Behind the Scenes: Our $94,936 Strategy Academy Launch and the Lessons We Learned
Episode 082: Show Notes
On today’s show we literally take you behind the scenes of the biggest launch of our careers! After two years of hard work and thinking about what we could offer the world that’s really going to change the landscape for creative entrepreneurs, we launched The Strategy Academy. We don’t think you guys realize the amount of excitement that we have to bring you this episode. Not only are we excited because it means the launch is over and we can finally breathe, but we are also excited because it’s the biggest launch of our careers, ever! It also meant a lot of lessons learned, a lot of successful decisions, a few minor tweaks and pivots, and some crazy data and stats that absolutely blew our minds!
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A lot of people plateau because they don’t know how to automate and they don’t know how to grow a team. So we took everything a step further in the Strategy Academy and really gave people like a full blown roadmap! The launch took off in June this year and had some unexpected highs, some surprising lows and some exciting turns! Today, we are giving you the launch breakdown 101. The data, the results and the digits — because y’all know we hold nothing back — of our most recent $94,936 Strategy Academy launch. Hear how we did it and how you can do it too!
What Is The Strategy Academy?
We developed the concept for The Strategy Academy over the course of two years with meticulous planning! In a nutshell, The Strategy Academy is a six week online webinar coaching program that we developed to help passionate creatives move their businesses forward and up. Once entrepreneurs reach a certain point in their business, they often plateau because often they don’t know how to automate or grow a team. Where to next? We didn’t just want to offer a strategy; we wanted to offer the step by step, practical guidelines and tools to give people a full-blown roadmap for the first year, potentially first two years, of their business. Within The Strategy Academy program, we offer two programs for customers to choose from. The first is The Self-Paced Program and second is The Coach-Based Program — the former being more independent, and the latter being more of a “hand-hold”, guided approach.
Expectations Versus Reality
Going into this, we had a goal of reaching $100,000 for this launch. We wanted to sell 60 seats to our Self-Paced program and 20 seats to our Coach-Based program. We ended up with 31 in our coach-based and 27 in our self-paced. We drastically surpassed our goal for coached and did not reach our goal for self-paced. The reason why we still got very close to our financial goal is because one, we decided not to cap the courses and two, the coached program cost twice as much as the self-paced program. On our first day we had 423 people show up live, of those 423, 129 people directly clicked our offer and of that, it resulted in $31,440 in sales live, which resulted in $37,000 by the end of day one.
Our launch total in eight days for the Strategy Academy was $94,936. Pretty close! But it was not without its challenges after that first day spike. On day two of The Strategy Academy Launch, we made zero dollars. Yep, zero.
Re-pitching, Re-selling, and Re-energizing
After our zero dollar day two, we panicked. We spoke to our bookkeeper-advisor who works for similar online companies who assured us that it is the same every time. First, you have a big, big flash, make maybe 40 to 50% of your money on the first day, and then it is going to be crickets. Then 50 to 60% of your income will come in on the last 48 hours. The key thing was that we had to keep our momentum going. So we did. We didn’t change the courses but decided to focus on how we were wording the courses. So instead of doubting ourselves, which is what happened for a couple of days, we switched our energy and reassured ourselves that our program was amazing, that we really have put our hearts and souls into this, and there was no reason why people shouldn’t invest. So we re-energized, and started re-selling to get to our next goal!
Upping Your Customer Numbers: Small Strategies That Make A Big Difference
Pre-cart, we ended up spending $2,099.27 on challenge-based Facebook ads. This was the best money we ever spent, and we made it back quickly. Another thing we did was we decided to try a monetary savings for fast-action takers, meaning you would save $100 on the self-paced version or $200 on the coached version if you paid in full on the webinar. You had to buy before the little count down timer that we set up through webinar jam through our offer expired. We put a sense of urgency on there, where people were more inclined to commit to signing up if they knew they would save! We also explored the option of payments plans, and after the low number of customers that signed up for payment plans, we think we’ll stick to one moving forward.
Remember, nothing beats the personal touch and a creative follow up email. We made a list of people in our circle who had taken previous programs who we knew could benefit from the Strategy Academy. So we decided to record a Voxer (a walkie-talkie app) to see how they were doing and to let them know how they might benefit from our new course. These are just a few of the things we did that didn’t take much time, but certainly helped us make a few more sales!
Quote This
If we believe in ourselves, others will trust and invest in us.
Highlights
We did end up spending $2,099.27 on challenge- based Facebook ads… the best money we ever spent! [0:09:10.1]
We really have put our heart and soul into this. There is no reason why people shouldn’t invest. [0:29:19.1]
Selling the value. [0:30:41.9]
Within four hours of a seven day launch, four hours, we made the bulk of our money. [0:35:10.5]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Strategy Academy, Expectations Versus Reality, Re-pitching, Re-selling, and Re-energizing, Upping Your Customer Numbers: Small Strategies That Make A Big Difference
