Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 93 of The Shine Show. And today, I am going to lift up my dress and show you my knickers. Yes, I am going to take you behind the scenes and do a full launch debrief on our recent A-Lister Launch. I share with you the good, the bad and the ugly, so that you can get a view for what a launch really looks like. What happens that's great, what happens that's not so great. And, how we navigate those things. Enjoy the episode. And after you've listened, send me a DM on Instagram and tell me which bit you love the most, and which part you're going to take and implement in your next launch.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack. And, I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads, so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in. Because, you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Live launching. Am I right? I mean, phew, there's a lot that goes into that and we can probably talk about it for days and days. So, my goal with today's episode is to share with you a little bit behind the scenes of what worked really well in our recent A-Lister launch. And frankly, share with you the good, the bad and the ugly of what needs improvement. And, I want you to know that the reason I share this with you, it's not because I'm all braggadocious about the numbers. I mean, I am a little bit braggadocious about the numbers. But, I remember feeling like this whole launching thing, is like this enigma, mystery that some people seem to get and other people don't get. And, I will never forget the first time I saw, it was Denise Duffield-Thomas, who shared an in-depth unpack of one of her launches.

And, I think she shared it in blog format. And, I think I saved that blog and read it 600 times. Because, it was the first time that someone wasn't just explaining the theory of launching to me, they were actually showing me behind the scenes numbers and situations that unfolded in real life, and what it looks like in real life. So, my gratitude to Denise for sharing unpacks of her live launches is now, hopefully turning into something that is helpful to you. It's also born from what happened to me in 2016. When I did my very first live launch, selling my online course called the Facebook Live Superstar. This was my very first course. And, I had been trying to build the business for about two years at that point, and failing. But, what I was really good at was going live on Facebook. And so, everyone was saying, "How are you doing this?" So, I created a course. Teaching them how I could do this, how I'm doing this.

And, I learned how to run ads and ran $400 worth of ads, and made $2,000. And, thought that it was the biggest failure ever, because I felt like, well, I've worked for two years to show $2,000. At the end of it, was not going to make up for the $40,000 debt I'd racked up trying to get this business off the ground. So, I felt really demotivated and flat, and I quit. And, I went back to my day job. And, it wasn't until a lot later that I shared those results with someone. And they said, "What, that is amazing, you should have just done it again." That I kind of had this, doh, moment. And I went, "Oh, I should've just done it again."

So if I can, in anyway, help you see the context of some of the numbers here, help you see that everybody has things that doesn't work in their launches. And, there were a lot of things that do work that maybe you're not recognizing them as working. Then I will be very, very happy. And then, I feel like my goal with this episode will have been achieved. So, I'm going to break down the episode into three parts. And the three parts, and the three parts of the results that I'm going to share, is the three parts of a live launch, really. So, the first part is the runway, the runway phase. Then we have the pre-launch phase. And then, we have the launch phase. So, let's start with the runway phase. The runway phase is really anything from nine months, it can be nine months, or six weeks or three months.

It is the period of time leading up to your live launch, where you're telling people it's coming. Now, I know Stu McLaren, who is the creator of Tribe and whose Mastermind I'm in. He is in this runway, pretty much for almost 10 months. Because, about 10 months out from his last, or at least around two months after his last launch, he announces the date for the doors to open for the next round. Now, you can do this if you have a once a year launch. Some of us have twice a year launches, then your runway might be shorter, it might be four months long. Or if you are just starting out and you are just juggling all the plates, your runway could be six weeks long, and that's okay too. But, I do want you to be deliberate about this period leading up to your launch.

If you think about any blockbuster movies that come out, they announce years before the movie comes out, that the movie's coming. You would get all the social media, and you would get little snippets maybe from the stars that are in the movie while they're making it, teasing you. And, they would just say, "Coming Christmas 2023." And you'd be like, "Oh, Christmas, 2023, I can't wait for my favorite blockbuster movie to come out then." It's kind of a little bit like that. So, it builds that anticipation and gets people to mentally start putting that date in their calendars, to mentally start preparing for what's about to come. And also, if you just think about how our brains work, like now we have a timeline, now we have a journey. So now, we're paying more attention because we know there's a clear end date to this thing that we anticipating.

It also works like when you go to a comedy show, my husband and I went to a... I suppose it's a stand-up comedy show, but they call it sit down comedy, because we were sitting and eating. We went to this stand-up comedy show the other night and it was great. I loved it. But more so, probably the last acts than the first ones. The first ones tend to be the warmup acts. And, there were three warm-up acts. And, the first person that came on, it was her very first live stand-up comedy show. Yeah, it showed. But, good on her for getting up there, good on her for having a go, good on her for doing what she loves. And, we applauded her. And then, another guy came on and he was hilarious. He was really funny.

And then finally, another lady came on and she was absolutely hysterically funny. And so, by the time that the main act came on, my stomach muscles were already sore. My face was sore. And, I'd had a few glasses of wine at the time, so that probably also helped the main act. But, your runway is a little bit like these supporting acts. It sets the scene and it sets the tone, and it gets your people into the right mindset. So without a proper runway, you will lack a certain level of energy and momentum. So, your runway serves to start winding up the audience, it serves to start to building energy and momentum and telling them what is coming. Your runway typically, would have a very specific purpose for your podcast content, your guest posting, your social media, your blog and your ads.

In your ads, you're going to focus on list building. So, what we did during the runway phase was, on the podcast and on social media, I had clear calls to action for my Lead Magnet, that I know is a very good lead into the A-Lister Course. It's the five day video training that teaches people how to get their first list building ad up. And, I know people just love this Lead Magnet, so I had a heavy focus around that. I also invited a lot of my students to come on the podcast and I shared their success stories. Because, their success is my success. And, I don't have to tell the listeners how amazing I am, if I have students coming on telling us how amazing the results are, that they got in their businesses as a result of what they learned from me. I also and I would have to say, this was more luck than strategy.

Luckily, I had an invitation from Amy Porterfield to be on her podcast. And, the content I chose to share on her podcast was perfectly positioned for anyone who is curious about taking the step towards starting to use ads to build their audience. I positioned it in such a way that it appeals to anyone who is frustrated with trying to build an audience on social media, who is feeling like they've wasted a lot of money on ads, or feeling like they just don't have the support and the guidance to really make good decisions with their ads. And so, I shared my engagement strategy with Amy, with her audience, which worked really well to attract the right kind of people. I also shared it, which was also a little bit more luck than strategy, but inside of Stu McLaren's community, there was a call for guest contributors, to the content inside his membership.

He's a membership is filled with people who are perfect for A-Lister. And so, I shared the same kind of strategy over there, and I'm sure that that has also contributed to the success. On social media, we ran a lot of posts for the Lead Magnet. We promoted Amy's podcast and I kept promoting my students. And, we also would tease every now and then that A-Lister is coming and you should sign up for the waitlist. As far as the ads go, I started running engagement ads, and made sure that the content of the engagement ads lined up with what I just said, what is the biggest challenges, the biggest pain points that our customers for A-Lister has? And that is, that they feel like they're selling their souls on social media. They feel like they're trading water on social media. They feel like they're walking through mud with social media, because they're just keep working and working and working, and they don't get anywhere with social media.

I also created some content around wasting money with running ads, the way we used to run them in 2017, which just doesn't work. And also, about running ads without actually having a clear strategy, which is a recipe for wasting money. But, those are all things that my ideal customer for A-Lister can really associate with and, or things that they want to overcome. So, we ran a lot of engagement ads around those messaging. And then of course, we ran this building ads that led people into the 5 Day Video Training, that teaches them how to get their first list building ad up. Now, you might be wondering, why would I have a Lead Magnet that teach people how to build Facebook ads, when I'm going to sell them a course that teaches them how to build Facebook ads.

And here's why, and maybe this is something that you need to hear today. Facebook ads, the nature of Facebook ads is such that, you can literally watch a YouTube video and learn how to run Facebook ads. If you are just what we call a lever-puller, you have the ability to watch a video, and then see which buttons to press and which levers to pull, then you can run ads. But, learning to successfully run ads, has nothing to do with button pressing and lever-pulling, it has to do with understanding this marketing strategy behind the ads and understanding the business strategy. So, I know that I'm okay if I give people that first win, that a lot of people don't give them because they want to sell it to them, if my people already have a win under their belts, if they've already been able to place a pixel, or create a custom conversion, or run a simple list building ad, then they are more likely to come into my course with a higher-level of knowledge, and with a better quality question that I can then support them with and help and guide them.

So, I then bring them in to a course that teaches them the strategies to succeed, not just the lever-pulling. And, I don't sell to them the lever-pulling, because nobody wants the lever-pulling. They get stuck on that and they have this momentary, "Ahg, if someone can just show me how this tech works," moment and that's when I show them how the tech works in the 5 Day Video Series. But, as soon as they figure out how the tech work, then that opens up 700 new questions for them. And, those are usually strategy questions, and that is what I want to address in the course, and that's the students that I want to work with, or the ones who are more interested in the strategy. So, in October... So, the launch happened in January, so I started my runway phase in October. And in October, I spent $2,000 on ads.

I ran those engagement ads, and then we also ran list building ads. And I added 600 people to my email list. And, we also retargeted people who went to the landing page for the 5 Day Video Training, but who didn't opt-in. And, those retargeting ads didn't do much, because that landing page converts at almost 80%. So, there weren't many people to retarget, which is a great problem to have. Then in November, I spent another $2,000. This time we wanted to build more warm audiences, so we ran even more engagement ads. We added video view ads to the mix and we added some traffic ads, which we ran to the podcast episode I did with Amy Porterfield. And, we also ran some list building ads, and I added another 400 people to my list. So at least, I knew I'm going into this with a thousand new people on my email list.

And then in December, I doubled the budget to $4,000 and we doubled down on the engagement, the video views and the traffic ads. And, we doubled down on the list building, and I added another 830 people to my email list. So, my email list had a really nice injection of new blood into it. We also cut our email list. We also cut off... It literally felt like I was cutting off my arm. I cut off anyone who hadn't opened an email in 90 days. If they had not opened an email from me in three months, then I called them from my list, which was devastating. Because, after growing my list and then calling it, I was kind of back where I started. So, my list size didn't grow, but at least my open rate went up, and at least the life in my email list did grow.

So, that was basically our runway strategy, and that's what we did in the runway phase. Then moving onto the pre-launch phase. Now, the pre-launch phase is that phase that you're in about seven to 10 days before your big conversion event. Let me explain. Your big conversion event is a webinar, or a three-part video series, or the beginning of a challenge, or a live series or what ever, I kind of referred to it as the party, the live party that you invite people to, where you have a giant big live event happening. And at the end of that event, you have a call to action for them to become your paying students. So, that's what we call the conversion event. And, it could be a webinar, or a video series or anything. It's kind of like a grand opening of maybe a new shopping center, or a hotel or something.

You have in the runway phase, you build that anticipation, you say, "It's coming, it's coming, it's coming," and then you host this live conversion event. It's the grand opening, and you have timely bonuses, and you have things that happen on the call and things that motivate people to take action instantly. So what we did was, we used the podcast. There was one episode that overlapped with this pre-launch phase to tell people to come and register for the event. We used social media, changed all the banners. I went live twice a week inside my page and on a Facebook Group that I have, and drummed up all the enthusiasm for everyone to sign up for this event. We also ran ads to the webinars. So, I decided to host a webinar. I'll be honest, it's just because webinars are the thing that I've always been doing. It's the thing that I feel like most comfortable with doing.

It's the thing that I kind of feel like I can do it with my eyes closed. I am curious about doing video series, but I have just never, ever sat down and literally mapped out what it would look like to create that video series. I'm a member of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula, and I love, love, love what he teaches. And I love, love, love video series launches, just haven't done one myself. So, we decided to use a webinar and I spent $10,000 on webinar registration ads. The ads resulted in 807 leads for the webinar, and that was both warm and cold traffic. So, that means people who were already in my world, we sent them ads to sign up for the webinar, and people who had never, ever heard of me, we sent them ads to sign up for the webinar as well.

And, the previous launches that we've done, there was a bit of a challenge with getting people to open the emails for the webinar, leading up to the webinar. And then also, just getting people to show up for the webinar. I think in the industry that I serve, by the time online course creators learn Facebook ads, they have been on a lot of webinars and they've bought a lot of online courses. And so, I need to know that I can make up for that level of jadedness, that is already existing there. So, I decided to put a video on my thank you page for when they registered. And in that video, I tell them that I've just sent them an email with a secret question that I want them to hit reply and tell me the answer to that question. It worked like a bomb, because our open rates on those first few emails were through the roof.

And, I was able to start having two-way conversations with people who signed up for the webinar even before they showed up for the webinar. And, I sincerely believe that the energy that this built and the momentum that this created, and then just the personal patch that I already... By the time you were on the webinar, I already knew people's names. I'd already had discussions with them. I knew who they served and what the differences that they make. And, I knew what they wanted from me, so that helped a lot. The fact that they hit reply to those emails was also an indicator to Google, to Gmail, that they see my email as valuable. And so, that meant that Gmail was less-likely to seam the email into spam. So, that went really, really well. And, we ended up with a 29% overall show up rate on the webinar, which was a lot better than the previous round, when my previous launch, we had 17% show up rate.

So, I was very happy that from the 830 people that I paid for, that I paid $10,000 for, to register for my webinar or the 807 people that registered for the webinar, that I was able to get 29% of them to show up, which made me very, very, very happy. And, I believe that, that translated into sales. Once they were on the webinar, I will tell you, I made a decision to keep the camera on. On previous webinars, I've kind of been a little bit more scripted, a little bit more polished, and I kept the camera off unless I was doing Q&A. This time, I decided to keep the camera on, and I just wanted to connect with them and have fun with them. And, I loved it. And, the webinar live conversion rate was 7%.

So, 7% of the people who showed up for the webinar bought, and that is a good result. I think it can be better. I want to say, I'm aiming for 10% next time. But, one of the reasons I think it converted lower than 10% is because I had a no live show up bonus, I had no disappearing bonus, I had no fast action bonus with the creation of the launch, it just got to the point where I went, "I don't have the bandwidth to create the program, manage the launch and have all these bonuses." So, I made a decision to just get it out there without the bonuses. And, do I regret that decision? I do not. I would have done it again the same way, because it was a decision I made for my sanity. But, I could hear from the questions, people were asking me on the webinar, "How long do we have to decide?"

Which I kind of was like, "That's a bizarre question, how long do they have to decide?" And then, after unpacking it with my launch manager, I realized, "Oh, it's because people are trained for webinars and they're expecting a show up bonus." They're expecting to get something special for the fact that they showed up live. So, the next time I will definitely reward my live show uppers, shower uppers, with a live show, a bonus, and I will have a early bird bonus as well. As far as the conversion days go, we had our highest number of conversions on cart open day, which you would expect, but usually, you would also expect a highest conversion rights on cart close day. Now, an interesting thing happened in this launch, which I did not anticipate happening was, I made the decision to close the doors on Thursday, the 21st of January midday, Brisbane Time.

That is about 4:00 PM Pacific Time on the 20th of January, which, if you remember, was Inauguration Day. And, I feel we got our... So, we had our highest conversion rate on cart open day. And then, we had our highest conversion rate, the 48 hours, the day before cart close day. So, the day before Inauguration Day, we got a lot of sales. And then on cart close day, we did not get many sales. I also went live. I was planning on being live for two hours. I ended up stripping it back to an hour, because I was there on Facebook Live talking to myself. Because, I think everyone was nailed to their TVs watching the inauguration. So next time, I will check that I am not competing with any new presidents. That is not a competition, I think I will ever win. So, we had our highest... I wonder had court closed day not aligned with inauguration day, if we would have gotten more sales on that last day.

But anyway, it is what it is. We ended up getting 56 sales from the 806 people who showed up for the webinar, who signed up. That is a 7% overall conversion rate, which is good. I'll take it any day. And again, next time, I'm going to aim for 10%. I think 10% would be a really good push goal for me to go for. So in summary, what worked really well? I'll say, this worked really well for me. In 2020, I launched A-Lister for the first time. I did launch it on the... It was like the 20th of March that cart opened, which was also the exact same day that everything shut down due to COVID. So, a bit of a timing issue there. But what I did well, that served me really well in this launch, was after that initial A-Lister Launch, I surveyed the people that didn't buy A-Lister and I asked them, "Why not?"

And the answer I got, I had never anticipated this. I didn't see this coming. But, the answer I got was because we don't want to build our email list. So at that point, last year when I launched A-Lister, I launched it as, the promise of the course was, I'm going to show you how to build your email list and get your first 1000 subscribers. And the feedback I got was, "I would rather change the tires on my car than build my email list, or learn to build my email list." And, when I surveyed my audience and I asked them, "Well, what do you want?" The resounding, like what I want that came out was, "I want to just find people who want to buy something from me." And I was like, "Well, yeah, that's what you do when you build an email list." But, I realized that I had been speaking to a feature instead of a benefit.

I was selling a feature instead of a benefit. I was selling them on what they need, instead of selling them on what they want. So this time, I completely redid the sales page, we completely redid the promise of the course. I added in a few extra bonuses, my friend, the copywriters, Zafira Rajan, added a bonus swipe file, email swipe file. And, my other friend Sal Frances added a Template Tribe, Canva Templates for ads. So, we added in a whole lot of things that allowed me to then change the promise, from build your email list and get to a thousand people, to build an engaged audience and make your first or next sale to them. So, that made a huge difference; because now, I was selling to people what they want, instead of what they need. So, that worked really well. The other thing that worked really well was getting my current students involved.

I have amazing, phenomenal, fantastic, I love them, students inside the membership I launched last year called the Launch Lounge, which is not open for enrollment and won't be for a while. But, those girls are my lifers and they are just incredible. And, they showed up for me on such a high level. And so, it was nice to have students show up so vocally and so visibly, and particularly, because a lot of them have come from communities where I am known like Amy Porterfield's and Stu McLaren's. It helped having these familiar faces. So, that was a really big win for us. The other thing that I feel really happy about that I did was I hired help from a professional. I hired, instead of me, the launch roughly put together, trying to show my team of people who've never launched before, how to do this.

I decided I'm just going to bring in the big guns, and hire someone who does this like for breakfast, and who can literally just tell everyone what to do and get it done. And so, I brought Louise Griffith in, and if you haven't listened to episode number 92, then I want to invite you to go and listen to episode number 92, where I interviewed Louise, and we talk about launches and what you need in place in order to manage a successful launch. So, that took a lot of stress off of my shoulders. The other thing that made a huge difference for me was I was coming up to about a year of running engagement ads on my account. And, that brought my webinar costs way, way, way, way, way down, way down. And, I feel like I'm still on a journey to bring down my costs.

And, I'm still using a lot of top-of-funnel ads to bring those down. And by top-of-funnel ads, I mean, engagement, video views, traffic ads, all of those ads that lead with value and that build my account mojo, that build up the engagement on my account, so that Facebook can see that I have a quality account and that people like and respond to my ads, so that they bring down my conversion cost and put my ads in the newsfeed. So, that worked really well. The other thing that worked really well, was list building. I had consistently been list building for the better part of 2020. And, just having an email list, makes a giant difference. Because, it just takes your hard work and creates that snowball effect. So, I promise you, the snowball effect is really nice when you go into a launch, and you know you've got momentum, and you know you've got people who volunteer to be there and hang out with you and learn from you, and is happy to hand over their credit cards.

The other thing that worked really well, I think, was this video strategy where I asked people to hit reply to my emails, because it started a two-way conversation with a lot of people. And a lot of people when I asked them, "Email me, if you still have questions about joining and we'll hop on a call." I hopped on a call with a handful of people. And, most of them did end up buying. Those that didn't were really not right for the course. And, I told them that. But, I feel like just doing these hit reply emails with the video worked really well; and then, couple that with keeping the camera on during the webinar. I feel like people really had a strong connection to me, to how I speak, to how I do things and who I am, before they came onto the webinar.

What will I do differently next time? Here's my list of things I'll do differently. And, I might still add more things to this list, but next time, I will make sure we have more bonuses, bonuses, bonuses, and more bonuses. Or at least not necessarily more bonuses, but timely bonuses. Next time, there will be alive show up bonus. There will be an early bird bonus. And then, I will add in some last minute bonuses as well. I did have bonuses, but none of my bonuses were timely. So, none of my bonuses enticed people to make a decision or gave them a reason to make a decision, which is marketing 101, really, so I need the bonuses to line up, to serve as something that's going to make people pull the trigger. The other thing I'll do differently next time is, check the calendar for all sorts of things.

Check the calendar. Like, yes, you need to figure out if Mercury's in retrograde, but more importantly than that, see if there's some big news event going on, like president's being inaugurated before you decide what day you're going to close your doors. There's always things like COVID that we cannot control and we cannot manage, but there are also things that we should just maybe used a little bit of common sense and just think, "Where is the world's attention going to be at that hour on that day?" Is it going to be somewhere? And if it's going to be somewhere, that's not on their emails or on their social media, then choose another date. And then, the last thing that I would change, is the timing of the webinars. I think I had three webinars, two of which were 9:30 in the morning for me here in Brisbane, which is, I think it's about 4:30 Pacific Time in the U.S. Or 7:30 Eastern Time, which was great. That bit wasn't confusing, but I wanted to have a webinar for my Aussies, and for Europe and South Africa as well.

Because I have a lot of Europeans, people from the UK and South Africans in my audience. So, I added a class at 5:00 PM my time, which is like the middle of the night for the Americans. And, that caused a lot of confusion, because people thought they were signing up for a 5:00 PM class local time, and then found out it's the middle of the night, and then didn't show up for the right class, and then re-registered for another class. So, what I'm going to do next time, just to keep it clean, I think I'm going to just separate my audiences into Australians and Americans. And then, I might run a whole separate landing page for a class for the UK, Europe, South Africa, and those Aussies that want to show up in the late afternoon.

Yeah, there was a bit of confusion. I mean, we had great energy on all of the webinars, but there's by far the majority of the people that sign up for the webinars in America. And, a lot of them were confused by this weird timing thing that I had on there. So, that is what we did well, what we will do differently, how we mapped it out, how it worked. And, I can honestly say, I think back at the A-Lister Launch with a tremendous, tremendous sense of gratitude and appreciation for my amazing, incredible team. They just pulled it together so quickly and so well. I am so incredibly proud of the students inside A-Lister. Some of them are already getting incredible results. Somebody said yesterday, "She's paying 80 P, which is like 80 cents in the UK for a lead. And, even as little as like a month ago, she was paying $3.

So she said, "The engagement strategies already working for her." So, I am very excited to see what these students create, and I'm very grateful for this time that we are alive, where we get to use the internet to build businesses. And so, if you are thinking about launching this year, if you have launched and you haven't done it again, because it's a bit of a production and it requires a lot of energy. And, I just want to encourage you, I want to tell you that there's no right or wrong way to launch, just do what you can with what you have. Show up and serve your audience, build that momentum at the front-end, create a conversion event where they can all show up to, and then serve your little heart out at the end, after they have paid you.

That's my unpack of the A-Lister Launch. I appreciate you listening. And, if you have a question for me about this launch, please shoot me a DM on Instagram. I am Salome.Schillack. If you search for Salome, S-A-L-O-M-E, it will come up. Or if you check the show notes of this show, then I will have it there too. I want to hear about your launch stories too, so shoot me a DM. Let me know what worked well for you and what do you want to do differently next time? All right, my friends, have a lovely, lovely week. And next week, we're going to talk about courses or memberships, which one should you choose and win. Join me then. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button, so you never miss a thing.