A-Z Launches: Everything you need to know for a stress-free launch
Updated: Jul 5, 2021
Launches are a lot.
In every sense of the word. They can be complicated, convoluted, and soul-sapping. Or they can be wildly profitable, revenue-building machines.
To the uninitiated, the sheer number of moving parts can be mind-boggling. But, every one of those moving parts represents both an opportunity and a potential pothole.
A-Z Launches is a glossary of marketing terms to help you make sense of launches so you can cash in and avoid a launch catastrophe.
P.S. Entries in purple are things you should be considering as you plan your next launch!
A/B Testing
When you test two variations of headlines, subject lines, landing pages, ads etc. against each other to see which one converts the best. Never make assumptions about what’s going to work and what’s not!
Ads
Ads are essential for each segment of your launch.
First, you'll use ads to attract people to your webinar, then ads to drive sales once the cart-open period has begun, and then cart close ads during the final stretch. You’ll need ad copy, images, and someone to set up each ad.
Affiliates
An affiliate is someone who earns a commission by promoting your products. Affiliates are a great way to boost your reach. You can ask past students/members or influencers to promote your program in exchange for a commission on each sale. Normally, you’d provide images, copy, and maybe even templates for your affiliates to use.
Automations
Automations are every business owner’s best friend, but in a launch, they’re your lifeline. With automations, you invest the time in setup upfront, then sit back and reap the rewards so you aren’t manually trying to tag webinar attendees, or moving each registrant one by one into your sales sequence. If Zapier isn’t your best friend yet, it soon will be.
Ability
Does your target audience have the ability to pay your listed price?
Benefits
What are people walking away with when they buy your product or program? We’re not talking about the different bells and whistles your offer has, but rather, the kind of impact your offer will have.
People don’t want a four-part money management system; they want the freedom to live their best life, buy their kids whatever they want, and take exotic holidays.
Bonuses
What bonuses are you offering? Think of bonuses as sweetening the deal. Consider including Fast-Action Bonuses (aka bonuses that expire if you don’t buy the offer within a set time period).
Bounce Rate
The percentage of people who pop onto your landing page or site and then leave without checking any other pages out. In a launch, your bounce rate is inversely proportional to your conversion rate.
Budget
Is your budget for your launch realistic? Always put aside at least 30% more than you think you’re going to need. If you don’t end up using it, great, more money in the bank. If you do end up needing it, at least you weren’t caught with your pants down.
Call-to-Action
The one action you want a lead to take at each stage, e.g. register for your webinar or click through to your sales page. Make it clear, catchy, and impossible to miss.
Cart Close
The final push before you stop accepting sales. The duration of the Cart Close period varies from launch strategy to strategy, but usually refers to the last 48 hours before you stop accepting sales.
Conversion
The action you want your audience to take. A campaign is made up of multiple conversions. For example, signing up your lead magnet, registering for your webinar, clicking through to your sales page, and finally purchasing your offer.
Marketers often position conversion as an event. It isn’t. Conversion is a process. And it begins long before a prospect is hovering over a Buy button. You need to start sowing the seeds for a successful sale early.
We use a three-pronged approach that combines data and your competitive advantage with a healthy dollop of personality to craft copy that cuts through the noise, speaks to your audience’s deepest struggles, and positions you as the solution.
Conversion Rate
The proportion of people who’ve seen your emails/ads/sales page/landing page/webinar and then gone on to take the desired action.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Fine-tuning your sales pages, landing pages, ads, and other launch assets to maximize conversion.
Copywriting
The art and science of crafting copy that taps into psychology, decision science, and behavioural economics to drive people towards a purchase. Copywriting is the foundation of conversion.
Cost Per Acquisition
The total cost of finding a lead and turning them into a paying customer.
CTR
Or click-through-rate. The proportion of people who’ve seen your ads /emails/landing page and then clicked the link.
Current Behavior
Where is your customer at right now? What behavior needs to change for them to purchase your program?
Debrief
Set aside time post-launch to go over all the stats, as well as your systems and processes. This is easily the most important step to ensure that your next launch does even better.
Decision Fatigue
When your prospect is overwhelmed by the number of options presented. Keep it simple and stick to one campaign goal, otherwise you risk leading your prospects into that dark place between analysis paralysis and decision fatigue.
Demand
Does your offer speak to your audience’s core demands/needs?
Downsell
A lower-priced lite offer to pitch to customers who couldn’t buy your full offer.
Email Sequences
An email sequence is a set of automated emails sent out to your list designed to nudge your customer from one point in their journey to the next.
A typical launch includes the following sequences:
Pre-Launch
Cart Open
Main Launch Sequence
Cart Close
Emotion
Also known as Empathy Marketing. This is the art of tapping into the emotional state of your target audience and making them feel heard, aligning your offers with their specific needs, and engaging with them in an authentic way.
Evergreen
An evergreen sales funnel is just your regular sales funnel running on autopilot. It runs in the background and strategically sells your courses everyday, all year-round, to your audience. Plus side: you don’t have to do any daily maintenance!
Fast-Action Bonus
Fast-Action Bonuses are offers only available to people who buy within a set time period. For example, if you’re doing live webinars, then a bonus that’s only available till the end of the webinar is a Fast-Action Bonus. They’re a great way to build urgency.
Framing
How are you presenting purchasing decisions? People are going to react differently depending on how you’ve framed the choice. $1 a day feels more palatable than $365/year. It’s why the whole “it’s cheaper than your daily latte” line is so popular.
Friction
Friction kills conversion. Watch out for inefficiencies that irritate the customer and slow down (or put a stop to) the buying process. Examples include things like glitchy payment systems, poor layouts, incomplete information, slow responses to inquiries, poor customer service, etc.
Funnel
A sales funnel is the marketing jargon for the journey potential customers go through on their way to purchase.
Goals
SMART goals are a cliche, but they really do matter. Set time out as you’re planning your launch and map out goals that are Specific, Measureable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely.
Hero
An image or a video that lets people see themselves using your offer. Think of it as a quick peek into their future.
Ideal Client
An ideal client is someone who needs your offer to solve the most pressing issues in their life/business. They feel aligned with your brand and your messaging, and everything about your business speaks to them on a deeper level.
Interruption
A deliberate break in a pattern to shake things up and make your audience pay attention.
Incentives for Change
What reasons does your audience have to want to change?
Journey
Planning a launch is a lot like planning a novel. Your user is the hero (or heroine), and needs to grow as they progress through the funnel.
Think of your nurture sequences as your training montages complete with Eye of the Tiger playing in the background. Your sales sequences are when the battle’s picking up, and your sales page is the final showdown.
You’ve got to build urgency and emotional impact throughout the funnel for the ending to be effective.
Knowledge gaps
What information crucial to decision-making is your audience missing?
Landing Pages
A landing page is a stand-alone page built for your launch with one goal and one call-to-action.
Lead
A lead is someone who opted into your content by providing their email or other contact info.
Lead Gen
Or lead generation. This is how you attract qualified leads.
Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing provides leads with value, showcases your authority, builds trust, and helps take them to the next stage of the customer journey. Think of it as a relationship-building process with your list.
Lifestyle
How does your course or program fit into their lifestyle?
Message Match
Consistency of messaging across all your sales copy. You never want a prospect feeling confused or disoriented during the process. Keep drilling on your one big promise.
Message Mining
A part of a copywriter’s research toolkit. This type of research allows copywriters to find the exact language your ideal clients are using to articulate their struggles. Solid research is the cornerstone of conversion.
Nurture
Education and providing value to nudge your audience along the customer journey. Blog content, webinars, social media posts, newsletters, and email sequences can all be used to nurture your audience.
Objections
The little nagging questions or reservations that are stopping prospects from becoming customers.
Open Rate
The percentage of people who open your emails. Split test your emails with different subject lines to maximize your open rates.
Opportunity Cost
What your audience is losing out on by choosing one option or the other. For example, what’s the opportunity cost of not buying your product?
Pain Points
A pain point is a specific problem or challenge that your target audience is experiencing. The goal of your product is to alleviate those pain points, and the goal of your copy is to show prospective customers how.
Perceived Value
Perceived value is the value of your product in your customer’s eyes. Your goal is always to make the perceived value look incredibly high relative to the actual cost.
PLF
Or Product Launch Formula is a type of launch popularised by Jeff Walker. Jeff popularised the idea of a Pre-Pre-Launch (aka when you survey your audience) and then nurturing your audience during the Pre-Launch period. If you’re interested, check out his book, Launch.
Post-Launch
The period immediately after your launch. This is when you review what worked, what didn’t, how many refunds you had, and analyze your findings for next time.
Pre-Launch
Your pre-launch period is the time you spend nurturing your audience before the launch starts. Ideally, you should have a stable of content that you can pull from and strategically use to prime your audience pre-launch.
Questions
What questions are you asked most often? And how do you address them throughout your launch? The questions you’re asked most often give you insight into what your customers’ biggest objections are.
Relevance
How relevant is your offer to their specific pain points? Is the connection between your offer and their pain points immediately clear? The lower the relevance, the less likely you are to convert users.
Research
There is no guesswork in marketing. By the time you’re getting ready to launch, you should already be done with most of the research. At its core, research is about getting into the head of your target audience and understanding what makes them tick. Review mining, customer interviews, and qualitative surveys are great ways of getting voice-of-customer data.
Risk Reversal
A refund policy, testimonials, stats, numbers, and social proof go a long way in minimizing the risk your audience perceives.
ROI
Or Return on Investment. It’s a measure of what you put in versus the pay-off aka ‘was this worth what I spent on it?’
Scarcity
Remember, Scarce = Sales
One of the easiest ways to capture a small segment of the list at a higher price is to build exclusivity into the offer. Having a limited number of spots or time constraints automatically builds scarcity into the offer, which in turn raises the perceived value.
Segmentation
Dividing your audience or your market based on certain factors. This allows you to only send them marketing material relevant to their specific pain points, which in turn helps you optimize and raise those conversion rates!
Simplicity
Do you have too many packages? Simpler options help avoid decision fatigue and improve conversion. When in doubt, KISS: Keep It Super Simple.
Social Proof
Social proof is the tendency of people to assume how good/effective/valuable something is based on how other people regard it. Social proof does a few different things. It helps build trust, mitigates risk, AND taps into FOMO.
Software
Launches involve a ton of moving parts. Software and tech can help with some of the heavy-lifting. Here are a few options that you’re going to need:
Course Platform Software Terrain (Our team built this!) | Xperiencify | Teachable | Podia | ThriveCart
Email System Software ConvertKit | Active Campaign
Webinar Software and Automation EverWebinar | WebinarJam
Find more software and tech recommendations here →
Testimonials
Use testimonials generously! Get quotes from clients raving about you and your offer. Make sure to encourage them to use numbers and be as specific as possible.
Trust
Trust is crucial for any launch. Your audience has gotta believe that you’re the real deal. Establish trust by showing up being transparent, and sharing value consistently without asking for anything in return before making the ask for a sale.
Unique Campaign Positioning
Simply put, it’s the combination of the unique benefits of the offer that your campaign revolves around. Your UCP informs all aspects of your campaign messaging.
Upsell
An upsell allows you to entice a customer to buy more immediately after they’ve bought your main offer. You can do this by offering potential products, add-ons, or upgrades that are related to your primary offer.
Urgency
Light that fire under your audience! Use scarcity, countdown timers, and fast-action bonuses to drive your leads to take action.
User testing
Plonking people in front of a computer and watching how they interact with your landing page. This helps identify and eliminate areas of friction before they start affecting your conversion rates.
Voice of Customer Data
Aka the cheat sheet to getting inside your ideal customer’s head. Voice of Customer Data reveals what customers think of your business, product, or service. It tells you about their struggles, challenges, aspirations, desires, and pain points in their own words, helping you bridge the gap between their expectations and their actual experience with your business.
Warm leads
Warm leads are people who’ve expressed an interest in offer. These are people who’re likely following you on social media, on your email list, or have bought from you in the past.
Webinar
A webinar is a live online workshop or presentation, during which participating viewers from different locations can interact with you through comments and questions. Webinars are a great way to establish your authority, provide value, and give your brand a personal touch.
Turn up the conversion potential of your webinar with this free webinar about webinars (kinda meta, no?) This is the same webinar framework Andy Jenkins used to make $4 mil. Check it out here →
Some great webinar platforms are:
Great for Evergreen Webinars. You can build your landing pages, registration pages, customize webinar emails, and even simulate live-chat during your evergreen webinar. This link gets you a 2-month free trial!
Does everything EverWebinar does (minus the simulated live-chat). If you’re ever planning on going evergreen, using WJ allows you to save the live interactions from your live webinar and repurpose them on EverWebinar. The above link gets you 60 days for $1.
Super easy to use, clean interface, customizable branding. Give it a whirl with their credit card-free trial.
*I haven’t personally used GetResponse and ClickMeeting, but I’ve heard good things about them!
The X-Factor
There are 99847593875 other people selling to your customers. What are you doing to stand out?
You
Are you leveraging your unique competitive advantage? What about you as a brand appeals to your audience? If you’ve never done a SWOT analysis for your business, now might be a good time!
Zzzz
Launches can feel like you’re running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace aka not fun. At all. If you don’t look after your health and sanity, before, during, and after the launch, you’re booking yourself a one-way ticket to Burnout Central.
Want to side-step stress and jump right to the part where you’re making a profit? See how I can help you →