Picture it: you’ve just opened cart and ping —  the email announcing your very first sale. And, get this, it’s 100% cash-in-your-pocket profit!

Now, I see the skepticism dancing across your face.

Because this isn’t how launches go, right? The usual process is this:

You spend $$$ on marketing and the first 10 -20 sales will barely cover your costs. You’re looking at another few long and stressful days (maybe even a whole week!) of consistent sales before you break even, much less make a profit.

Spoilers: it doesn’t actually have to go down like that.

Join us today to learn how your pre-launch strategy can bring in the dollars before your cart even opens.

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Been listening to our pod or reading our blog for a while? Then you know our mantra:  

Make your marketing pay for itself.

And there’s a reason that’s become such a game-changer for us and our clients.

Time and again, we’ve seen the same thing play out — and experienced it ourselves. When you’ve created a program that’s selling well, whether it’s a premium offer or a signature program, after a period of initial growth, you hit a ceiling.

Hard!

 

Primarily because you reach a point where to make more sales, you have to spend more on ads. But as you do so, it ends up costing you more to make each sale.

This isn’t sustainable so you find yourself down the rabbit hole of trying optimize every single point in your process. You’re thinking, “Maybe if my opt-in page worked better…”, “What if this button was blue instead of yellow…”, “Could this email headline be improved…?”

Once you get sucked into that icky thought spiral, you could spend literal months stuck there, spinning your wheels, tweaking every sentence of your landing page for infinity…and still not making progress on your sales.

Oh boy, have we been there!

And when we broke it down, we realized the problem.

We needed to be able to spend more on ads – a LOT MORE — but we needed to be able to do it in a way that would also be profitable. We needed to know that for every $1 we spent on, say, Facebook ads, we’d get more than $1 right back.

The TL:DR: To grow in the way we wanted, we needed to make our marketing pay for itself.

And when it comes to applying that mantra to your pre-launch strategy, we have a couple of ideas that have worked well for us and for our clients.

How to make your launches profitable before they start.

You’re all familiar with option 1 — creating a webinar, a workshop, or a challenge as a lead-in to your launch. Traditionally, these would have been free because the idea was to get as many eyeballs as possible on your launch.

But there’s been a switch in the last couple of years and lots of people are now charging for these lead-ins.

Of course, reaching out to a cold audience and trying to get them to whip out their credit card is challenging, so this tends to be a better option if you’ve already built up a sizeable list and have plenty of warm leads to work with.

It also works particularly well for those of you with a premium program to offer. Because if you’re selling a $10,000 program, rather than a $1000 program, you’re probably aiming for 20 sales rather than 200.

If you tick both of those boxes — a premium offer and a sizeable email list — the key to making this work is creating a killer upsell because if you want the marketing to pay for itself, the average order value usually needs to be higher than the initial ticket price.

That brings us to option 2.

Option 2 is ideal for those of you offering a signature program or those who are still working on getting those big numbers on their email list.

And the key here is to keep the workshop, webinar, or challenge free, but to offer upsells for the people who are really into your thing and who will happily get their credit card out in exchange for more value.

There are a few different ways you can do this that are super effective and I walk you through them in this week’s podcast — you can hit play on that right here.

Oh and if you’re over here tying yourself in knots over your pre-launch strategy because you think that consistent launching is “just how it’s done”, you don’t actually have to subscribe to the live launching spiral of doom! Find out more about our approach to “evergreen launching” — a far less stressful path to business.