
51. Launch Debrief: Everything That Worked and That Didn't Work During Our A-Lister Launch
12 May 2020 | By Salome Schillack
Over the past 3 years, I have had the massive privilege of having a front-row seat to a LOT of amazing online courses.
What I didn’t even think was possible three years ago, I’ve seen other people pull off effectively. Sometimes with grace and style, and sometimes with frustration and disappointment.
The difference in their online course launch success came down to this: how well they managed their expectation of what was going to unfold.
I’ve seen people launch for the first time and make $2000 and cry happy tears because it confirmed for them that they were on the right track.
And I’ve seen clients turn $70,000 into $800,000 in one launch and call the launch the biggest failure ever.
I kid you not!!
This made me realise that I need to help everyone who is learning to launch an online course learn what a launch really looks like, and what you can expect from your launch results.
Today on the show I break down ALL the numbers from our recent A-Lister webinar launch and I share it all with you.
I hold nothing back and you’ll see exactly what we did right, what we did wrong and what we will do next time to plug some holes and to optimize our results.
Click the link above to listen then share a pic of you listening on Instagram Stories and tag me @salome.schillack so I can join you there and share it with my peeps.
When you subscribe and review the podcast not only does that give me the warm and fuzzies all over, it also helps other people to find the show.
When other people find the show they get to learn how to create more freedom in their lives from their online courses too!!
So do a good deed for all womenkind and subscribe and review this show and I will reward you with a shout out on the show!!
- The Lead Magnet we used to build our email list prior to starting webinar ads for A-Lister: 5 Day Video Training - Get Your First List Building Ad Up Without Wasting Money
- Instagram @salome.schillack
Podcast episodes where you can learn more about the strategy behind using Engagement ads to bring down your conversion costs:
Hello hello, and welcome to episode number 51 of The Shine Show. I am feeling a little bit shy today because today I literally am going to lift my dress and show you my knickers. Figuratively, not literally. Figuratively going to show you my knickers in the business. I am going to unpack all of the results we recently had with our A-Lister webinar launch. So if you are ready to hear a lot of data and put the big picture together of how we ran the launch and what happened, and what did we do well, and what did we learn from. Then this episode is for you.
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.
Back in 2017, I was still working at my day job every day and then running ads for online course creators by night. So I was moonlighting as an ads freelancer I would say.
And I got a client, my first big client. I was so happy. She paid me, offered to pay me two and a half thousand dollars to run ads for her launch. And I remember thinking holy cow, who has two and a half thousand dollars to pay someone to run ads? I was very excited to work on my first real big launch, and I had heard of big launches. You know, we all hear the big marketers talk about their seven figure businesses, and their six figure launches, and their million dollar online courses. And you hear these things, but they're kind of like Sasquatch. You wonder if they really exist. You've seen the footprints, but you don't know if it really exists.
So I was very excited about this because clearly this was a step up from the ads I had been running up to that point. And then when she told me her budget is $7,000, I was like, "Oh my goodness, we're going to spend $7,000 on this launch. This is amazing."
Now at that point, I still very much had an employee mindset where the money that goes into your bank account at the end of the month. All of that is your money for you to spend as you want on your life. Today, I very much know that the entrepreneur mindset is more about taking money and turning it into more money. So spending $7,000 to make a lot more money makes sense to me now. But back then, it didn't really make sense to me.
But it was incredible for me. Over the course of a week, I watched as she launched and I watched what she was doing. And I watched the sales come in, and I was looking at this thing every single day going, "Holy cow, how is she doing this? This is amazing." And I remember it so well because I was working after hours. I remember it was a Friday night, my husband was sitting in our TV room alone watching a movie as he often had to during that time, because I was working on a Friday night. So no TV and relaxing for me. I was working. So if you're in that phase of your business, I feel you.
Anyway, he was sitting watching TV and I walked in there and I say to him, "Her doors close in about 48 hours. I think we are in for quite the entertaining weekend to watch what happened." And her doors was meant to close that Sunday, or at least it was going to close that Sunday.
So I was very excited about keeping my eye on this launch every single day. And it's kind of the same as when we recently launched A-Lister, our very, I call it our first online course launch because it is the first online course launch that I'm doing since I started Shine and Succeed.
And since I've niched down as an ads manager and since I've started the agency, the last time I launched a course was back in 2016 . And that was just before I packed it all up, quit the whole thing, and went back to this day job that I was working at. So that's why I call A-Lister my first online course launch. But it's not really my first one. There were attempts at this many years ago.
I have watched over the last, I would say since this launch with the first client, I have watched people turn money into more money with launches. And I do consider that position that I've been in to see how they do this as a complete privilege and also an education. I've had a front row seat to seeing how people who are brand new to it do it in spectacular ways using their strengths.
Like one client comes to mind who's just got this incredible ability on Facebook Live. And she could just sell people into massive masterminds for tens of thousands of dollars by just going live on Facebook. I mean, that is a talent. And then other clients, I've them take $24,000 in ad spend and turn it into $2.5 million in the course of a month, because their marketing is so good. It's been a real, I am acutely aware of how lucky I have been to have had this front row seat since this first Friday night where I said to my husband, "Holy cow, what is this girl doing?"
So today I want to give you a front row seat, because I know that not a lot of people share their numbers. Not a lot of people share the good, the bad, and the ugly. They only share the good. They only share the shiny. They only share the thing that makes you go, "Oh wow. Okay, that is fantastic. You got a great result."
But when you're behind the scenes like I have been for so long, you very quickly learn that it's not black and white. There are always things that go right, and things that go wrong. And there are always a ton of things that you learn in a launch. And unless you are paying attention to those things, you miss those things. And then next time you launch, the market is going to respond the exact same way. But because you didn't learn the lesson, you're going to miss it.
So here's the thing is every launch, the market speaks. And once the market has spoken, it is your job to understand what it's safe to you. I know that's very abstract, but I'm going to break it down for you. And then at the end, I will tell you exactly what I feel the data and the feedback we got from the A-Lister launched told us the market has said so that you can use that information.
So during any launch, we run ads in three different phases. The first phase is the list building phase. This is often also called the runway phase, or that's basically the phase where you are focusing on building your email list so that you have a fresh new group of people in your email list ready for you before you start launching.
Now back in December, 2019, we were starting to get ready for our runway phase, for our list building phase. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I had almost zero people on my email list at that stage. I just cleaned it up, and it was somewhere in the vicinity of probably around 300 or 500 people. That's all. The reason I started the podcast in December, is because I knew that list building should be a priority for me. And if I'm going to build my email list, if I'm going to be paying for leads, I need something in place to add value to the people on my email list every single week. So here we are. You're probably on my email list, and you're listening this podcast. And you see how the idea has come all the way, followed me all the way from 2019. So I knew we need to start building our email list. That's the first phase. That's what we started doing in February.
The second phase of a launch is what we in the agency just call the rego phase, or the registration phase. It's often also sometimes referred to as the prelaunch phase. But it's basically when you're getting registrations for your webinar or your three part video series, or your challenge. Whatever it is that you're going to use to sell your course. In rego phase, you're getting registrations. Rego comes from registrations. It's our little slang word here in team shine.
The third phase is launch phase, and that's basically the phase where you say, "My doors are open. Hurry, get in. Early bird bonus, [inaudible] bonus, testimonials, overcome objections, doors are closing. You're going to miss out. Hurry up. It's going to close. You're never going to get in again." That is the launch phase, and your purpose in the launch phase is to make as many sales as you can.
So here's how the list building phase went for us during this A-Lister launch. I knew I had to build my list. I had not built my list in the past. But now that I had the podcast, I knew it was time to start taking list building seriously. So I asked myself, what does my ideal customer really, really, really want at this point in its journey, in their journey with me? Where they don't necessarily know that they need a $1,000 course that's going to teach them how to build their email list yet. What is it that they want?
So I tried entering the conversation that was in their head roughly two months before I take them ... so if I'm taking them on a journey, I want to enter the conversation in their head and then deliberately bring them with me to the launch. Asking yourself what your ideal customer really wants is different from asking yourself what does my ideal customer really need. I know my ideal customer needs to learn how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to build engagement, and to build their email list. But that's not what they want. What they always say to me is just show me how to run ads without wasting money.
That's what everyone says to me. But the beauty of what I've learned is they want me to show them how to run the ads because they think their problem is flicking switches or pulling levers in the ads manager. Because let's face it, Facebook did not make the ads manager easy to understand for someone who's brand new there. So most people's challenge when they start is they come up to this, the ads manager, and they go, "Holy cow, what is this thing? There's so many buttons. Where do I even begin?" So they think the help that they need is to learn how to pull the levers. But what they really need is a strategy to help them build marketing systems that uses Facebook and Instagram ads to build their audience and their email list.
I knew that if I show them how to pull the levers, how to set up their first list building ad, they're going to realize that they need more. Because once you know how to pull the levers, you know which buttons to push, a whole world of new problems opens up for you. And I know this because I've been doing it for so long and I've been talking to people for so long about this. And I know that what everybody wants is show me how to pull the levers, but that just opens up all of these rooms for conversation about how to interpret their results and how to have the right strategy. So I knew my freebie has to overcome the objection of I don't know how to use the ads manager. And feedback from so many of the students that actually ended up signing up for A-Listers were I knew which buttons to press. I just needed someone to show me the strategy behind why it works or it doesn't work.
So I know that I got that piece of the puzzle really right. I got the piece of the puzzle really right in terms of showing them which buttons to press and then having them come and say, "Well now I just need someone to show me the strategy behind why it works or it doesn't work." And then enter A-Listers, that achieved exactly what we wanted.
So I created a freebie called the five day Facebook and Instagram ads training. Get your first list building ad up without wasting money. The fastest way to get started with building a lucrative email list. It's basically five day video training. People are gobbling it up, and the feedback is amazing. And if you want to go and check it out, you can check it out at shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. I will link it in the show notes as well. Shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. And while you're there, please marvel in the wonder that my landing page that is converting at 70%. And while you're there, appreciate the fact that I sent you there and you're probably going to mess up my 70% conversion rate because if you're already in it and you go and click on it now just to see the landing page, then all those clicks are going to bring down my conversion rate. And I'm willing to do that for you. So go and check out that page. Shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. That's what a landing page looks like that gets 70% conversion rate, and appreciate it while you're here because it's going to drop as soon as everyone goes there, which is kind of shooting myself in the foot. But that's okay.
So in February, I spent $3,255 on list building. Yes, that is $3,255. I know for some of you that is just enormous amount of money, and I do want to say that you need to start wrapping your head around the idea that you're going to give Facebook your money. There are easy ways to give Facebook your money, and there are ways to give Facebook your money without wasting your money. I talk about this all the time. So if you hang out with me, I promise you I will help you not waste your money.
From that $3,255 I spent, I added 643 leads to my list. That is an average lead cost of $5.06. That is a lot to pay for a lead. If that's what you're thinking right now, you are right. We always say to everyone the industry average for leads is about $5. It totally depends on the niche that you're in, and it totally depends on your target audience.
There's a couple of things that contributed to me paying $5 for a lead. The first thing is I did not run many engagement ads before these lead ads, so I ended up paying more. I teach everyone in my community to run engagement ads, to build up the mojo on your account. Build up the learning process of the algorithm on your account, use engagement ads, and do it cheaply with engagement ads. Because the difference in conversion costs when you run engagement ads consistently is just phenomenal. And I'll show you later why when you do run engagement ads.
So we ended up with $5 per lead. It was painful. I had to make peace with it. But I also want to say that it has to do also with my niche. Being a Facebook ads manager, and running Facebook ads, and promoting Facebook ads as training generally converts slightly higher than a lot of other things. If I sold a training on how to create flower decorations, my lead cost would be a lot lower. If I sold training on how to lose five kilos, my conversion costs would be lower. There's a lot of niches that convert much lower. So $5 whilst it's a little bit painful for me to swallow, is not outlandish. Right?
So my lead cost after I started running engagement ads later became around $2.50, and that's what it is right now. Because I'm more focused on running ads all the time and running engagement ads alongside those conversion ads.
If you want to learn more about this whole engagement ad strategy, I talk more about the strategy in episode two and episode 13 of the podcast. So you can go shineandsucceed.com/2 or shineandsucceed.com/13 if you want to listen to those episodes. I'll link that up in the show notes before as well.
So by the time we ended the campaigns for the list building, so this is before we started running ads for the webinar. My email list was a whopping 1053 people on it. It was important to me to have at least 1,000 people on my email list before we started running webinar ads. Because I know the importance of having the balance between launching to a warm audience and launching to a cold audience. And I knew that I need a good chunk of warm people coming to my webinar so that I am not launching entirely cold. Because cold people are less likely to convert, and that is exactly what we discovered later on as well.
So then we started running the webinar ads. The webinar ads, they did not do so very well. The webinar ads, there were days where my team and I would get on a call and we would all kind of just laugh because crying is not an option. My team, I have to give my team so much credit. They work their behinds off, and they pulled out tricks that I didn't even know exist to try to bring these conversion costs down.
But basically, I knew that I webinar registration for a webinar about Facebook ads is going to convert somewhere in the vicinity of between $7 and $17. I knew that. I knew I'm looking at somewhere between 7 and $17 because I know what my peers pay for their webinar registrations. And some of them have gigantic audiences, and they pay closer to $7. And some of them have smaller audiences. The marketing's not always so clear and they pay more like $17. So I knew it's going to be somewhere in that range.
It is more expensive in my niche because it's a marketing niche and it's a pretty saturated market. So we ended up spending $5,445 on webinar ads. That is a lot of money to spend to a cold audience if you don't know what your results are going to be.
I worked out how much I need to put in to get roughly 400 registrants for a webinar. If you're ever running a webinar, you need 400 registrants to get a clean run of your funnel so that you know where your funnel is leaky. And as I break this down for you, you'll understand why I needed those 400 people.
So we spent 5,445 on the webinar ads, and ended up with 456 registrants for the webinar. So after all the blood, sweat, and tears to try to get the webinar conversions down as much as we can, we ended up paying on average $12.35 per webinar registrant.
It is important to me that you hear this, because I know some of our clients, or some people sign up to work with us as clients and we tell them numbers like this. And they go, "What? Such as such mega marketer told me I can get webinar registrants for $2.50." And I want to jump through the roof because mega marketer has been running ads for 10 years and has 50,000 followers on their account, and has affiliates, and has all sorts of things that they do not take into consideration. And has been running ads for Yonkers years. So their account is so seasoned, and then they tell everyone in their audience, "Well no, a webinar registrant costs $2.50," and people come to us with these expectations that they're going to make $180,000 from putting $5,000 into ads. And it is our job to burst their bubble. So this is why I'm sharing this with you, so you can hear that we paid $12.35 per webinar registrant. That is a lot of money to pay for a webinar registering.
Now there was one giant mistake that we did learn that we made from these ads. The whole running engagement ads and seasoning the account, that's part of it and that's a longterm play. So I know my webinar and registrations are going to come down longterm because I'm doing what I need to do to build up my account mojo right now. But there's one big mistake with the ads that we made. And that was trying to get too cute, too fast.
If you saw the A-Lister ads or you saw any of the social media content, you will have seen that I connected back to my musical theater dice days. My marketing manager and I Ash, we went into a costume shop and bought every 1920s prop we could find and hired a photographer. And we had so much fun with those photos. We took these 1920s photos that were just amazing. And I have to say I will do it again any day for the course, to have those beautiful photos inside the course because it just makes it so much more fun.
But using those photos on the ads did not work. The fun photos and the fun videos did not convert. And there was one in particular where I had a little fashion faux pas. I was wearing this very strappy dress, just a strappy dress. And I had feathers in my hands and my hair was down. So after we'd already made the video go live, I noticed that my hair covers the straps of my dress. And then there's just feathers basically covering my boobs. So if someone just uses their imagination a little bit, they can think I'm naked. And I'm standing there in feathers, which was not our intention at all.
But I decided to keep the ad because I just decided that as a rule, I'm not going to be precious about it. I'm going to put it out. If it's a faux pas, it is. If it's not, it's not. I asked a few people what they think and they said, "It's not the first thing that came to mind." So knowing that, I just left it. But then we did get some creepy comments on it that I had to, there was one guy who kept, I would delete his comment and he would just come back.
I think that worked against us. The fun photos with my face on it dressed up in 1920s, people didn't get it. Because they don't know me and they don't know my flair for the dramatics, but they also don't understand how this check in the 1920s dress is connected to Facebook ads. So after about three days, after it'd ran for three days and we were paying a fortune for webinar registrants, my team and I decided to edit the images, create new images that didn't have my face on it, that had more objects in it and just styling around the theme. That 1920s theme. And we ran those, and the base performing image of the webinar ads ended up being just a turquoise background with two glasses of champagne plinking and it says, "Build your email list faster with Facebook and Instagram ads." And that ad ended up getting 135 leads at $11.15. And then the second base image was an image with the same copy on it, but it had the bottle with the two glasses and then some peacock feathers in the corner. And that one got 60 leads at $9.02. So it's important for you to take note that when you're running ads to a cold audience, be careful to try to get too cute, too fast if they don't know who you are.
So my goal to get 400 people minimum on the webinar or registered for the webinar worked, and we ended up getting 456 registrants. And out of that 456, only 76 showed up live. That means that our webinar show up rate was only 16%. The industry average that we aim for is 25%. So overall in the industry, we expect people to show up for a webinar at about 25%. 25% of the people who registered should show up.
We still don't know exactly why. Because I looked at the email open rates. And our emails that went out, the pre-webinar emails had an open rate of anywhere between 23% and 50%. So I don't know, people seem like they were opening the emails. If 50% opened the emails, that's really great. But maybe for a webinar you would expect that they'd be opening them a bit more. So the next time we do this, we will focus very heavily on getting people to actually open the pre-webinar emails, because I do believe that's a very important piece of getting people to the webinar.
So there was a big question that I had to answer, and deal with, and face as I was watching these webinar registrations kind of tank. And that was do people want a webinar about list-building, using Facebook ads for list building? Do they really want a course about list building or using Facebook and Instagram ads about list building? My hunch at this stage was we had missed the market slightly in terms of our messaging. They do want training on building their email lists, but they want that training to be about social media, and not necessarily about learning how to use Facebook ads to build their list. So there's more education that needs to be done with most of the people who were ready for this course in terms of teaching them the importance of building their list, and teaching them how easy it is to get started with Facebook and Instagram ads to build your list.
So when the webinar registrants were so expensive and then the show up rate was so low, I kind of started getting the feeling that our messaging and the marketplace kind of missed each other slightly in that people who feel they are ready to spend money on Facebook ads generally are looking for a course that's going to teach them how to make money, not necessarily how to build an email list. Now I know the secret to making money is building an email list. But I am not sure if I want to really go out in the world and try to convince people that they need to build their email list before they can make money. So there's a little bit of a mismatch there that I'm still kind of figuring out. Well I know the answer, because I'm going to share it with you what the answer is. But I can see that's where we going out into cold traffic, going out into the cold, wide Facebook land world and asking people to sign up for a webinar to teach them how to build their email list with Facebook ads was a slight miss on my part in terms of what they want. They don't want to learn how to run ads for list building. They want to learn how to run ads to launch their courses and to make money.
So that's the results we got for people signing up for the webinars. So what happened after that? Okay. So then we enter into the third phase of the launch, the doors open face. And we had a full pay bonus to entice people to pay upfront, which the investment for the course is $997 US. But we also offered a payment plan of 12 by 97 because I knew that a lot of people who are going to sign up for this is going to be new to this, is going to be on a tight budget, is going to be where I was when I signed up for Amy Porterfield's Webinars That Convert in 2015, which was the very first online course I bought. And the only reason I could afford it was because she was offering a 12 by $97 payment plan. So it's kind of my way of paying it forward and putting myself back in the shoes of that person I was in 2015 when I knew I have the capability of creating an online course. I have the ability to learn how to launch that course. I just need someone to show me how. So that was the idea with the 12 month payment plan, and I will do that again. I believe in the value of that.
We also had a fast action bonus to entice people to buy on the webinar. That worked really well. And then there was an early bird bonus that was talked about on ads in the first 48 hours. We had a [inaudible] bonus that was talked about in ads and in emails, that did nothing for us. And then we had some emails going out after the launch, and we ran ads to everyone in our warm audience after the doors open. So people were getting the message from all sides. They were getting it from emails, and they were getting it from ads coming into their newsfeed.
So here's the results. We got 17 total sales in the launch, and that gave us a total revenue of $18,619. So that is not at all bad, and I will take that and everything we learned along with that any day. However, those results are not scalable. Not yet, because there are some leaks in this bucket that we need to fix. I'll explain to you exactly why.
So after we take what we spent on ads into consideration, then our earnings per lead was about $41.47, not too bad. And our return on ad spend, which basically is the way we measure the results for ads. And it's just expressed as for every dollar you put in, how much did you get out. Our return on ad spend was 1.89. So that means for every dollar I put into Facebook ads, I got back a $1.89. So I got my original dollar back, which is great, I broke even. And then another 89 cents.
So 1.89 return on ad spend is not great. I will just say that. There is no room for movement there. There's no fat, and there's no room for experimentation for all the work you put into these kinds of launches. Getting a return on ad spend of 1.89 doesn't really give you a lot of movement. A better return on ad spend would be when it starts looking at three, four, five, $6 for every one you put in. Then you know you have something you can scale.
However, with the breakdown of the full pay, we had seven people choose full pay versus the payment plans. We had 10. We broke even in month number one, and then we will make up the rest of the profit over that 11 months. So that's a lot of work, and a lot of ads, and a lot of money, and a lot of time, and a lot of energy that goes in to break even on month one. I mean we take it, we love it. The results we created with the students are spectacular. And what we learned is just absolutely invaluable. Would it have been nice to have more profit in month one? Absolutely. But I share this stuff with you because I want you to see that it is not black and white. And a win doesn't always look like mega profit. This is a win, because the market has spoken, the market has given us feedback and we're taking it. So we will still keep the payment plan even though I believe that if we get rid of the payment plan, we might make more money in month one. But I will keep it because I believe in it right now. And I am going to do the work to entice people more to take the full pay option.
So the ads that performed the based in this final bottom of the funnel launch piece were actually the video, the almost stark naked video of me telling people that the doors are open. And that video, we attributed seven sales to that video. So that video ad did really well.
Now the question can come up whether it was the ad that made people buy or whether it was the email. We don't really know. If they clicked on the ad and then they bought from the email, it still might attribute the sale to the ad. So there is that. It all works. It just shows you how it all works together in a beautiful snowball effect that it has.
So here's where this gets really interesting. And this is where I love having a team that is data driven, that looks at the data, and that lifts the bonnet and really goes inside our email CRM and our Facebook ads, attracts everything really well for me.
If you look at the data using feedback from the students, we have learned the following. So if we drill down on the students that purchased the course, here's what we can see. We can see that the percentage of the people who purchased the course who also downloaded the five day video training was 64%. And what that tells me is if 64% of the people who purchased our course started their journey with us through the five day video training, do you know which ads I'm going to run? I'm going to run the five day video training. And that's exactly what we're running right now. The five day video training results in 4% sales, so I don't have to come up with 700 new lead magnets all the time. I have one that works really well for this course.
The other interesting thing is the percentage of people who registered for the webinar and then bought the course is 3.79. So almost 3.8%. The industry average for webinar registrant conversion to sale is 2.5. So again, so considering the fact that we struggled to get people to register for the webinar, we struggled to get cold audiences to register. Considering the fact that of those 400 cold registrants, we struggled to get people to show up for the webinar. Those that did show up purchased at a very high right. The percentage of attendees on the webinar that bought was 18.4%, and the industry average is 10%. So I know that the people that I had on that webinar were standing by, they were ready to buy from me.
And then the other very interesting data point that we were able to collect as the percentage of customers, the percentage of students who bought the course and detained at the webinar was 76%. so there was still some who bought and didn't attend the webinar, but a very high percentage of those who did buy actually attended the webinars.
So from our tracking, we can see that 13 sales, 76% of our students were in our warm audience already. And only four sales or 23% came in cold from those ads that we ran or from somewhere where they hadn't been on any of our email lists or they hadn't engaged with us at all before the webinar.
And the funny thing is when we surveyed the students to find out how they knew the course was right for them, one person said, "I didn't even read the sales page. I bought because I'd been on a call with you where you did the training and you did a Q&A, and I knew you will be able to help me." Somebody else said, "I was just listening for when you say where to buy because I know you can help me. I didn't even watch the webinar, I just bought." And one other person said, "I was driving all the time while you were on the webinar, and I had to pull over when you started talking about the buy link."
So here's my conclusion about this. My conclusion about all of this that we learned is that our warm audiences were red hot, ready to purchase. They were standing by with their credit cards. They were consuming the content, they were in. They were ready to go. Our cold ads to people who had seen or heard about us before didn't work for those people, and they didn't even show up for the webinar. So I believe that the people who bought the course didn't even need the webinar. I believe the people who bought the course would have signed up anyway if I had just created a video series, or launched to them in an email sequence, or invited them to a Facebook Live Q&A and pitched it to them. The next time I launch this, I will probably not even bother running ads to a cold audience. Because the data is showing me that if people opt in for the five day video training, they are very likely to purchase A-Lister. And the feedback from them was, "I was already sold. I just needed a way to give you my money."
So I know that when people opt-in for the five day video training, they get good value and they get nurtured by us. And I know that if they experience the way I teach, they're going to sign up. So for the next launch, it will likely just be to our warm audiences. And I'm going to save a ton of money on cold ads and hopefully convert just as well, if not better without a webinar and without ads to a cold audience. So now we're talking about what we call an internal launch, so this is a launch we only do to people who are already on our email list or already in our social media world. Which really is a much cheaper launch, because you're only talking to people who are a lot warmer. Now then the challenge becomes how do you scale that? Because you cannot put a course like that on Evergreen. You can, but you still need to figure out how do you warm these people up in Evergreen. And it's harder to do that with affiliates as well.
So what I want you to learn is to have an open mind for what success looks like. In marketing, everything is feedback from the market. And if a launch didn't go as you hoped it would, then that just means that you need to take that feedback on board.
So back to that Friday night when my husband was watching TV and I was telling him, "Hey, we better keep an eye on this launch over the weekend." By Sunday, it was my Sunday because I'm in Australia. It was Saturday for the client. She's in America, the cart closed. And I watched as she took $7,000 and turned it into 70,000. 70. $70,000 right in front of my eyes with just some list building ads, some emails, a bit of social media posts. But a really thorough understanding of who her ideal customer is and how to speak to her so that she wants to buy her course. And I will tell you at the end of that weekend, I was totally hooked. I was completely hooked on what becomes possible when you launch an online course. And I share all of my launch details with you because I know that not enough people talk about it. And I hope that by me sharing my results, it'll help you see what is really possible, and what success really looks like. Because let's face it, it's not flying on a private jet, buying a Bentley, or bragging about your seven figures.
So as you think about your launch, I want you to start dreaming about what is possible for you when you build that relationship with your audience and you warm them up with the right content. And you create smart marketing strategies that you can amplify with good ads. And when you do that, you'll become unstoppable and you'll create a tribe of people who adore you, and who are standing by with their credit cards waiting to pull the car over when you say the doors are now open. I would love it, love it, if you would take a screenshot of yourself listening to this podcast and share it with me on Instagram Stories. You can tag me at salome.schillack. That is hooked up in the show notes. If you don't know how to spell it, don't worry. I don't know how to spell Schillack. I've been married for 12 years and I still can't spell it. But find me please, find me on social media. I am Salome Schillack, dot shellac on Instagram. And I would love it if you give us a shout out, share where you're listening to this episode from. And share something you're learning. That way, I can share that with everyone in my community and we can spread the love that way.
All right my friend. I hope this has been incredibly valuable to you. I hope you've learned a ton, and I wish you very well. I hope you are well and you are safe. I hope you are staying at home. I am just sending all of my wonderful, safe, and healthy love to you. Have a lovely, lovely week.
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.