Post Mortem of Our Free Challenge + Launch of Our Flagship Program
Episode 156: Show Notes
Today, we’re talking about the launch, baby! The breakdown, numbers, data and takeaways. For the second time this year, we did our Five Days To Launch challenge and yes, there were some major hiccups going into it. In total, we spent $20,427.64 on this launch and we made… drumroll… $126,716, in just three weeks! Although we spent way more than anticipated and didn’t reach our $200,000 target, this was still our biggest launch of the year!
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But when a launch happens, the money certainly doesn’t just fall into your pocket. There is so much work that goes into making a launch happen. There are a lot of learning curves, risks and unexpected surprises that will get thrown at you. We had a lot of roadblocks along the way of this particular launch and we’d like to share these with you today. Learn from our mistakes, take everything with a pinch of salt and get ready for takeoff! Take a listen.
Initial Challenges With Our 2017 Five-Day Launch
Firstly, Facebook has kind of wised up and are increasing the cost per lead pretty dramatically. We were shown, again, there is never a one size fits all answer or solution that can determine whether something will work and this time, we were shown by Facebook ads. From going over a previous launch’s data, we know video ads usually run really well for us. We started running our video ad for this launch and what do ya know? It wasn’t going well at all. Our traction was low and we were getting very few new people. We had some major concerns. Were we not targeting the right people? Were we not spending enough? Soon enough, we reached out for some help.
Video Ads: Be Consistent But Not Too Consistent
So we posted in a mastermind that we are in and asked for some advice. We showed them our video ad and the feedback we received was basically two-fold. One, they told us our video was great, fun, beautiful and catchy but that it looked so similar to our last video, they thought it might have been the same one! That was red flag number one. Consistency is great, but having them look different enough is also key. The second major point that was brought up was that maybe video is just too much right now and we should go and test a text-only graphic and see how that works. We had never done text only at this point. So we did three new ad tests and within hours we had some clear winners. We were hesitant but decided to use a stock photo with a picture of a person as one of the tests. The person in the stock photo was someone who we thought looked like our ideal client and to our surprise, it worked! The new ads cost us five times more money ($16,000 to be exact) and we had 5000 leads to show for it! Learning curves, right?
Participation, Contemplation and Lessons From The Cart
A lot of people were excited about the webinar, but holiday season was a distracting time of year. We had a lot to compete with; Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. People were busy! Whereas with our last launch, it was in the middle of summer and it was the only event! But we wrapped up the challenge strong and did the same format with a webinar, where we gave away a free scholarship to The Strategy Academy. This is one of our most effective tactics for opening the doors. In the past, this had driven a lot of people to participate and we saw similar results this time. Overall participation was a little lower. Two takeaways from this are; one, 17 days for a cart open is way too damn long and two, do not ever launch something where you are shortening or lengthening the cart for the reason of a holiday. There were eight out of seventeen days where we made zero sales! Zero.
Find Out More About Our 17 Days Of Shit Storm
We also wanted to take this time to give you the rundown of what else happened during the seventeen days our cart was open. Not only did we have Thanksgiving, Black Monday and Cyber Monday to compete with as we said, but Emylee officially adopted her child and Abbie was sick with a severe fever. So some lessons learned here: one, cart open and cart close webinars are always our best and will always be our best. Two, in the last 48 hours, we doubled our sales when we doubted that we would. In between cart open and cart close, we do a number of lives. You can strategically plan more lives that add more value, answer some questions and get some fence sitters in.
Let’s Take A Look At The Solid Stats, Shall We
We did do a cart open video but were having mixed feelings about our ads, so we did try a couple of different things. We had two video ads running for clicks and roughly had about 1600 clicks and spent about $4000. We also had an engagement ad that ran to the same video specifically because we wanted more organic engagement and a lot of that comes from people watching, commenting on and liking your video. We also tried a GIF, which didn’t go too well.
Because our videos from the previous launch and this launch were looking too similar, we experimented with a more “selfie” style video this time. In total, we spent $20,427.64 and we made $126,716 in three weeks. Our biggest launch of the year! We want you to know how much money it takes to spend in order to make a certain amount of money. Our goal was definitely $200,000 and we didn’t get there. We also spent way more money on ads than we would have liked to. But the truth is, we went into this launch over the holiday when we, and our audience, were distracted. Again, lesson learned!
Time For The Fun Numbers: End of the Road Stats
In the past, we’ve seen super high participation from the challenge to actual purchase and this happened again. 82% of the people who bought participated in the challenge this time, last time it was 85%, so that was super consistent. In the past, we’ve had super high participation in Trello for Business prior to purchase. 68% of all the people who enrolled owned Trello and we also had 41% of our existing students only take Trello. We also had 28% of people participate in Rock Your Biz. Of the people who purchased, which was approximately 62 students, 33% of them were brand new students who had never bought anything with us before and 18% had subscribed with us for the first time in the month of November.
Tweaks and Repeats
We repeat: 17 days of the cart being open was way too long! 7-9 days is the sweet spot. This launch was the first time we offered a 12-month payment plan, which was super successful with two-thirds of people choosing the payment plan. We call that a tentative success – because how many people are going to ask for a refund or have their credit card info slip and not fix it? And this is the nature of doing business online and when we do a launch we have to anticipate a loss. Another big takeaway is that neither of us are managing ad spend again! Another strategy we’ll be repeating is the first and last day video and webinar. You need to add value. Our last piece is a tentative tweak regarding our mid-launch webinars and mid-launch Facebook Lives. We can’t really say if they’re converting because it’s hard to track that data.
So we want to know what you think? What do you want to hear from us during that lull time between open-cart and close-cart? Do you want to hear from students? Do you want to hear testimonies or maybe case studies? Or do you want us to just shut up? We would love to hear from you, so email us at: hello@thinkcreativekollective.com or thinkcreativekollective.com/community and let us know your thoughts!
Quote This
When we have a launch, we have to anticipate a loss.
Highlights
The initial challenges we faced with our 2017 Five-Day Launch Challenge. [0:03:40.1]
Video ads: how to be consistent but not too consistent. [0:05:00.1]
Participation, contemplation and the lessons we learned from the cart. [0:14:00.1]
Find out more about our 17-day shit storm! [0:21:00.1]
Taking a look at the solid stats and what they are telling us. [0:30:20.1]
Time for the fun numbers: analyzing the end of the road stats. [0:44:20.1]
Tweaks and Repeats: things we would change and do over if we could. [0:48:00.1]
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
Launch strategy, Five day launch, Cart opening, Cart closing, Added value, Webinars, Video Ads, Facebook Ads, Trello, Rock Your Biz, Conversion rates
