus worked…
We still experienced a dip in sales – which was not ideal.
So something we’ll experiment with next time is adding a bonus MID-CART to give people another reason to buy sooner.
Alright, on to lesson #2…
Lesson #2: Stay Agile
Now this is something we have always done…
But it’s bears repeating again.
During our promotions, we monitor the feedback we receive—from Facebook groups, comments, DMs, replies to our emails…
Then we adjust our messaging based on that feedback.
This is something I can’t recommend enough.
OF COURSE, it feels nice to have all your sales emails written out ahead of time…
And yes it does add a little bit of stress and pressure to be updating and changing emails right before they get sent out…
But agile copywriting it’s the best way to make sure your emails are hitting the mark.
Because the thing is – no matter how much research you do before you launch…
No matter how well you THINK you’re addressing everything…
You can never fully predict how your audience will react to your offer.
Or what objections they will have.
By keeping a pulse on what people are saying, you can address these concerns, objections, and questions directly in your emails IN REAL TIME.
Because if one person is wondering…
You can be sure that more people are wondering the same thing.
We pivoted our messaging twice during this launch…
And BOTH days we did this, we had a small increase in sales.
So don’t be afraid to change up messaging mid-launch to stay agile.
Alright, next lesson…
Lesson #3: Build A Launch List
Okay, so something we did for this launch that we’ve never done before was build a dedicated “launch list” specifically for this offer.
Right before this launch, we had migrated email platforms – from MailChimp to ConvertKit (and that’s a topic for a whole other day).
So even though it would have been nice to NOT be planning a launch during an email migration, we were able to do some pretty in-depth segmentation in ConvertKit which was cool.
During our pre-launch, we created a sub-list of leads who showed interest in our Spark-related content…
Those who downloaded our free guide on 101 ways to find clients, took our fun Client Attraction quiz or signed up for our $10K Action Plan masterclass for freelance copywriters.
Then when it came time for promotion, we promoted heavily ONLY to the leads on that launch list…
And we left the rest of our list alone.
Don’t get me wrong – we didn’t neglect the rest of our list.
We still sent them regular content emails…
But we suppressed them from our launch emails (maybe because they were business owners, not copywriters, or they simply didn’t resonate with the Spark content).
This was a game-changer for us.
For a couple of reasons…
Even though the list was only 11,000 people, it pulled in more revenue than many of our other launches where we emailed the entire list…
Our value per lead was over $40 because the offer was TARGETED.
As a result, our open rates and CTRs were higher, we were able to maintain high deliverability…
AND avoid a lot of unsubscribes.
Win win win!!
Another thing we did to avoid unsubscribes was add a link at the bottom of all our launch emails to allow people to “pause” promotional emails…
“If you no longer want to hear about the SPARK membership, just click here to stop receiving these emails. Don’t worry, you’ll keep getting our other emails with marketing and copywriting tips.”
Because even though we spent months building a launch list – not every single person who landed on that list was interested in this specific offer…
So by adding this small “Pause” option at the bottom of each email, we were able to save a lot of unsubscribes.
To give some context…
With the SPARK promotion, we only had 2.34% unsubscribes from our list.
Compared to another promotion we ran last year to a similar audience where we DIDN’T have a launch list and we DIDN’T offer a pause… and we had a crazy high unsubscribe rate.
Oops.
So the lesson here is actually a 2-in-1:
- Build a launch list
- And give an option to “pause” promo emails.
If you’re wondering – “Okay, but how do I create a launch list with pre-launch content?!”
Well, that’s going to have to be a whole separate topic.
So if that’s something you’d be interested in learning, comment below and let me know and I can create something for you guys.
Alright, now the next lesson we learned…
Lesson #4: Increase Customer Value
This is another thing we haven’t been great at doing consistently…
Which is so silly because it’s SUCH low-hanging fruit and is so simple to do with most checkout tools or software.
What is an Order Bump?
An order bump is a small offer you include on the checkout page. It allows people to check a box to “add” something to their order.
You just add a little blurb about another offer you have—something low-ticket that complements the thing being purchased…
The goal is to make it an easy decision with minimal copy.
So you can see here – on the SPARK checkout page, we added this little blurb here for our Look Legit Website Toolkit.
So that’s an order bump…
But we ALSO had an upsell offer.
What is an upsell offer?
An upsell is an offer that pops up AFTER the checkout page (aka after the order is placed).
I find the best way to do this is to add right on to the thank you and confirmation page…
After a short thank you line…
We go right into promoting the upsell – which in this case is our email marketing program: Own The Inbox.
This offer is higher priced than the order bump but it’s still complimentary to the offer.
It is such a no-brainer way to bring in a little extra revenue.
These offers already exist.
All we had to do was slightly tweak the messaging to make sure the order bump and upsell made sense and flowed with the SPARK offer.
And we had 64 people take advantage of either the order bump or upsell or BOTH.
Which added almost $7,000 to our bottom line.
Maybe not a massive number in the grand scheme of things – but it makes a difference!
Alright, now on to lesson 5…
Lesson #5: Resend to Unopens
This is another new thing we tried with this launch…
And another thing that was made possible after we migrated to Convertkit!
All we did here was RESEND the same email to the people who never opened the original one.
Now there is a caveat with this one…
Don’t go out there and start resending every single email to every single person who doesn’t open it.
That would be super annoying to your audience and it’s a sure way to get a new unsubscribe.
Or worse – get flagged by Google as spam.
You want to be very selective with what emails you’re resending and to who.
We chose just a couple of emails that were top performers for us…
And resent them only to people on our list who were HOT LEADS.
Meaning these people had been opening and engaging with our previous promotion emails…
But for some reason they missed these emails – they never opened them.
And because these leads are hot and we know they’re at least somewhat interested… it’s worth the time and effort to try again.
We only resent two emails…
This “only hours left” email had two segments.
NONE of these people opened the initial email…
But these re-sends are getting 20-30% open rates and the clicks are pretty decent too.
We also religiously split-test subject lines during this launch and if you want another blog on this (along with the results, let me know in the comment below!)
Alright, now on to lesson #6 and playing off what we just talked about…
Lesson #6: Give Hot Leads EXTRA Love
Okay, so this plays into a lot of things that we’ve been talking about…
Segmenting our audience played a HUGE role in this launch.
And it’s why I believe we saw such great results.
So as our promotion was running, we started creating a new audience segment called Spark Interest – this is where we put all our hot leads.
Like I said before, your hot leads are the people who are opening your emails, clicking links, and engaging with the content.
These are people who are clearly interested.
But for some reason or another, they aren’t buying.
So you want to give them a little extra TLC to see if you can move them over the threshold.
But we didn’t JUST re-send a couple of emails to them…
We went even further…
And hosted two LIVE events towards the end of the promotion window – just for them.
I went live once to give a sneak peek of the SPARK membership…
And then I went live again 24 hours before doors closed to do an “Ask Alex Anything” session…
These live sessions were ONLY promoted to our Spark Interest List.
And as a result, these emails had very good engagement:
- 48-58% open rates…
- 10% click-through rate…
Which is really great.
We split-tested that top email and we had a clear winner with the first subject line.
All this extra love paid off because we ended up getting 16 sales, 6 upsells, and making almost $20,000 in revenue from this segment after these events.
Just by giving this small group a little extra attention.
Alright, now on the last one…
Lesson #7: Non-Buyers Survey
For all the hot leads we had on our Spark Interest Segment who did NOT end up converting…
We decided to send them a non-buyers survey.
Again – this was the first time we’ve implemented this into a launch.
We asked them 2 simple questions…
First we asked them what best describes them so we could get a feel for WHO they are and what they want.
Then we asked them why they didn’t buy – aside from the financial investment.
We got almost 400 responses from this survey!
Which is awesome because it allowed us to learn more about those 400 people.
So that we can SEGMENT them better next time.
I wonder how many times I’ve said “segment” in this blog? LOL – that’s obviously the lesson that keeps on giving.
Another thing we did with this non-buyer survey was to offer a downsell to anyone who didn’t buy because they were “not ready yet” – in other words, they still needed to learn foundational copywriting skills.
So, we offered them our 8-week copywriting course instead!
Now technically this was NOT a downsell, because it was actually the same cost.
But we did still bring in a few sales with this approach.
Now if the downsell had been a REAL downsell… you know – priced lower than the original offer, then I’m sure this would have converted even better.
So next time around, we’ll plan further ahead and be more strategic and targeted with this process.
And that’s that.
As you saw, we tried a lot and we learned a lot with this launch and I hope you learned something from watching this blog too.
Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel as well for more REAL-TIME marketing insights like this.
Until next time, I’m Alex. Ciao for now.
