Want to learn how to launch?
Do you want to learn how to launch?
Call it a blessing or a curse, but at this stage of my business - nearly six years in - I’ve been around the launching block a time or two.
I’ve launched so many times in fact that I think it was Dana Snyder who once called me “The Launching Queen”. 👑 I just need a crown.
I’ve launched ugly 😩 - like when the pandemic broke out and everyone was canceling their in-person fundraisers. I remember running to my local gym, throwing my daughter in the kids club and busting out a toolkit on How to Take Your In-Person Events Online in just two hours. It did ok.
I’ve launched surprisingly easily 😮💨 - like when I launched my first Raise More Together Summit. From deciding I was going to host the event to actually launching it was just six weeks (don’t recommend 🥵) and I had less than 600 people on my email list. My “pie-in-the-sky” goal was 500 and much to my surprise, nearly 800 people registered! It was the first time I thought - huh, maybe this can be that easy.
I’ve launched and flopped 👎, like the one time I was going through some deeply personal things and tried to launch a group coaching program on how to start a monthly giving program. Three days in and no sales - I decided cancel the launch. Not my best performance.
Over the last six months, I’ve been getting asked more and more about launching from my fellow nonprofit consultants watching my moves 👀 - it’s cool, I do it too. While I wish I could do a Zoom call with everyone, I’m finding I’m getting asked the same questions over and over.
Instead of answering them, here are three pieces of launching advice I know to be true.
#1: IT’S JUST MATH
Your product or your service is your baby - I get it. You’ve likely been dreaming it up for weeks, months - hell, maybe even years. You’ve perfected it and now it’s ready to bring to the world. Congratulations! 🎉
You might wish you had a magic ball to predict how much you will sell, but it’s just math. You can literally calculate what you can expect to sell based on your audience size and your conversion rates.
BIG NOTE: While the world seems to think that 1-3%, maybe even 5% conversion rates are average, nonprofit buyers (in my personal experience) are just…different. I have a very engaged audience and I personally have never broken the 1% threshold, but I’m trying!
So back to the math.
A lot of people come to me with launching questions and I ask them about their email list size (yes, email is going to be your best marketing tool - more on that later) to which they tell me a number.
Let’s say they tell me 200.
200 x 1% = 2 sales
200 x 2% = 4 sales
200 x 3% = 6 sales
Knowing these numbers can help you price your product because making 2-6 sales on a $97 product is very different from 2-6 sales on a $6,000 product.
#2: YOUR PRE-LAUNCH PHASE WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOUR SALES
I’ve totally done the thing where you build your product or service and get the guts to launch and….crickets.
99.9% of the time is because you failed to properly warm your audience up. I call this the warm up phase.
Again, the online gurus of the world think that this can be achieved in 4 weeks. Personally, I’ve seen much better results when I embrace 60 to even 90 days.
Is that a long time to be talking about one thing? You bet.
Is it what our specific nonprofit buyers need? A lot of the time - yeah.
Think about it - lots of nonprofit pros need to get leadership approval, budget approval, board approval, God’s approval - ok I'm kidding with that last one, but you get the picture. Most don’t get to call the shots like we do in our own business (unfortunately).
Let’s use my Make It Happen Conference as an example, tickets go on sale April 26th and the event is on May 16th and 17th.
That means that when I announced the dates in this email, I started warming people up to the idea of attending this virtual conference for nonprofit consultants SEVEN WEEKS before anyone can buy a ticket and TEN weeks before the actual event.
My pre-launch content has consisted of everything from:
Sending folks a survey to get their insights
Teasing speakers and their sessions
Highlighting what will be different this round
Driving people to join the waitlist
Hosting a booth at ICON - if you’ll be there say hi!
…even this blog serves as pre-launch content (very meta!).
Notice what it isn’t ❌: Just telling people that the conference is coming over and over again.
While announcements have a place, it can’t be the only pre-launch content you share or people will stop paying attention.
Remember, you are not marketing your product or service - you are building anticipation around buying it.
#3: EMAIL MARKETING IS YOUR BEST FRIEND
A few months back, when I surveyed past Make It Happen attendees, I was shocked to learn that 60% of nonprofit consultants didn’t utilize an email list.
Of that 60%, 80% had email lists of 300 subscribers or less.
I couldn’t believe it.
Not just because email has been the single most profitable tool in my own business, but because according to everything I’ve read, it’s the most profitable marketing tool in any business.
I’m currently reading Ann Handly’s Everybody Writes where she references the ROI of email marketing at 38:1 meaning - for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect to get $38 back.
Show me how to do THAT on LinkedIn.
It hasn’t happened overnight, but I’m at a point with my email list that I can expect for every sales email I put out to get at least $1k back. Again, that’s not something I could ever count on Instagram to do.
This is all to say that if you want to launch anything:
A waitlist
A 1:1 coaching package
A group coaching program
A retainer contract
A digital product
A toolkit
Tickets to a virtual or live event
...or whatever else you offer - I’m begging you to use email marketing.
Finally, if you are as nosey as me and love nothing and I mean nothing more than a launch recap - I’m going to be offering a bonus session for VIP ticket buyers at the next Make It Happen Conference on May 16th and 17th.
In this session, I will break down all of my pre-launch content, my pre-launch and sales emails, the nitty gritty numbers, expenses, revenue and more. If you’ve been wondering about hosting your own virtual or in-person event (yes! You can do it! 👏) - this might be the best way to see how I do it for my events - no detail will be spared.
Tickets go live Tuesday, April 25th, but you can join the waitlist now and not miss a thing!