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A Launch Recap for my August 2021 Launch of Club Content Batching!
The first time I ever launched a digital product, I was overwhelmed. I attempted to create a huge launch, I had unrealistic goals, and then, because I had unrealistic goals, I believed it to be a failed launch for a long time.
Launches can be scary and overwhelming, but they don’t have to be. Now that I’ve gone through quite a few launches, I’ve found a system that works for me. In fact, I’ve used that system 3 times to launch Club Content Batching, and each time my revenue increased, and so did the number of students that joined!
With my latest launch, I decided it was time to start experimenting with that system, so that I could bring it to you and tell you what works best and what doesn’t.
And today, I’m sharing what went well, what didn’t, what I learned, and what I’ll do differently next time I launch Club Content Batching. You’re listening to episode 074 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host – Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Take the first lesson in Club Content Batching – for free!
- Learn more about my Year of Content Prompts
- Check out Club Content Batching for Yourself
- This week’s action step: Launches are needlessly scary, and I want to take the fear and the unknown out of them for you. I want to know – what’s your most burning launch question? Email me, dm me, whatever – but send it my way!
- This week’s book recommendation: Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.
Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.
The first time I ever launched a digital product, I was overwhelmed. I attempted to create a huge launch. I had unrealistic goals. And then because I had unrealistic goals, I believe Citi have failed launch for a really long time. Launches can be scary and overwhelming. They don’t have to be. Now that I’ve gone through quite a few launches myself, I found a system that works.
In fact, I’ve used the system three times to launch club content batching, each time my revenue increased. And so did the number of students that joined with my latest launch. I decided it was time to start experimenting with that system so that I could bring it to you and tell you what works best and what doesn’t.
And today I’m sharing what went well, what, didn’t, what I learned and what I’ll do differently. Next time I launched club continent, batching. You’re listening to episode 74 of the champions of a podcast. And I’m your host, Amanda Ward. Let’s dive in.
How do I run a successful business for my home? How can I possibly wear all of the hats? Am I the only one that struggles with staying organized? What am I supposed to do about work-life balance? How can I create a solid schedule and routine? How do I. And the biggest question of all, how do I manage it all?
And can I really create a business that I love without being chained to my laptop? Welcome to the chasing simple podcast where hard conversations and actionable education meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield time management coach, online educator and crazy cat mama. My mission is to help overwhelmed business owners get more done in less time so that they have more time and energy for what matters most, if you feel overwhelmed or occasionally lost in the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.
I want you to know that you aren’t. Those things you’re feeling you aren’t the first or the last to feel that way, the hard things you’re going through, someone else has already been there to each week offering you transparent conversations, actionable steps in a judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whenever your drink of choice is, and meet me here each week for love. Practical tips and advice on simple buying your beers. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together.
Hey friend, sorry to interrupt. You’re listening, but I’ve got something really exciting to tell you. And I know that you’re going to want to hear about this. So I’ve done something a little crazy and I’ve opened up the first lesson inside of club content, matching to the. For free. That’s right. You can get a look inside of a club content matching membership hub, and take the very first lesson inside completely.
All you have to do is head over to Amanda warfield.com port slash basics, to get your log in details. The first lesson covers the basic premises of content marketing that I want all of my students to know before they begin bashing. You’ll reframe how you think about content marketing. You’ll learn exactly how long you should be spending on creating content and you’ll uncover the two most important things that all of your content needs in order to grow your business.
So, if you’ve been curious about what the inside of club content batching looks like, and you want to take that first lesson all about the basic premises of content marketing, be sure to head on over to Amanda warfield.com forward slash basics to get inside completely free today. Again, that’s the main warfield.com.
Ford’s less basics. Now let’s head on back to Europe. First, let’s start by talking about my intentions for this launch. So if you listen to the intro, you heard me say that I’ve now launched called content patching three times with improved success each time. And I found a system that I think really, really works.
I know it works for me. Hm. I wanted to tweak things because the only way to truly learn if your system works is to tweak it and experiment with it and see if you can find ways to improve and see if maybe the things that work make it worse. So that was my intention. That was my goal with this launch.
Obviously I wanted to fill seats inside of club content matching too. Right. My goal for that was to get 24 new members, but my big intention for this launch was. I wanted to find out what changes I can make to improve the system, or if I make changes, how do they detract? What does that look like? And maybe what do I need to do moving forward?
So how this launch different from past launches and maybe in the future, I’ll do a full launch recap. Okay. My launch system and the way that I’ve done it successfully, if that’s something you’re interested in, be sure to send me a DM, send me an email, something, let me know if that’s something you want to hear about, but how this one differed.
So first things, first Legion, you’ve got to have a lead gen piece for what ever launch you’re going to have in the past. My bake lead gen piece has been my wait list. Doors have been opened and closed because I was teaching it live and I was doing live rounds and things like that. And so that was a big, big part of it.
Waitlist. If you get on the wait list, you get a discount. And then that really helped with a lot of sales on day one of every launch. So I didn’t have a wait list this time. Cause doors are always open for cloak on that patching at this point. So this time I was going to do a challenge note that was going to do I’ll get to that in a second.
But my plan was to do this big five day challenge. I had a challenge that I already had graded about helping. Come up with content ideas. And so I was going to take that what I already had and make it bigger and better in this new, really huge interactive thing. I’ve also done a webinar every single time, and that webinar has been improved each time, but it’s been basically the same webinar every single time.
So those are typically my Legion pieces. Scarcity is also a big part of a launch in the past. My scarcity has been price increases. Doors closing and disappearing bonuses. I’ve had a lot of scarcity built in this time. The only scarcity I had was one single bonus that was going to disappear at the end of the launch period.
Something else that differed was I did less of an Instagram push and less showing up that actually wasn’t intentional. And I’ll get to that again in a minute, but that was something that differed and I also added in one extra email. I pretty much use the exact same emails with small tweaks. To different things, but pretty much the exact same meals that I’ve been using for launch after launch, after launch.
But I did add in one extra email for that launch sequence. Now, what did not go well, first the challenge, the challenge, I don’t want to say it was a failure or a disaster, but it did not go well. And a lot of this comes down to poor planning on my part truly. So. First my plan was to have this challenge again about content.
Yes, it is meant to be a way to generate content ideas. And there are couple things that I did not so well with this challenge. So first I have a product called a year of content prompts. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. If you’ve listened to the podcast and it is literally a year of content prompts over my birthday week, I ran a flash sale.
That’s centered around those content prompts, that year of content prompts. And then just like two weeks later, I announced this challenge and in hindsight, That was a terrible plan because the people who wanted the content prompts, they had already bought the year of content prompts. And the reason that ended up being such a close two week gap was that I honestly had something different planned originally for my birthday sale.
And the last second changed it to. The year of content Brahms. And that was just a problem. It was too much too soon. And I wasn’t looking at the big picture when I made that decision. So, so then when I first launched it, the first week of announcing the challenge, no one signed up. And at first I was like, you know what?
I’m just going to keep going. It’s totally fine. I’m going to keep pushing. It will get more sign-ups after a few days of no signup. It got to the point where I honestly was feeling a lot of impostor syndrome insecurity doubt. And eventually I ultimately did swing around to that, that place of, okay, well, if no one signs up, it’s not the end of the world, I’ll still attempt a club content batching launch.
This isn’t going to ruin my launch. And I also, we ended up going to Washington to visit friends in the week between announcing. The challenge and the challenge actually happening. And so I wasn’t as present on social media, I wasn’t pushing the challenge as much, and that definitely was a detriment to the challenge.
So we get back from Washington. I decided, you know what, I’m just going to put up a waitlist for the challenge. I’m not going to do it right now, maybe next launch. And I ended up having quite a few people sign up for the waitlist when I sent out some final announcement emails, but ultimately ended up not doing the challenge.
It just, it made more sense to just go ahead and scrap it, but. That was my big lead gen piece that was supposed to be my big lead gen piece. So I knew right then that my lunch was not going to go as well as I had hoped. The other thing that did not go well is that I planned the launch during batch week.
Again, this was really poor planning on my part. I really don’t know how I ended up managing to do this like that. I don’t know. I don’t know. It didn’t go up. That was a bad move. Having a lot. Is exhausting and doing it during batch week, it just made it so that I wasn’t able to show up. And so this is where that, that less of the Instagram push and the less of the showing up came in was because I planted during launch week.
And I think maybe in my mind I was thinking, well, I don’t typically do anything during launch week. I typically block out that whole week and I don’t play in any business stuff. And so I guess I was thinking, well, I don’t normally do anything so I could probably fit this in and it would keep me busy, et cetera.
The problem was, is I was so busy that I didn’t have time to truly promote the launch. And that was just something that I will not do again, from what I can tell, it seems like most people click through the emails to buy, but they typically buy based on what I’m doing on Instagram. It seems to be a correlation because the emails in the past have always had great click through rates, great goal rates, all that stuff.
But this time, those same emails did not convert well. And my apotheosis is that that’s because I wasn’t showing them Instagram as well. And so people weren’t getting that engagement through Instagram and then also seeing the email in their inbox, they would just see in the emails. And so I think the two really work together well, not so well separately, but what went well, let’s talk about that.
Let’s turn this into a positive first. I welcomed in a student, one student. Was that very far from Michael? Yes, absolutely. A key part of running a business for me is remembering that every single sale is a person behind that sale. It is a person who, who is invested in me. Who’s trusted me with their content marketing.
And that is something that I treasure. So even though it was quote unquote only one student, I am so excited about the student. I’m so honored that they’ve invested in me and that they’ve trusted me with this. And I’m so glad to have them in. So that’s something that will really. Even though it wasn’t anywhere near the goal I had set.
I’m still so, so excited about that couple of other things that went well, first my mindset, typically in past launches, my mindset has been the hardest thing to overcome. If you’ve never had any kind of launch in the past, it is. Mentally exhausting and emotionally exhausting because you go through these really high highs, really low lows, really high it’s really low lows, someone buys, and you’re so excited.
And then you don’t hear anything for hours and hours and hours and maybe days. And you’re thinking, oh, this launch is a failure. I’m not going to get any more sales and then someone else buys. And it just it’s an up and down, up and down thing. If you had told me that this would be the outcome of this launch, I would have thought that my mindset would have been.
Heritable this go round, but it actually wasn’t at all. I was able to really quickly recover from those low lows and say, you know what? This is just one launch in my business. And I don’t really know what contributed to that. If I’m being totally honest, I hope that I can continue to keep that mindset up in the future when launches are up and down and up and down.
But it was really nice to have more of a steady mindset throughout and be able to quickly turn around those consensus of, oh my gosh, this is such a thing. And then the third thing that we’re really well. I said I had a lot of lessons learned. There are a lot of things that I’m taking away from this launch, even though it didn’t go the way I necessarily wanted it to.
I learned so much about my launch process through all of the quote unquote failures. So what I’ll do differently next time first, there are two emails that I want to flip in the sequence. I mentioned earlier that I added in an extra email and I think it would fit better. In a different part of the sequence.
So I’m going to try switching those around. I’m not sure if that’ll really make a big difference, but it is something that I want to try. I also want to do a better job of hyping up of what’s to come because in the past I’ve always had a waitlist. I’ve done a really good job of saying, Hey, doors are opening on this date and leading up to the launch, talking about the launch happening.
I did not do that well this time. Mostly because I didn’t have that doors open doors close. This is the first time I’ve done a launch of club content, batching where doors weren’t opening and closing. And so I didn’t talk about the launch because I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. In a way where it wasn’t like, Hey, doors are open right now, but also there’s going to be this big deal later.
I didn’t quite figure that out. That’s something that I definitely will need to figure out and I need to do a better job of hyping up what’s to come. I also want to make sure that I have a better lead gen piece. Promo of that lead gen piece, whether that means I try this challenge again in the future, or I decided to scrap it, do something different, either way, it’s got to have a better promo and a better lead up.
And I need to follow my own plans in leading up to those things and not add in extra promos and things like that that might kind of overlap with what I’m moving into. So that’s, those are the things I want to do a different couple of emails. I want to switch really small. But the two big things are better Legion piece and promo that Legion piece, and then better just hyping up of what’s to come and letting everyone know, Hey, this launch is happening.
Something. I think that I will keep the same. And this might be a surprise to you is less of an Instagram push. Even though I do think the Instagram push and the email sequence are correlated heavily with each other. I also want to play around with that a little bit more. I’m not fully convinced on that and I want to see if I can make it so that the emails can stand on their own.
So I think that’s something that for now I will keep the same and eventually move back into more of a, a huge launch piece on Instagram, because I think it’s fun and I love interacting with everyone. And I do love putting the post-it notes with everyone’s names and it’s just really exciting. So at some point I will go back to that because I do think that it definitely helps with the marketing, but.
I also want to play around with that a little bit more. So I’m going to keep that at the same for now. And then a couple of things that I still need to think on. So, like I said earlier, I always do a webinar and every single time it’s hit or miss, because frankly, I just don’t have a huge audience and you don’t need a huge audience to have a successful launch, but I am at the point where I think that you probably do need a huge audience to have a successful webinar because.
A small percentage of the people in your audience are going to sign up for the webinar. And then an even smaller percentage is actually going to show up, live for the webinar. And then an even smaller percentage is actually going to buy from the webinar. And so. The math just doesn’t really make sense.
Every single time. I have a handful of people that actually show up live and I’ve had some where, and again, I always use the same webinar. I’ve had some where I’ve had two or three sales during the webinar, and then I’ve had a lot where there’s no sales during the webinar. And frankly, that’s just how the math works out.
When you’re talking about launching launch goals, launch math as a whole thing that I could also do an episode on, but. That’s just kind of the way the cookie crumbles. And so I’m starting to think that maybe the webinar won’t be something that I will continue to do. Maybe I’ll have an on demand webinar.
I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet. That’s something that I still have to think on. And then the other thing I still need to think on is scarcity. So, like I said before, and my past launches, I’ve had a lot of scarcity built in price increases, doors, closing, disappearing bonuses. As in like three, four bonuses.
I’ve had a lot of scarcity built in by this time. I only had one single bonus that was disappearing and it’s a bonus that my students love. And so I really thought that it would be able to stay on it. But it did not, is not seem to really convert me one. So I’ve got to figure out how I can truly create scarcity because of what I’m not going to do is have false scarcity.
I refuse to do that. So I’ve got to think on how can I create scarcity around the launch in a way that will convert. And I’m just not sure, because I don’t want to have doors opening and doors closing. Maybe at some point I’ll move into that. But frankly, I want people to be able to get the help they need when they need it.
So I haven’t quite figured out the scarcity aspect and that’s something I’m still going to think on as well. Now, I’ve talked about how this launch differed from past launches. What my intentions with this launch were, what went well, what didn’t, what I’m going to do differently and the same moving forward.
And also what I still have to figure out. Here’s the thing. And here’s your action step for this? Launches are needlessly scary, and I want to take the fear and the unknown out of them for you. So I want to know what is your most burning launch question? I definitely plan on doing future episodes about launches.
And so I would love to help really dive into the things that are unknown or scary, or you just don’t understand about launches. And I would love to redo episodes on those for you. So email me. Hello@amandawarfield.com. Send me a DM on Instagram. I’m at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, whatever works best for you. Send your launch questions my way so that I can make sure to cover them in future episodes.
And this week’s book recommendation is year of yes, by Shonda Rhimes. Let me say, I picked up this book because I used to be such a huge scandal fan Shonda writes so well. And so I knew a book was going to be no different and it was going to be truly amazing, but I was. Blown away more than I even thought I would be.
If you haven’t heard of the book, it’s this whole idea of her deciding that she’s going to say yes to every opportunity that comes our way, even the scary ones. And I know it a lot of times in this industry in particular, we talk about, we need to say no more. We need to set more boundaries. And so it is a twist on that, for sure.
It’s, it’s a whole different way to look at these idea of opportunities that come our way, but it was really. Encouraging, but also motivating to say yes to the scary things. And I just, I highly recommend that you check that book out. So that’s this week’s book recommendation year. Yes. By Shonda Rhimes.
Don’t forget to send me your burning questions about launches. And until next time I hope you’ll go out and Uncomplicate your life.
so much for joining me here today, friend, if you loved this episode, it would mean the world to me. If you’d leave a rating and review, this is a great way to help spread the word about this podcast and help other wonderful women like yourself. Find it. You can find this episode show notes as well as tons of other great resources over@amandawarfield.com.
And if you aren’t following me on Instagram yet, I’d love to connect with you. I’m at Mrs. Amanda Warfield. Shoot me a DM. And tell me what you love most about this episode. Thanks for being here, friend. I’ll see you next time.
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