5 ways to turn your launch around and boost sales

Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to up-level. Skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator and business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams.

We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in.

Hello. Hello. Amazing one. I hope you are having a beautiful day today. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. As always, we have just finished our bootcamp, our Educators Income Booster Bootcamp, and we have just launched Digiteachers Biz academy and enrolled new students again after six-months of it being pretty much closed.

So now we have a whole new cohort of a bunch of students, and I'm just so freaking excited. They are such amazing educators and they want to create courses in all different niches. Which is always so wonderful to see and help support and yeah, I'm just really, really positive about this new live round.

I'm not sure. When we will be running the bootcamp again or opening D b A again we might change things up a bit, but I'll definitely let you guys know if that is the case. So obviously I've just had a launch now and I was just thinking about, you know, I had a couple of questions about what.

what do you do if your launch isn't going the way you wanted to? Or it's kind of flopping if some were to say that word, even though I'm not a fan, but you know, what would you do in that situation? So I thought, you know what? Let me create a podcast on that. Let me share with you five ways that you can turn your launch around if you need to.

And also, even if your launch is going well, these are five things you can do to make it go even better, because why not, right? Firstly, what I would love to say is that your launch is not a flop. And sort of declaring it a flop is, is not the right way to go about it. Like say you have in your mind how you envision it to go.

Like you envision that when you open the doors to your program, you will have X number of students join on day one, and it will be, you know, you'll make X amount of money and it'll look this way. If it doesn't look that way, that does not mean it's a flop. It's just. We're not psychic. We can't plan exactly how things are going to go.

We aren't in control of other people's decisions. And so I think the key is just to not like plan in your head how it's going to look. Because really we have no control over how it really looks like you have control over certain things. You don't have control over who buys on day one and who buys on, you know, the final day and all that jazz.

So I just think if you are experiencing a situation where you have had a launch and like the first day or two days, It's not looking like the numbers aren't looking like what you wanted them to look. It's really important to not just go into, oh my gosh, this is a fail. This is a flop, because you are going immediately into an energy of.

Like this is not good. And you will, because of that energy, you're going to contract and you're going to show up less and you're going to be less excited. You're going to have a very different energy when you are showing up. So, I think one of the greatest arts of launching besides like strategy, which you know, is, it's like not so much an art, like you just apply the strategy, but really the art of launching is managing of your mind and your emotional regulation and maintaining belief and energy. 

Even when it's not looking like it's going so well. That is the art of perfecting the art of launching is actually being in such control of your state that you don't let any external results affect how you show up and what you know, your belief in your product, your belief in yourself, that you become so grounded in it and like not moving, like you're just so grounded in it that you cannot be swayed. 

It takes a lot of time to build up that skill. It is like an art form and also to remain neutral. So setting the intention for what you want to happen and the goals and the money, and the revenue and the sales, but remaining unattached and being neutral.

So having the goal, having the intention, but remaining unattached in itself is very important because when you get attached to the outcome, you get really weird in your head about it, and you can really derail your launch by just getting in your head about it. Like you can go on a rollercoaster and you can start making all these stories like, ah, they haven't bought now and therefore this means I'm not good enough, or my product's not good enough.

And suddenly you're in a rabbit hole of doom and gloom. And that's one way to really, that's the thing that's going to derail the launch. It's, it's literally, because you just made all these stories in the first few days. That are probably not even true and you're tanking the whole thing even before it started, and that happens all the time, okay? 

The key is to set the intention, remain unattached, and be neutral in the process, and just manage your mind and your emotional state and your energy. Really manage that. Really be conscious of it and be on top of it. And look after it, because that's going to make a huge difference. Now that being said, I'm going to share with you some strategy stuff that you can do.

If you're in a situation where you've opened the doors to your program and you're like, cool, people aren't buying as much as I'd like them to on the first day or the first two days. And I am wanting to increase sales because of course there are things, strategy wise, that you can do to increase sales and to improve your conversion overall.

So that's what I'm going to share with you in this podcast. But I just think it's really important to know that strategy can get you so far. But energy, your energy and the way that you are showing up and that frequency you're existing at makes a big difference too. So really priming your internal world is going to actually have probably some of the best.

Results than just, adding an extra bonus or doing some strategy thing. Like really just grounding yourself in your product, in how bad as it is, how amazing it is, and how it's going to impact students life. How the transformation, like really digging into that and showing up with like such conviction around how amazing this thing is and how life changing it is.

I think that goes a long way. Alrighty, so let me share with you, I think I'm going to share around five things that you can do strategy wise to sort of turn your launch around or just make your launch conversions even better. Your sales conversions. 

Okay, so number one would be to innovate and brainstorm a surprise "oh my gosh" bonus. Something that is really good. Like, you know how you have early bird bonuses and fast action bonuses, and those are the things you put in at the beginning of your launch to incentivize people to hop in first. And you know, typically those bonuses are very juicy. They're very desirable.

They're the thing your audience wants. So that's why you normally see an uptick in sales in the beginning of a launch because you have like an early bird bonus. Typically in your open cart period, you will see sales. This is, this is not something you can sort of really guarantee, but typically what you see is you get a, the highest amount of sales on the day.

You open your program and you open cart and the final two days. Like the last day and the second last day, you'll see an uptick in sales. Now, this is not something that is necessarily going to happen with every launch, but after all the launches that I've done, that is kind of what happens. You have the most sales on day one and the last two days.

That's kind of how it goes. Now, there is a period where in the middle it's called the open cart free fall, or the mid-launch free fall. It's when you're in your middle of your cart open period, and you have this lull in sales and you've got this lull in activity around that.

So say your open cart is from Monday to Friday. Monday will have a lot of sales. Friday we'll have a lot of sales. Thursday I might have more sales, but then this like Wednesday, Tuesday period is a bit quiet. So what can you do to incentivize or to increase some sales in that time? Something that is very good to do is to brainstorm a really amazing surprise bonus that you can release midway during your open cart period.

And this is when you want to get a bit creative and innovative and you want to ask yourself, what do my audience want? Really, what is it they want and desire? How can I give that to them? And don't think what you think they need or want. Like you must literally know what it is they want and you must create some sort of bonus or you can create some sort of bonus that is in that helping them achieve something that they want.

And you release it in the middle of your open cart and you can do this, you know, if you see on Monday, okay. The sales haven't been what I wanted. Let's get creative. You can just add that bonus on the Wednesday and be like, woo-hoo, we've got the surprise bonus. This is what you're going to get. And you can send an email and you can make a big thing about it.

And that is definitely something that does help is that you're adding something extra as a surprise and that can really help people. Over the fence. That might be the thing that, that's what they've been wanting, right? So that is one thing. And also get creative about this bonus. Don't be like, don't make it some generic thing that people don't actually want.

Just really the, the key is to create a bonus that people want or it needs to address a very big objection that's stopping people from joining. So if you know that your students are fearful around joining your program, you need to try address that fear and make them feel safe in order to join. So there's, there's also that when it comes to bonuses create something that's desirable that they want or address a common objection that's preventing them from feeling safe enough to join.

The second thing you could do is you could add a surprise extended payment plan if it is aligned and if it makes sense for your price point. If your product is only a couple of hundred dollars or less, then an extended payment plan probably doesn't make sense. If your product is. You know, maybe a thousand bucks, 2000 bucks something like that. 

Then maybe an extended payment plan is going to make quite a big difference because it's a higher price point product and maybe some people literally just needed that extended payment plan. So I have seen that happen before with the higher price products that I've sold.

I've been asked for extended payment plans before and I do offer them with specific, yeah, with specific products, right? Not all of them. It has to make sense, you know, if your product is like 500 bucks and your course is two months to have like a six month payment plan for a $500. And the course is going to be done in two months, or the program's over in two months and you've still got another four months of people paying for it.

That's not really ideal. You kind of want to try avoid. Having like extended payment plans for low price products, you can have a payment plan, but not like a six to 12 month payment plan, because that's not going to be feasible. because remember, every time that you have every time that you have a payment plan, your, your payment system, whether it's PayPal or Stripe, takes fees.

So every time someone pays with a plan, it literally takes. So if you're going to put in a six to 12 month payment plan in for a low price product, you're going to be chewing through a lot of fees for a very low price program. It has to make business sense and it has to be something like, say someone, you're getting quite a lot of feedback from people that they need a longer payment plan. 

You can look at it, look at your price point and see if it's feasible, and also see if it is aligned for you as well, and that it feels good to you. I think it can be really great because you're letting people in to join the program and you're giving people a greater chance of being able to join. So that is something it's worth doing. 

So the third thing I would say that can make quite a big difference is to get some past students some alumni students to do some calls with you on either social media or in your Facebook group or wherever your main audience is, and get them to do some like live calls with you or case studies with you.

And this is an opportunity for you to talk to them about their journey in your program, to find out what their transformations were, how they grew, what their results were. And this is a really good opportunity for your audience to see the students that come out of your program and get real life like feedback from that, because it's actually very, you know, it's great that you can sell your program and stuff, but when you have students that have had an amazing experience with you, it's powerful to let them sell your stuff in the way that they're just sharing their journey and how important it was for them and all that stuff.

So it's very powerful to let your students share their transformations because it not only gives hope to your potential students that this is what's possible for them. It shows them that your program or your help really supports and can help them, right? So it's basically a high level of social proof.

And social proof goes a very long way. Some people just need to see evidence that what they want to do is possible and they need to feel safe in making the investment and seeing other students vouching for your offer or whatever it is that you're selling. Creates much more safety in people to invest.

They trust that you can then help them. Because it's a big deal to make an investment online with someone, right? You want to make sure that your money's going to the right place and you want to make sure that that person can actually help you. So this, this thing that you can do where you have calls with past students is very valuable. I recommend everyone does it if they can in their launches. Cause it goes a long way.

The fourth thing. And this is worth doing if you have a bit of a higher price point product because it is going to require your time. But basically it's adding in 30-minute, one-on-one calls where people can book a 30-minute call with you during your cart open period. 

And this could be positioned as a feedback call a confidence, call, a clarity call some type of call where you are giving them some sort of help in whatever thing that they want, they need the help with. And you are, you know, giving your expertise for the first 15, 20 minutes, and then in the last 10 minutes or so, you speak to them about how they feel about your program, if they're wanting to join your program, and you essentially offer the program to them, you sell the program to them.

This is good because people actually do require a lot of one-on-one touchpoints to buy because people just need to feel safe to make the purchasing decision. And some people really need that one-on-one connection to make that purchasing decision. And I still believe that this is, this is one of the best ways to actually.

Fill up your program, especially in the early days when you haven't got like a massive launch with thousands of people. Like you can't actually have one-on-one calls. It's just not possible. But if you have a small audience adding in a 30-minute, or it can even be 15 minutes, it doesn't have to be 30-minutes, but adding in a one-on-one call with you for you to firstly, help the person in whatever the way they need help. Answer questions, and make them feel safe and comfortable to purchase with you. That goes a long way. I recommended for small startup launches. If you can put that in your open cart period, do it. That one-on-one thing is valuable.

I know it's not scalable, and that's why it's not something that I think you do later down the line when you're having bigger launches and scaling up. It is possible. But you can't do it with everyone. You'd have to say, okay, I'm only opening 10 one-on-one spots, and you'd have to create a limit on it.

But that really increases sales conversions because people are needing the extra touch point to make the purchasing decision. And the higher the product price, the more likely people are going to need this. If you have a product that's only $300. If your course is only $300, I don't think it's necessarily that feasible to be doing one-on-ones.

But if you want to just get started and you're willing to do it just to get people in, for sure, I recommend doing it at the beginning point. But yeah, it's more typically for the higher price products to offer a one-on-one because people, it's a bigger investment. They need a bit more support in making that decision.

Okay, the fifth and final thing that I have for you today is in a launch, it's very important to get visible. And what I mean by that is get your face on the camera and talking on camera. Show your face to people. Don't hide. Go live on Facebook or Instagram, wherever it is that your audience is and that you're launching to.

Speak about your offer. Don't hide your offer. Sell your offer. That's what the open cart phase is for. It's for literally just selling your program. If you typically have an online business, you've probably spent months giving free value. You've probably hosted a free event of some sort.

You've done a lot of free stuff for people. At some point, you're going to have to just sell, right? You cannot avoid selling. Like selling is what makes you sales. So you can't shy away from it. You need to get more visible. So when you feel like contracting, you need to actually go against that and you need to expand.

Especially in that open cart phase, especially if the first few days aren't going the way you want. Instead of admitting defeat and contracting and going all in your head about it and getting all, you know, defeatist and weird about it, maybe you can spiral into victim mode. You need to really manage your mind and you need to be like, cool how I show up in this launch is testament to how I show up in my life and business.

I'm going to show up fully for this product because I believe in this product. I'm going to sell my heart out on it. I'm going to explain how amazing it is. I'm going to showcase what it looks like. I'm going to show how it's going to transform people. I'm going to send emails, I'm going to go on socials. I'm going to be proud, and I'm going to just leap into.

Process and that's what you do. You just get more visible and you leap. Even when you feel like your body's saying, hide, be quiet. You are not meant to listen to that. That's not the way that you sell something. You actually might feel like you're repeating yourself, but people need repetition.

People do not listen the first time you say something, you need to say it like five times before someone actually listens or for it to hit home. And the same for like on social media and stuff like your message and your offer. They need to see it like 10 times before it finally hits home and they can make the purchasing decision.

So don't think, oh, I just tell someone once about something. You actually need to repeat yourself incessantly. And I know it feels weird to do that, and you're like, oh my gosh, people are probably so annoyed with me for repeating myself. But actually that doesn't happen. There's always new people that are coming into your world or your email list, or your Instagram or wherever, and people need to know what you're selling and how you help people.

You have to be repetitive in your message for it to drive home, for it to hit home. So just remember that. And the other pro tip is in launches I often see people are focusing on the wrong thing when they're selling. They're selling the features of the product, which are like the worksheets. The training videos, the how many, you know, things they get in the program, how many calls they get, all that jazz, like they're selling the features and they're not selling the benefits.

And there's a very big difference between selling features and benefits. People don't buy stuff for the feature, people buy stuff for the benefits and the transformation. So when you are in your open cart period. Don't focus on the features. Focus on what the features do, or how they help your students.

So focus your messaging on the benefits of everything, how and how it's going to transform your student's life in some way. How it's going to either make their life easier, how they're going to move away from some pain that they have towards some pleasure. And really, really reminding yourself that that is the key message to be sharing, rather than, oh, this program has 10 training videos and it's six weeks and it's got four worksheets.

No one buys for that. No one really cares how many worksheets they're getting. What they care about is that they're going to get a result. And what is that result and how it's going to help. So that is very important as well. So if you are in a launch, remember to focus on the benefits and the transformation in all of your messaging. 

And that's it for the five things strategy wise, just to turn your launch around. All of these things can bring in more sales. All of these things are great to do in any launch. Actually, the other thing that I would say is that a launch isn't over until it is over. And even when it's over, it isn't over.

So really just don't get in your head about it. Like in the first few days, if the numbers aren't really looking the way that you wanted them to look or you were intending for them to look, the numbers are a bit lower and the sales are a bit slower. Do not get into defeatist mode and do not spiral. This is where the work comes in.

This is where the emotional resilience and the neutrality and the mindset work and all of the stuff, this is the point where it needs to start. You need to start walking the talk and you need to start really managing yourself in your open cart because you can really spiral and you can start derailing your launch before it's even started, and this happens all the time.

So I will say like a lot of the time people are just waiting a bit to buy. And so if people aren't buying on day one, that doesn't mean they're not going to buy on day 2, 3, 4, 5. They will often even wait till the last moment to buy. 

Say I've got a five day open cart period. The first four days are like slowish or like the first day we get a bunch of sales and then day two, day three, day four, like almost crickets. I've had situations in an open cart period where we've had no sales for like two or three days out of a five day open car period.

It's quite something, right? And. In that moment is when you get your greatest challenge in business, and that's when you really need to show up and you really need to start. Practicing the, the work that you've been doing. And this is the work that I preach, so I have to learn how to practice what I preach.

Otherwise, it's not very embodied, is it? But I have gotten to a point where I'm able to completely neutralize and stabilize and. Calm my nervous system and create safety in those periods where I don't completely spiral into doom and gloom and make all these dark stories about why I'm not good enough and why my product's not good enough.

Yes, my mind can go there, but I'm able to manage my mind. And so this is the work that you need to learn is to manage your mind so it doesn't manage you and. Can I tell you in almost all of those launch situations, we get like most of our sales on the last day, and that's because you've held the faith.

You are committed to your program, you're committed to the process. You're not giving up. You are fully in it, and you're just being grounded in it, and you're holding the vision and you're not swaying, you're not wavering. You know, there's a lot of wavering that happens like, oh, no one bought, and so I'm not good enough, and so I'm just going to not sell my product.

That's wavering. You need to be grounded in your vision and committed to the launch, to fully seeing it through and being fully. In it and stepping fully off the mountain or taking the full leap, not a half foot in, half foot out. You need to completely leap and go through that process.

And then you'll find often on the last day you get a bunch of sales in. And that's just because people need time to make purchasing decisions. And they just needed to figure some things out. Maybe they needed to speak to a partner, maybe they needed to just figure out their financial thing and whatever it is.

People often buy on the last day. People often buy on the last hour. It happens all the time, so don't think it's over when it's just begun. You've still got an entire open cart period. And also just because someone doesn't buy your first launch the first time you launch your program, it's very likely that they will buy later down the line.

Sometimes I've had people in my audience for I think years and they've probably gone through multiple launches of the product, and they have only purchased. Maybe on the fifth launch or the sixth launch. And that's just the nature of the game. And that's why you're always wanting to grow your audience.

You're always want to get new people on your email list because there's people at different time points. And there's people that are ready now and there's people who aren't ready now, but there are people who will be ready later. That's how the business runs. You'll pick up the people who want to buy now, later down the line, others will buy and that is fine.

So don't make stories about it. Don't think that you're not good enough. It's absolutely nonsense. It's just the way it works. And it's like this for pretty much everyone who launches. It's not just a you thing. There's that mid cart free fall where you've got like few sales coming in and you feel like doom and gloom.

That's the time to really manage your mind. And show up fully. That's the hardest part actually of the launch is managing your emotions and not going down a loop of negativity and try just, that's going to take practice, but that's what you need to build as an entrepreneur, as someone who's selling stuff.

If someone doesn't buy, you can't go and then make it mean that you're not good enough, you're not worthy enough and you can't make it so personal, this is business. Just because someone's not buying your product doesn't mean you're not good enough.

Like you are inherently good enough and full and you know, perfect in yourself. This is just a product thing and it's, it's a business thing and you need to separate the two, and it's like something you just need to learn over time and exercise over time like a muscle, right? But the key is you want to be in a neutral space, unattached to the outcome, but you want to be madly excited about your offer and you want to show up with that mad excitement and confidence.

And that goes a very long way. People feel that energy, people are magnetized to that energy, people magnetized to you just leading yourself and being fully in it. And that is just so respectable. Like magnetic in itself. If you are, if you are putting yourself down and you know, being this like defeated victim, that's not going to work, right?

People can feel that energy as well. So I gave you some strategy tips, very simple tips. You can add them to any launch. As you go, as you want to pivot your launch, if you want to change direction, these are great things to do. All of them can be done. I recommend doing all of them if you can, because I think they're great.

I think they're great for any launch. Even if the launch is going well, you can make and go even better by doing this. And yeah, just enjoy learning. Again, remember when you finish launching, the key is to just look at your launch. Debrief the numbers. Look. You know who bought all of that jazz? Do a full launch debrief.

I'll probably create a podcast episode on what kind of debrief you should be doing, what numbers you should be looking at. because remember you want to look at the data so you don't get emotional and make random stories about stuff. Data doesn't lie. And you just need to look like a scientist at the data and pick apart what worked, what didn't work, and then you just do it again and you do it better next time.

And that is how you get good at it. And that's how you get good at selling stuff is just through doing the thing, learning from it, tweaking, adjusting and repeating. So repeating, rinsing and repeating over and over. 

All right, I hope this was very helpful to you. I hope you have an amazing day. I will be chatting to you very soon, bye.

Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. If you love what you heard today, then be sure to share it with me by leaving a five star review so I can continue delivering these goodies. If you aren't already following me on social media, then come tune in to some daily inspiration on Instagram, by following @_digiteach_ or visiting my website at digiteach.biz. 

I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.