Tips for Launching Online Courses: A 3-Pronged Approach
This guest blog post was written by our friends at Be Elevated.
Whether you're a first-time online course creator or an experienced veteran, your launch plan will make or break said offer's success. But don't panic - there's a way to ensure that the "break" doesn't happen.
The launch strategy we use at Be Elevated varies from client to client and launch to launch, but we like to do a few very consistent things when launching for ourselves and our clients. Frankly, this works for ANY digital product or service, online course or otherwise!
Ideally, if we break up the launching process, it ends up spanning over three months. With this approach, the actual public live launch is in Month 3 - this means the majority of the process is prep work! Let's dive into each prong or month of the launch for your next online course or offer.
Prong 1/Month 1
Planning, Preparing and Implementing for your 60-Day Warmup
First, you need to know and set your dates for every detail of the launch. We're not talking about the specifics of your actual offer being launched or the conversion event YET.
However, we are talking about everything before that, which is equally, if not more important.
We start this around 70-80 days out because we want to ramp up to the launch of your offer for your organic audience 60 days away from the live launch. Even if you're using paid traffic too, it's great to have that time to accumulate more leads, build trust with them, and nurture and prime them for the offer!
About 2-3 months from the live launch is when you should plan, create, and execute everything you need for the 60-day ramp-up. This includes everything you need for both of your freebies - the nurture sequence, the landing pages, social media marketing posts.
You'll want 2-3 opportunities to get more people into the door. For example, you could release a freebie around 60 days out and put people into a nurture sequence. Send them two emails a week for the eight weeks leading up to your launch.
Same thing if you release another freebie around 30 days out. We want to make sure that you don't have people in both sequences because they'll be getting four emails from you a week and we don't want to fatigue them before the launch even starts (this is techy stuff and if you hire a team - such as mine - you won’t have to worry about that!)
We also want to set our goals and projections. I always like to say you need to treat your business like a GPS: It's really important to know where you're at and where you're going to find the most efficient path to get there. Then, you can use that to guide and determine what you need to do in the 60 days leading up to your launch.
Prong 2/Month 2
Planning, Preparing, and Implementing for Conversion Event & Live Launch
This is typically where we like to do the bulk of the launch itself in terms of creation and execution. Yes, we're into the juicy stuff with your conversion event, as well as your live launch!
This would be the part that we cover with the top-tier launch support package that my agency offers. Using our process as an example, we go through a four-phase framework at this stage:
PHASE 1: Ideation → This is where the CEO magic happens! You have a billion ideas - bring them to the table. Focus on what makes the most sense and cultivate a specific vision if you don't already have one. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you start to narrow down a particular vision for your launch:⠀
Brain dump ALL of your thoughts and ideas if you haven't already. Any trends or related thoughts that you can pull together?⠀
What can you offer the online space or your niche that doesn't exist right now? ⠀
What problem(s) comes up over and over again that you can address?⠀
Who is a good fit for this offer and who isn't?⠀
Paint the picture of the end goal you desire for them. What kind of results do you want them to see?
PHASE 2: Reverse Engineering → Everything starts with the end in mind. The reason you feel so stressed during your launch is a lack of planning. You end up operating out of "dumpster fire" mode rather than flawlessly executing everything you envisioned. ⠀
But when you reverse engineer each step of your launch, you'll start with the desired outcome → work backward to create all of the pieces that need to get done along the way. ⠀⠀
You know your cart open/close and conversion event dates and you know what your offer and conversion event consist of. ⠀
Now, work backward to plan out how your funnels need to look and map out your flawless client experience. Based on the desired outcomes in mind, you'll want to create the most optimized automations for said onboarding to ensure that everything is accounted for and plug in the accurate pieces.
PHASE 3: Creation → Once you know the plan, you get to create all the many pieces of your launch that need to come together. ENJOY this phase of the process with your team - the copy, the design, the graphics, and the offer itself!
At this point, you've mapped out EVERY single piece of the process so you can look at it on the micro and macro level. It helps to see how all the tasks weave together for the greater good of the project so that when you DO go to delegate, you know who (zone of genius) and when (timelines + desired outcome) to assign it to/for. ⠀
PHASE 4: Automation → After all the pieces are created, go in and automate as much as humanly possible! The days of keeping everything in your brain and manually doing #allthethings are long gone. Time to let your biz run on autopilot (for the most part!)
Here's what you NEED to automate after the creation phase in order to coast to the beginning of your launch:⠀
Schedule email sequences⠀
Schedule social media posts
Client onboarding (confirmation email, invoice, contract, deliverables, and scheduling link if applicable)⠀
The biggest tip I can offer you for this stage in your online course or offer launch? ⠀
DOUBLE. CHECK. EVERYTHING. ⠀
The last thing we want is incorrect dates, missed emails, emails sent to the wrong lists, or social media posts delayed or scheduled in the wrong order.
This framework WORKS - every time. BUT there are almost always bumps in the road that you don't expect, so prepare & start as soon as you can!!
Prong 3/Month 3
Open Cart Assessments & Post-Launch Analysis
Month 3 is when you finally hold your live launch! But there's still some work to be done, as you should be assessing things while your cart is open - do NOT wait until it closes. When you analyze your launch response in real-time, you can improve upon them as you go.
Examples:
Are we noticing people flocking to the sales page, but not a lot of people are buying? Maybe there's an issue with the copy and/or the structure of the sales page itself.
Or are not a lot of people opening your emails? You need a better subject line. Or maybe they're opening the emails, but the click-through rate isn't great - the copy likely needs improvement.
I would suggest checking these components DAILY during your open cart period so that you can do some live tweaking and adjusting. You might even want to do some A/B testing with two different sales pages to see what performs better to know what you utilize moving forward.
You also need to check on automations. For whatever reason, sometimes tech glitches. It's just the way it goes occasionally. Keep an eye on them and make sure that everything is functioning as it should. If four days have gone by and people get stuck in your queue in your email sequence, that's four days lost with potential sales.
Then, once cart closes, do a bit of a post-launch analysis:
How did everything perform?
Were there any tech issues? Any team issues?
How were your overall conversion rates from a whole live launch standpoint?
Were your goals and projections reached? If not, why?
Where did people come from/what can you attribute your sales to?
What can you do to improve for the next launch?
Make a note of these things so you can launch even BETTER the next round!
If you are interested in making sure that you have EVERYTHING you need for your next offer, download our FREE Launch Checklist! Say goodbye to the guessing and head into your launch with a clear and concise checklist that maps out everything that needs to get done so that you can plan, create, (and outsource) like a boss!