I’m so excited to present a successful product launch case study. I’m going to talk about a lot of the factors many other “case studies” and people claim to write about in their articles, then don’t. It’s a deceitful disservice to you if I don’t.

My goal with this article isn’t to “sell you” on me. Instead, I want you to see me as your trusted advisor when it comes to online marketing and decision making so I’m going to do my absolute best to disclose every reason why this worked.

This course launch was in the health niche, and it was specifically for a health coach certification course.

In this post I’ll cover the actions we took each month working together, ideas behind the marketing angles, the stuff that didn’t go “right”, our numbers, and setup.

First, Vocab

An “Internal” launch” means a product launch done only to an existing email list and or social media following. No ads. No affiliates.

A “sideways sales letter” is a concept invented by launch master Jeff Walker. In a typical sales letter, you present certain elements in a certain order to entice the reader to buy or take an action. In the sideways sales letter, you are doing the same thing, but each of those elements is presented over a period of days.

Self-selection is the concept that when you present info in a certain way or about a certain topic, the people who are already interested in it will identify and raise their hands as interested in marketing material. Ever seen an ad that says, “Calling all ______!” Yeah. That’s self-selection. It’s a front-end filter for your leads.

By the Numbers

Total revenue (including unpaid payments on payment plans): $ 32,539.00

Total renewals: $ 3,250.00

Total renewals #: 13

Total new students: $ 29,289.00

Total new students #: 12

Total registrants: 554

“Total Launch Conversion Rate”: 2.2% - Just above target!

(Total launch conversion rate is a metric I’ve not seen anyone else in the market use because it’s not a big number and doesn’t appear to be a very sexy stat. It’s calculated by dividing total registrants for your launch by total purchases. 2% is honestly what I’ve seen as an average for this metric having handled the launches I have. Further, this was a reasonably high ticket product.)

Bad stuff

We ended up pushing our launch date back a number of times. My client had some things to take care of in their personal life and there were a few hold ups with webinar development. I’m a “done is better than perfect in many cases”, but here, it’s got to be done to the best of our ability and it was worth the wait. We simply notified those on our wait list that we had to push back because we wanted to make the training as helpful as possible for them.

Opt in rate sucked on the opt in page, but I left it up. The reason I did this was because of the idea of “self-selection”. If someone hit that opt in page, and they were a consumer, we really didn’t want them to opt in, then ultimately purchase a practitioner product. It’s not FOR them.

(*I checked the opt in rate during the launch and it was up to 33%. Take opt-in as an INDICATOR not a be-all-end-all.)

I’ll cover the follow up actions at the end of this post.

Marketing Angles

So many people out there have done webinars that sell stuff. The word “webinar” is a little burned… And unfortunately so is “masterclass” and even “free training” to some extent. What we did have working for us though is that in the professional health training market, training webinars are done SO frequently with no pitch that it made it easy for us to “slot in” with them. Think MedFit Network.

So we decided to try something I haven’t seen before and we went with “practitioner training” in all of our materials and it worked really well!

Many business owners who are primarily operators in their business feel guilty or feel like they’re not serving their clients when they cut out time midday to work on themselves, so upon sign up, we encouraged people to mark off 1 hour of time on their calendar ahead of time and call it “professional development time”.

Also, when you’re selling stuff in the business opportunity space (buy this expensive thing and it will pay for itself), there’s an easy logical appeal there. However, for stuff that is purely academic (get better at your craft that doesn’t necessarily pay you money), I always try to add some things in that make it a business opportunity because it gives you a logical reason to charge more.

So for the bonuses for this, my client added an “Instagram and Canva Masterclass” to help students of her course not just learn how to help midlife women with hormones, but actually generate leads.

Myself being VERY familiar with the health market since I’m an FDN certified practitioner myself, I know that many health coaches suck and feel very uncomfortable on sales calls. So, in order to make the deal even sweeter, I threw in my 7 Step Sales training for FREE.

Now people who bought the course had the information, community through a Facebook group, training on how to generate leads, AND training on how to close those leads. Pretty killer stack if you ask me.

We also made sure that when we outlined these bonuses, that we immediately addressed the skepticism or objection which might come up which is, “This sounds great, but the last thing I need is 2 extra courses that I don’t have time for.”

The Instagram and Canva masterclass is a one-time live call that will probably last just 1.5 hours long. 7 Step Sales is just barely over 1 hour long. Easy.

The Tech Systems

My client previously had her course built out on Kajabi, but between the sheer price of Kajabi once you start adding a lot of members, versus the page tracking, advanced emailing system, and built in video tracking Kartra features… as well as membership areas that can handle 10-15,000 people (Source: Kartra themselves)… Kartra became an obvious winner at an opportune time to help the client transition to a new platfom.

Some specific features in Kartra that helped us pull this off:

Page tracking. How annoying is it when you sign up for something, don’t even watch, and then you’re getting the countdown emails for an offer you haven’t even heard of? Yeah. Super annonying.

So we used page tracking so that only the people who actually clicked to visit the webinar play page actually saw follow up emails. Like I said earlier, we had 554 registrants and 373 people watch. Very good attendance as far as auto-webinars go.

And for the people who didn’t click through to watch the webinar, we sent them reminder emails for 4 days to click through.

Easy page tracking also allowed us to send an abandon cart email 1 hour after someone visited the checkout page if they didn’t buy.

YES, page tracking can be accomplished on other platforms, but frankly, in my experience the set up is difficult and doesn’t perform reliably. It also necessitates that you tie in other systems which means way more $$$ for your overhead. I set this up in Kartra in 15 minutes - Including writing the email and had peace of mind knowing it would work.

In my experience, people frequently start watching, get interrupted and then come back and pick it up. Definitely have a “replay” page with the play bar "unlocked” for those people. Of 373 people who watched, 147 of them visited the replay page.

Bonus Points - Automatic Contracts for Viewership of Course Material

My clients program is actually a legally backed certification course. She wanted to make sure that people signed an agreement before getting any access to the course. However, we didn’t want to fiddle with doing this manually ever single time. Luckily, I’ve got a pretty good brain for automation and I came up with a way to automatically send the contracts to people.

First, we had to choose the right software. Most electronic signature software costs hundreds or THOUSANDS of dollars for use of their API. With a little research, I found SignRequest which… We were somehow able to use on the free plan and accomplish this. Big win!

So the Zapier set up went like this:

Kartra: Person buys course —> Add to list “Unconfirmed”
Zapier: “Kartra: When someone added to “Unconfirmed” —> Send SignRequest Template”
Zapier 2: “SignRequest: When signature successful —> Kartra: Add to list “Confirmed”
Kartra Automation: “When someone added to “Confirmed” —> Grant course accesss

I know that’s probably a bunch of nonsense but it worked. We also set up some more stuff on the backend where if they took the payment plan, enrollees are automatically dripped the course in 3 even intervals. :-)

(Kartra saves the day - AGAIN.)

Distinguishing features of this launch and what made it successful

My client had MANY things going for her that helped to make this launch successful. They have emailed their 7,000 person list two times per month for a long time, they have a very engaged Instagram following, AND they had already launched this program before meaning we already had a solid stack of testimonials to work with.

It’s so easy for marketers to claim , “Look at the big money we made with (client)!”, but then ignore all of these factors.

Do NOT ignore them. If you don’t have an audience or email list yet, START TODAY. Across all of the clients I’ve worked with, the ones who have RELATIONSHIPS with their audiences are the ones who succeed. If you only ever show up on social media to promote, this won’t work for you.

The number two big thing that helped with this launch was all original content.

My biggest failure of a launch came when we tried to use recycled content for the launch. I had even asked the client for some original content to use with ads and they said no. Like a total weeb, I folded and said, “Ok.” when I should have stood up as the coach and said, “I need you to make this content or this won’t work.”

BIG lesson learned!

And if you’re not on my email list, I have a whole email about how you have to be BOTH the coach AND consultant. (Most people fail because they only do one.)

When you’re creating launch content, it’s not just about providing useful information or checking the box of “Well I sent them some stuff”. Pre-launch content is about hitting specific “milestones”. You need to speak to the desires of your audience and the opportunity they have, create a bond, and show them proof that what you’re talking about works. That’s the fundamental stuff of why these things work.

Recycled content, stuff you aren’t pouring your heart into, won’t cut it. Period.

(I myself have since started posting consistently to Instagram to begin to curate that audience. A big lesson I’ve learned from my wonderful clients. I’m following my buddy Josh Ryan’s tips for Instagram growth from his YouTube channel, and taking Maria’s advice that consistency matters more than frequency. You can follow me here.)

Manual follow up

Another distinguishing feature of this launch I learned from looking at other launch case studies is that MANUAL FOLLOW UP can make a major difference. We have an excellent FAQ page in place, but is a few emails

For this, I instructed my client to use the classic Dean Jackson “9 Word Email”

SUBJ: Hey
Were you still interested in (what they indicated interest in here)?
- YOUR NAME

This email CRUSHES it and is historically known to have a VERY high response rate. Is it worth your time to do a little digging in your CRM to get one more course sale and make an extra couple thousand bucks? YES.

In fact, I know that Todd Hermann takes a few hours every week at the end of his week to call random people in his CRM and will spend hours on the phone with them just helping them and getting to know them. Amazing fodder for developing future marketing efforts.

Bare-Naked Email Stats

First up you’ll see pre-launch emails mixed in with reminder emails. Check out the insane open rates we had on the pre-launch emails! I would say we successfully got people “hyped” for this thing.

Average clickthrough rate on most emails is 2-4%. The only people who received subsequent reminder emails (the bottom four in the picture) were people who hadn’t yet visited the webinar page at all. Look how many people we scooped up from that! (And without annoying anyone who had already clicked through). Kartra saves the day.

Here’s a pic of webinar engagement. This drop off looks VERY good. Most people dropped at the start which is pretty typical of ANY online video, but the view rate for the rest is so health I’m not even worried about it.

Next up, a picture of the follow up sequence. The first four emails here are my favorite.

“Webinar Just Ended” is a straight up sales email. Only link to that email is to the checkout page.
Followed by… The “Replay” email an hour after. See how many people went back and watched? LOTS.
Next up, the FAQ email to handle common questions about the product… However, the FAQ is hidden towards the bottom of a page LOADED with testimonials about the program.
“Want a FREE Lesson” - I love this type of email and the “course tour” email because people can really like your webinar, but still experience a lot of skepticism around what’s actually INSIDE the product. This let’s them experience the product before buying and you can see from the revenue column, that was enough to push someone over the edge!

Last up, the countdown emails. While most people just hit people with a bunch of scarcity emails, which is fear-based… We used a technique called “Stack the Cool” where you both reinforce the scarcity… But you also ADD BONUSES which makes the deal even better. People LOVE getting a deal.

*The reason the reported revenue number is only $25,002 is because more renewals came in after I took this picture and that number doesn’t account for the revenue from the payment plans.

Real Time Scarcity

Many marketers use fake scarcity in order to get people to buy and it break trust not just between the consumer and the marketer, but puts a bad taste in the consumers mouth about every other marketing experience they have.

The solution for this is to only use scarcity if you can invent a REAL reason to (and I use the word invent very consciously).

Natural Reasons for Scarcity:

There are truly a limited number of slots
There’s a limited number of slots for a particular bonus
The class is a live class and starts on a particular date

Because this class comes with a series of live Zoom calls, we were easily able to leverage true time scarcity.

Having a High Ticket Product Makes Getting ROI WAY Easier

My client priced the product at $2,497 for this launch. I know I know. Prices ending in “97” are pretty campy. It’s “overused”. Maybe that’s true… But not in the health market where many people running webinars aren’t very informed marketers!

Here’s a graph with ROI projections based on ad spend at different product prices.

Note the point at which the risk-reward ratio “flips” and where it becomes SIGNIFICANTLY safer to spend way more money on ads.

If you spend $500, you basically double your money.

If you spend $7,000, you need just three sales to make ~$400… But your earning potential goes all the way just to over $60,000!

Another quick note that contributed to two or three sales…

We discounted for some people in other countries where the conversion rate was crap

Some people don’t recommend this - what if conversion rate changes next month?
We had those who got discounts agree to a testimonial and not to disclose their discount.

Where Do We Go From Here? (Next Steps)

Now that we’v had a successful internal launch, we will shut down for 1-2 months and

Some of those steps include:

Affiliates
Higher price ($3,497)
Advanced Facebook Ads campaigns for bring in registrants, pre launch day, and abandon cart ads (You HAVE to be at a certain scale for some of these ads to even run)
More bonuses (We don’t know what yet but some exclusive interviews will likely be a part of it)
We will survey everyone we can to make the training itself better as well as adjust our marketing to handle objections sooner
Need new marketing angle for opt in page

“Why isn’t the number bigger? Why Internal Launch only first?”

The reasons for this are twofold.

First off, my client had a sufficient audience to make it worth our while financially to perform this launch without spending a bunch of money on paid ads. The revenue you see is practically all straight profit for her. And this is ON TOP of existing cash flow. A very nice bonus.

Second, doing an internal only launch allows us to “prime” our Facebook pixel with data we would otherwise be paying around $1,000+ for… So when we DO go to do our next launch here soon, our advertising results will be much more “efficient”… Meaning more registrants for the webinar for less money!

Want Help Launching Your Course or Scaling With Ads?

If you:

Have an existing social media audience or engaged email list…
Are in the health space….
Are a bona fide professional…
Have sales on existing products…
…Or are willing to invest in getting something new off the ground

Click here to book a call with me and see how we can work together. And look, even if you don’t qualify, go ahead and book a call. I love getting to know my readership and can frequently connect you with who is the next best step for you. :-)

One big caveat: I won’t promote green smoothie stuff or fad stuff. I myself am a trained health professional via FDN.

All the best. Truly,

- Matt Wright

$30,000 Online Course Launch Case Study