There is more to launching a product or program to your community simply than sending out an email and hoping people will buy! It’s about creating a whole product/program launch system so that you can get maximum sales for your brand-new offering. Every business owner is excited to launch a new product or program and dreams of seeing “sold out” on their website.
But very often they don’t have a launch strategy in place, and so miss many of those vital pre-launch steps that would result in those “sold out” sales.
Before I figured out the very specific system needed for a successful launch campaign, I too experienced those “launch flops”:
- Spending months putting a program together and not having a single sale when it launched!
- Tried again a few months later with a new program, and had two sales!
- Then, finally, creating a program launch system that created “sold out” signs going up on my website!
With the technology that’s available to business owners, and the world-wide reach of the Internet, you’d think it would be easy to create a product or program, launch it, and make sales! Not so. It’s all down to your program launch system, and taking very specific, step-by-step actions to ensure you have all the steps covered.
Here are my top five steps to ensure a successful product launch:
Step 1: Give yourself enough time to plan and implement your launch. So often business owners don’t allow enough time to put in place all the key steps needed to ensure a successful launch campaign. There are so many moving pieces in a launch cycle that if at any point in the process a step gets missed, it could spell disaster for your launch and means it might not to be as successful as you hoped it would be.
Step 2: Set realistic sales goals. For this you need to understand the metrics of your business. If your goal is to have 100 members in your new membership program, but your list size won’t support that goal, then you’re going to end up being very disappointed. In my experience, business owners set unrealistic expectations of what they want simply because they don’t understand their business. So take a look at your business, and determine what realistic goals are for your product/program sales.
Step 3: Set up the necessary back-office systems. This means having your Infusionsoft or 1ShoppingCart account properly set up to handle the automated sales and delivery process. If you don’t understand how this technology works, and you don’t have someone on your team who can do this for you, then taking orders is going to become an issue for you at launch time.
Step 4: Determine which promotional strategies you’re going to use. This ties into Step 1 above as there are many different promotional strategies you could implement, with some taking more time than others. For example, will you be hosting a preview call? A series of preview calls? A video series? Will you be bringing on board affiliates and joint venture partners? Knowing at the outset which promotional strategies to use will determine the timeline for your launch campaign.
Step 5: Decide on your launch window. After launching your product, how long will you make it available for? When will you close the cart? What will you do during this timeframe to encourage more sales? All of these are key factors that you have to build in to your launch campaign at the outset. And, depending on what you decide to do, you’ll need to allow the time and resources to implement these.
As you can see, there are LOTS of things you need to take into account. And this is why it’s so important that you create a system for your product launch campaign, so that enough time is allowed and important steps don’t get missed.
Once your launch is over, if you planned it all out from the beginning and created a system for it, you should be congratulating yourself on reaching your sales goals. And next time, guess what … you have the system in place. You simply rinse and repeat for future launch campaigns.
