Launch Reality Check: Understanding and Setting Realistic Expectations

Your Dream Business

I’m spilling the beans on product launches – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Drawing from real-life examples, I discuss common misconceptions about product launches and outline realistic expectations for success, breaking down the numbers and letting you know what to expect when you hit that launch button. I also highlight factors that can influence your launch and share tips on how to make it a success, even if it's not a blockbuster. Tune in to learn the truth about product launches and how you can set realistic goals for your online business!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

1. Realistic Expectations: Avoid unrealistic expectations about launch success. Focus on incremental improvements and celebrate small wins.
2. Understand Conversion Rates: Be aware of typical sign-up, show-up, and purchase rates to manage expectations and measure success effectively.
3. Consider Influencing Factors: Recognize that factors like audience size, engagement level, advertising, and pricing strategies can significantly impact launch outcomes.

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LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Denise Duffield-Thomas Launch Debrief Part 1 Denise Duffield-Thomas Launch Debrief Part 2 Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

Transcript

Have you ever done a launch and felt really disappointed in the results that you got? And when you look at other people's, they look so successful and have hundreds and thousands of people buying their stuff. Well, what if you could get the details on the stats behind those launches? Actually, would they be as more amazing than yours than you think? I think you'll be surprised. In today's episode, I am going to be taking you through some real life launches and giving you the percentages that you can expect to get in your launch and that others have got in theirs. I'll be sharing with you what numbers you need to track, what is realistic when it comes to those numbers and what things will affect the results of your launches and your sales. If you have an online product that you want to launch, this episode is not to be missed. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. How are you doing? So this week? I've got a really good episode for you because I've really noticed something recently. I, part of what I do is obviously I work with people to launch and to sell their online [00:02:00] products. And one thing I've noticed a lot with people is their expectation of what a launch should look like. They have watched huge people do these amazing massive launches, having Thousands of people going through it and they now think, well, that's what I should expect. But the truth is, they're not taking into account the size of the audience to begin with. So although it looks amazing and awesome that someone might do a webinar and have thousands of people on it, they're not considering, well, what's the size of their audience compared to the size of mine. So what happens is they will come to me very disappointed with the sign up or the turn up or the sales rate. And then I will work out the percentages and I will be saying to them, you've actually done really well. And like I said, I've noticed this a lot. I've noticed this coming up. So I wanted to do an episode all about this, and I am excited. Now, if you've listened to my episodes before, you will know I am a kind of fly by the seat in [00:03:00] my pants girl, and I give myself some rough notes to follow. Otherwise, I just talk ad lib. This one, I have made lots of notes. This one, I've actually done some math and worked out percentages and various things to give you. So you are going to walk away from this episode with so much good information that hopefully it's going to make you feel so much more confident when it comes to what you should expect when launching your digital products or your course, your membership, your group coaching program, whatever it might be. Now I'm going to ask a favor, not only for me, but for your business friends. I want you to share this episode with them. Whether it's personally, whether it's on your stories, because the more people can hear this very realistic discussion about what you should expect from these launches and what actually the percentages turn out to be, the much more happier I guess we will be with the results that we get, but also we won't beat ourselves up and we will start to understand [00:04:00] how we can improve and tweak and move forward from those figures. Like I said, I am super excited for this episode and I think you're going to get a whole lot from it. So buckle in, let's go. Have you ever heard the saying what gets measured gets improved? This is really true because if we don't actually know What we're looking at. And if we don't know what's good and what's not good, then how can we tweak it and improve it? And how can we know whether it's worked or not worked? And is it realistic? What has happened? So, like I said, we will see amazing, amazing results where people do a Awesome launches and get tens of thousands of people into their programs. They earn an absolute shed ton of money as then we, when we start in the online route and we're not getting the same, we think that there's a problem, but the truth is, it's not the full picture. And what I want to do is show you what that full picture looks like. So I'm going to take you through three, three main areas today. I'm going to talk to you [00:05:00] about the numbers you need to measure and what kind of things we can measure, because that's the first thing, what should you even be looking at? And even if it makes not a lot of sense to in the first place, still keeping a track of these in the early days will really help. Number two, we're going to look at what is realistic. Now, this is the bit that is gold because we're going to go through, I'm actually going to walk you through some percentages of real life launches. And I have lots of examples to give you. of real life launches and what you can expect and what that turns into from a money point of view or from a signup point of view. And then the final thing I'm going to be sharing with you is the things that can affect your launch. So these results I'm going to give you, I know behind the launch. So I know all the details of all the launch and therefore, I'm going to help you understand some of the things that made them successful or not so successful, and things that you want to look out for so that when you're looking at yours and you think, mine isn't as good as [00:06:00] that, then there might be reasons behind that. Okay. Let's get going. So let's start with the first thing, the beauty of being in the online space. Now, I have been around in marketing for no joke, 20 years, 10 years in marketing, following doing a degree in marketing, and then 10 years in my own business. So for 20 years, I've been in the marketing space. And the beauty about what we do now is everything is trackable. And it's not even that confusing. All the systems you're using, the emails, the platforms you're selling things on, their whole thing is set up, designed to give you as much information as possible. But even the basic stuff is perfect. It's great. That's the stuff that we're going to be looking at. We're not going to be doing anything too confusing. So this isn't to overwhelm you. This is purely to give you an awareness of what's available, but also kind of what the basics are that you want to get. Okay. Let's start right from the beginning. And when I say the beginning, I'm talking about the [00:07:00] way in which I would come through the process if I was your customer. So the way in which we build these things is very different. But if I was your customer, probably the first thing I'm going to see is a social media post of some sort. Now, Hopefully I don't need to tell you that we can track loads of stuff on social media. So we can track things like the impressions. And impressions, in case you don't know, is the number of people who that post was put in front of. So although it is a bit of a vanity metric, because great that loads of people saw it, but we want them to take action. Obviously it makes perfect sense that the more impressions you get, the more action you get on that post. So impressions is the first thing, then clicks. So how many people have clicked on that post or how many people have taken the action on that post? It might be that they commented a word for a chatbot or something like that. Now I'm going to, I'm not going to focus on these two as much as the other stuff when we get to the examples because these numbers can be quite low and this obviously isn't the only way that people are going to [00:08:00] find you, but I want to include it just because it is an important one to, to look at as well. The next thing you're going to have is landing page views. Now, If you imagine that I've seen your promotion and I'm going to say the word webinar a lot through this and just change webinar for challenge or bootcamp or masterclass or whatever launch methods you want to use and really you should be using a launch method. I feel like I'm getting into the weeds a bit here and I'm trying not to because that is a whole nother podcast on its own and you'll see I do a lot more sort of podcasts coming forward about this. But so if I say webinar, Take it for whatever launch method you're going to use. So I can click from social media to go through to your landing page, i. e. the page that I'm going to sign up to the webinar with, or I could come from an email and go to your landing page. So. Like I said, social media is just one thing. Email is another. There could be others. You could be running ads, but landing page views is a really important one. So how many people viewed your [00:09:00] landing page and then how many people opted in? Two different things. I can come and view your landing page, take a look at the webinar that you're going to be doing and decide that's not for me. Or I can view your landing page and go, yes, I want to opt in. And obviously your aim is to get as many people to opt in on that page. So then you're going to end up with the stats for the number of people who signed up for your webinar. So we've seen how many people came to the page. We've seen potentially where they've come from, and we've seen how many people have signed up, opted into your webinar. The next one we're going to have is the show up rate. Now things like webinars and bootcamps and masterclasses, the more you can get people to show up live, the better. And that's for many different reasons, but mainly the reasons are one, they're going to be engaged. Whereas you know what it's like, you sign up for a webinar, you sign up for a summit or whatever it might be. And you think, Oh, I'll definitely watch that later. And then you don't. So if you can get them to take the action and do the thing live, [00:10:00] great. So. Showing up live is really important. And then the second one is for me anyway, I love to interact with people and that really helps me. So you'll, they'll get to ask me questions. They get to kind of really get the most out of it. So the show up rate's really important. So how many people signed up and then how many people showed up. Then the next thing you're going to look at is your email sort of interactions now. And it said email open rate. Now the open rate is helpful. However, the way that tech is now, you can't rely on the open rate. So the only thing I would do is look at your own open rate against your own open rate. So. If your open rate is going down, if your open rate is going up, if your open rate is staying the same, then that's the only way I would track it. I wouldn't, and like I said, unfortunately, the open rate is affected by external things that we can't control, so I don't always look at that as a kind of solid thing, but I would track it against my own stuff. The next thing on emails is the click. So how many people are opening your email [00:11:00] and clicking to go through to the sales page or go through to the place that you're asking them to either book or pay or whatever it is. The next thing that you should be looking at is your sales page views. So the page that you're asking them to take the action and we'll get to. Some of the different actions you might ask them to take, but it could be book a call. It could be buy on that page. How many people are viewing it? And then how many people are taking the action? So if it's an action to buy, it's then how many people have bought. Like I said, this isn't, I'm trying not to overwhelm you. I know I'm giving you a lot of things to look at here, but actually when you start doing these things, it's not that difficult and it should be pretty easy for you to do on the systems that you're using. So let me just run through those quickly. Again, social media, you can look at impressions and clicks, landing page views, very important. How many people are viewing it and how many people are actually opting in. [00:12:00] From the opt ins, i. e. the signups, how many people are showing up? And then when you start sending out your sales emails, how many people are opening, clicking? How many sales page views you're getting and how many conversions are you getting? You can also break it down to how many people came from the webinar and did they come from the live or the replay? You could also add on how many people watched the replay if there was the replay views to watch as well. Okay, so as you can see from each area, there are lots of things that will go into these figures and there are lots of ways in which you can prove, improve them and which you can tweak them and we will talk about some of those things at the end in point three. And like I said, I'm trying not to overwhelm you, but these are kind of some of the basics. The basics that I ask for when I work with people are landing page views, landing page opt ins, how many people signed up for the actual webinar, how many people showed up for the webinar and how many things they sold. So those are the kind of key things I'm looking for. And those are [00:13:00] probably the percentages I'm going to talk about. Okay, point two. Let's talk about actual real life launches and real life stats. Now, I am one of those people who instead of watching Netflix, I go through people's launches like no one's business. And obviously it's my job. I have watched and helped and supported and coached and consulted lots of people on lots of launches. So the figures that I'm going to go through here are from real businesses. Some are big businesses and some are small teeny tiny businesses. But the thing that I want you to focus on is the percentage. Now this is the thing that lots of people don't take into account. However, This is the thing where you're going to understand the reality of what you can expect. And what I don't want you to do here is I don't want you to get disheartened. Now we talk a lot about the fact that this is a numbers game and it really can be a numbers game, [00:14:00] especially with an online business. And I hate saying it's a numbers game because one thing I really pride myself in is seeing my audience. Having conversations with them knowing who they are. I don't do anything that has thousands of people in it because I just couldn't cope with that. However, when it comes to people buying online, it is a numbers game and it does come down to the percentage. So like I said, these are some real things that I've been involved in and then things that I know about. One of them I'm including in here is Denise Duffield Thomas. Now she does a really good debrief of her launches and I've actually used some of that in order as one of my examples of, I've got like probably about 15 actual real life examples that I'm looking at in front of me. I'm going to actually link to the blog post that she's put in so that you can see her debrief. It's really good. I love it when a big person like that does a debrief because you can really get to see the real extent of how this works for them. [00:15:00] Okay. So the first step we're going to look at is the number of people who sign up to the webinar. And I want to base this percentage on the size of someone's list. Now, when I look at the, the stats in front of me, I'm basically going to give you the lowest percentage and then the highest percentage, and you will be surprised. Which kind of person is getting the lowest and the highest? Because often we'd expect that if you're new to this, you'd be getting the lowest percentage, but that's not always the case. Because sometimes with a really small list, you have a very dedicated audience and with a smaller number of people that you're dealing with, you can actually give them much more attention. Again, this will come to, this will be more, I'll explain better if I can get my words out when we get to step three. Okay. So number of people who sign up to a webinar, roughly between two and 15 percent of your email list will sign up to your webinar. Okay. So [00:16:00] again, the kind of lists that I'm looking at are in the hundreds of thousands, all the way down to a couple of hundred. So I really have got a big mix here. So like I said, roughly between 2 and 15 percent. I am going to use the example of a list that's 5, 000 big. Okay, for my examples to give you the percentages going through, but I'll also give you some other examples. So if you had a list of 5, 000 people and you got 2 percent of them to opt into a webinar, that's a hundred people you're getting on that list. If you had a list of 5, 000...