How to Run a Hands-Off Launch Campaign

Presented live on Tuesday, January 12, 2021

How do you run a launch campaign while you’re OOO?

For the first time ever, we ran a launch campaign while the entire team was on a holiday break.

Some businesses do this all the time – run campaigns without watching every single thing that happens at every single moment of the day.

But if you’re not one of ’em, this hands-off launch is probably a wee bit out of your comfort zone.

So in this tutorial, Jo’s going to walk you through the elements we had to have in place in order to “set it and forget it” with a launch that brought in $25K in MRR.

In case you wanna catch the behind-the-scenes of our first ever Hands-Off Launch…

(including exactly how we mapped our launch emails)

Transcript

Introduction [00:00]

Joanna Wiebe: Today, we’re talking about our recent launch of the 10x Freelance Copywriter specifically the emails, the email map. People are always asking us for maps or different workflows, things like that. However you describe it for email sequences. So what did you do, particularly when it comes to campaigns, but also evergreen, we’re not really going to talk about nurturing stuff.

What to Expect in This Tutorial [00:33]

But because people always want to know about these maps, we’re totally going to share them with you. But what’s really interesting as well about this particular case study that we’re sharing today. Is that it was the first time that we put together a total launch campaign and then walked away and just let it run.

And now, that does not mean that we are as hands off as some people may want to be with their launches. I know Ange was still monitoring Facebook ads and we had people on support and sales chat and things like that.

However, I was not very involved at all. Once the work was done. We just set everything up and walked away and went on vacation. And you know, you hear a lot of people talk about how that’s the dream, right? You just set it and forget it and your life is amazing.

And although sometimes that’s true. It’s a lot harder when you have a full team when you have thousands of customers and all sorts of other things going on. In my experience, it’s a little difficult to walk away, but we did it.

So I want to walk you through that, while also giving you the encouragement that maybe you’ll feel good about doing more things without always being there for them – as like a side note here.

Hands-Off Launch [01:59]

Joanna Wiebe: So here’s what went down. We welcomed about 250 new students into the 10x Freelance Copywriter. And that’s somewhat in keeping with how many we add every time we do a launch. It’s a little more. I think it’s about 25-30% more than we typically do and we do a couple launches a year for the 10x Freelance Copywriter. But start of year, so it felt like a really good time to do that.

Now as we welcome those students, we were vacationing. As much as you can vacation in a lockdown, virtual lockdown at least. So we were away. And that’s like a really interesting thing for me at least.

Hands-Off Launch Plan [02:36]

Reusable Launch Plan

Start with a highly optimized offer
Build anticipation / Re-engage appropriate segment of list with an email invitation to existing repurposed content
Launch at a time that’s most ideal for this segment
Combine emails, “success story” video landing pages, Facebook / Instagram ads and long-form sales page for this launch funnel

Joanna Wiebe: Now here is the launch plan. Basically a reusable launch plan that we’re sharing with you now that isn’t specific to 10x FC, it’s based on 10x FC, but you can use the steps that are here to do your own essential, non-crazy launch.

So we do much more intricate launches at other times of year. This is a simple, straightforward, Just get the job done launch plan.

Highly Optimized Offer [03:09]

Joanna Wiebe: So start with a highly optimized offer. We didn’t have webinars, we didn’t have live content, we didn’t have anything else going on. We didn’t create anything new. So as far as content is concerned, but we did optimize our offer.

And increasingly, the more launches we do, the more we see that it really does come down to the strength of that offer. How irresistible is it? And as a copywriter, I know that, right? You know that you know list, offer, copy – you know how important those three parts are.

But it’s always a little shocking, when you actually see in practice, just how important those are. And of course, we were also talking to a very specific segment of our list. Which is just people who have been identified as freelance copywriters or freelancers, and in some cases, I think we had a segment in there, at one point, just for copywriters.

So we don’t know if you’re freelance or not. But we were talking to that targeted list with a very optimized offer for that group. And then of course the copy was the third part of that. So start with that highly optimized offer.

Build anticipation / Re-engage appropriate segment of list [04:18]

Joanna Wiebe: I’m going to show you first, these four steps and then I’m going to show you how we applied that, what that looked like for us. So the second part is, do your best to build anticipation.

That doesn’t mean you have to do a lot and actually every year for our March Copy School launch, we do like this big ambitious in my opinion, ambitious anticipation build up to the launch.

And we’ve seen that you don’t actually necessarily need to have a really long build up.

You need to get people re-engaged and get the appropriate segment re-engaged. But for this. It was like two days of, I think, was three days of very light re-engagement efforts. And maybe if we had done more aggressive re-engagement efforts, we would have got more results.

You never know. And of course, we can try more things as we go. But what we’re learning is for the launch of Copy School in March, we’re unlikely to do a big anticipation building campaign.

And least, it won’t look like what it looked like before in past years. So interesting, do build anticipation. Don’t overthink this stuff though, it’s really just a quick like re-engagement email, a couple reengagement emails.

Take some existing content you have and send it back out to that segment that you want to engage again.

Choose Optimal Launch Time According to Segment [05:43]

Joanna Wiebe: Launch at a time that’s most ideal for the segment. When we talk about list, offer, copy, I see this fitting into the offer. What is the timing of that offer? Because if the timing’s crap, then the offer is not going to be as strong. It is going to fall a little flat.

If the timing is good, then you’ll get better responses to it and then it makes us question as well, launching Copy School in March or April. Every time we do this, we do a kind of tradition. But is it the best time? And so we’re thinking about that now going forward.

Combine Assets For Launch Funnel [06:18]

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. And then fourth combine emails. In our case, we did success story video landing pages, some Facebook and Instagram ads as well as a long form sales page for this launch funnel.

So you have emails. In our case, we drove them to what we call an interstitial landing page to really do more build up before dropping them on that long form sales page. So kind of a 3-part basic funnel there with Facebook and Instagram ads also running.

How We Used our Reusable Launch Plan [06:51]

Joanna Wiebe: And here’s how we turned this into an actual launch for us. Our highly optimized offer was a 7-day trial for $1, plus a listing in our freelancer directory and access to the 10x Landing Pages copywriting course. So a bunch of stuff optimize there, as well as the timing, which will see down in number three.

For anticipation building or re-engagement, we sent just two emails driving to the freelance copywriter segment on our list, to our existing free course, the 5K in 5 days challenge. We were actually going to do this other live event, but life got crazy and we were like, I don’t have time to get this set up before we go on vacation on December 22.

So do we even need a live event? Can we repurpose existing content? And we found that it worked out pretty okay to repurpose existing content saving us so much time and allowing us still to have this be a hands-off launch because we weren’t putting any live events of any kind, out there.

For the third one which has launched at a time. That’s most ideal for the segment, we launched the start of the year, which is really big. Of course for self employed goal setters. There was a period there when we’re getting ready to go away on our, our two week break, where I was like, should we even do this?

We were going to try to be on vacation. I know my team needs time off to just reset. And so I wanted to make sure that we were protecting the team. But it is actually a very good time to launch, start of year. So we were like, how can we make this as straightforward and hands-off as possible?

It also launched for the first time ever, on a Sunday because we have seen that we get really high engagement from freelancers on Sundays. So this is just looking through your data understanding how a segment interacts with your content and when they do, in order to build your launch around that.

And then the fourth part, the actual, like what are the elements that we had in place. We had our emails. They took about a day to write, I wrote them. We outsourced our video interviews. We hired Andrew Yedlin to interview a handful of the current members of the 10x Freelance Copywriter about their success stories.

Andrew’s in the 10x Freelance Copywriter, so we got him to do that work. Our social ads, Ange can speak to that as we get into this, especially if you have any questions, but between Erin actually writing the ads and Ange managing the all of it. Two-ish days for all of that work.

And then of course there was the maintenance. This is getting ready for the launch. And then our sales page we barely updated it. Mostly just updated that offer area and we put a new

quick video, which I actually don’t have here, the video interviews.

We had six videos. I think one of those was a highlight reel anyway. That was part of optimizing that sales page as well. So we had this stuff. Obviously, we can do more of these things. Do we need to have video interviews for this launch to go well?

I don’t know. We might have been able to get away with not having that just have emails driving to the long form sales page and ads driving to the long form sales page. And that might have worked like a charm.

But that wasn’t the bigger idea of the launch. We were like, we have a lot of great successful members inside this product. So let’s focus our marketing efforts on highlighting the successes that people do get inside the 10x Freelance Copywriter.

So for us, we wanted to do those video interviews here in part number four. You might not. You might find a different way into your launch. Your bigger idea for your launch might be something else about your product or your offer that you’d want to focus on. And then you wouldn’t have to do any of the video interviews or anything like that.

But we needed to for ours. Jawad says to us, I only signed up after watching the two interviews. So cool works, at least anecdotally, in one case of those interviews helped a lot. Roshawn said I didn’t see any videos I just joined.

So, you never know. Right. But that doesn’t mean we would, we’d have to know a lot more before we actually made any different decisions on this. And again, we do a lot of launches and those little pieces are different all the time. By little pieces, I mean things like video interviews or stuff that’s related to the big idea for that particular launch.

Email Map: Why Version [11:47]

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, looking at time I’m going to quickly get into the actual email map now. Now we’re going to start with the “Why” version. And that is every time you write any email, you should know why anytime you’re putting an email sequence together, you should know why each email is in that sequence.

Because if you don’t know why, how the hell is your prospect going to figure out what that email is there for and what they should do with it? So here’s the Why version of the map. And this is going to be the part that isn’t as tactical.

This is if you are involved in launches, or in campaigns that quote unquote launch and then end. This is going to be a helpful map for you. Soyou can see the parts that are bolded here, are moving them through the stages of awareness. I’ve never experienced mapping a single sequence that worked. That didn’t have the stages of awareness firmly planted in there.

Do we know what starting stage people are at? And how do we get them to the stage they need to be at, product aware, in order to get them to buy? So we wanted to re-engage, open with re-engagement. You’re typically trying not to teach people about the product, but to get them to remember what their problems are, what their pains are and then propose a solution or have them think through solutions to that problem.

Now in 10x Emails we talked about PASOP: problem, agitation, solution, outcome and then problem. And that’s that’s somewhat what we’re doing here as well. So if you’re used to PASOP, that’s really what’s happening here for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’re not, don’t worry about it. Just look at what’s going on here on the screen.

We want to re-engage prospects in problem awareness and in that same same email move them to solution awareness. So that means the call to action has to be related to solution awareness and that’s why we sent them to the 5K in 5 day challenge.

The problem for freelancers was, I’m not making any money. I’m looking at 2021, like how am I going to make more money this year? I have to make a real go of this. How do I make sure the problems of 2020 don’t affect me in 2021, or at least not in ways that I can control. Solution then is to actually start doing things a little differently.

That’s part of the 5K in 5 day challenge. And the solutions there are sending emails to certain people. Okay, cool. So that’s where we re-engage them, hey, come over to the 5K in 5 day challenge.

Next day is moving them deeper into solution awareness and that’s where they were able to actually start the 5K in 5 day challenge. And this is Friday on here, as the actual day of the week, but it was of course the first day of the new year. And so we were like, great start the new year off and do this first challenge in the 5K in 5 day challenge.

Cool. So now they’re deeper into solution awareness. And we’re moving them by end-of-day Saturday to the high solution aware. So if you’re familiar with the stages of awareness: problem, solution, product and most aware. Most of the time when we’re selling, we’re moving people through product awareness, through to the very end of most aware, where they convert.

So we want to get them to high solution aware. Then once the launch starts, as long as they’ve moved to high solution aware, now we’re ready to bring them into product awareness so we can launch the product to them.

So we move through early product awareness. It’s basically like, hey what’s up? Here’s the product. It’s for sale. And we’re also introducing the offer there because what you also want to think about when you’re launching is that you will have early adopters, who will just jump on what you have and not really think too much about it.

And so we introduced the offer there, understanding that a lot of people will sign up in that first day, just because they’re ready for it already. Maybe they’ve been waiting for this. They’ve been hearing people talk about 10x FC, stuff like that.

And then from that point on, the remaining four days of the launch, we’re moving them through product awareness to the point of most aware. In that final day, if they’re not most aware, sure we can’t control if they’ve opened emails or not. And you can do advanced segmentation to help people move through things. But that wasn’t the point of this more simple, hands-off launch.

So that’s the basic calendar. Here’s the more tactical version of that all based on the why you just saw. So I’m not going to dig too deeply into this because we’re out of time. And we have four open questions, but you can see that we had two emails out of the gate when we’re trying to build up that, move people from problem to solution so that they’d be ready in early product awareness.

Saturday we did not send an email because they’re moving through solution awareness was moving through it alone as well. Having that course there, the 5K in 5 day challenge, but nobody there to help them with it.

Versus 10x Freelance Copywriter, where you’ll have the course, as well as people there to help you with it. So helping them feel that pain all on their own, a little bit. And then we moved into the launch and as you already know what the why was, so you can see if you watch the replay of this or take a screenshot or whatever.

You can see what those emails and ads were there to do. The emails were driving by and large, to the video based interstitial page I spoke about earlier. And then those drove to the long form sales page. So unlike a lot of launches, we didn’t drive straight to the long form sales page.

We drove to an interstitial where we had student success stories, except on the last day of launch when we prioritized driving to the long form sales page and then have subordinate links in there to go to different success stories as well as the highlight reel.

And here’s where we were when all of these students were signing up. We were out of office, all the way up to the second last day of the launch. Which is a really nice feeling when you can check in, of course, and we did. But you can actually be out of office and just like letting these things run if you know that you have a basic strong launch plan.

And you have the emails written that are meaningful and intentional and meant to move them through those stages of awareness, then what you really need to focus on is just having support there.

Summary [17:57]

So, launches do not have to be hard. Do your best to repurpose anticipation or engagement content. And again, this is for a launch that may not be a major launch, might be more of a just a campaign that you run at some time.

We did of course, as I mentioned, cancel our plans to do a live event on Facebook. Last year we did the live event, the 5K in 5 day challenge live on Facebook. This year we just took that challenge and repurposed it because we’ve made it into a free course on copyhackers.com

So much depends on the strength of the offer. If you’re not optimizing your offer, you are losing sales like and we’re using a lot of sales. Lean into social proof or any original content for the launch. Social proof is a big mover, all forms of proof. There are like 100 forms of proof. There’s a lot of proof out there.

For us social proof is a big one, because people are signing up to improve their lives. We want to see other people’s stories of that and that’s typically always the case. You always want to improve your life.

And then focus your energy on sales chat and support. So if you are going to be around. You should still be able to be a little chill about this throughout. For us, I didn’t handle sales chat or support at all but a couple of different people from my team did at different times. And this is where you can get our email copy.

I didn’t think about anybody wanting the videos. We are adding them to the 10x Freelance Copywriter, in the bonus area. I think Paul’s working on that, they should be live in our training platform today. So I think Ange is going to try to chat that out.

I didn’t chat her the link before, so we’ve got that coming. But it is all of those emails in case you’re like, cool. I saw the map, but as I work through this on my own. I want to see how you guys implemented it. Cool.

All right, thanks, Ange. Yes, copy that directly because it’s case sensitive sensitive. Thank you. I was like sentence case no case sensitive. Okay, cool, thanks for chatting that out.

That’s really it. And I feel like I’m all like when we talk about launches, I get all jittery and stoked, talking about how to optimize your offer, how to get that initial anticipation building stuff in place.

But that is it for today’s tutorial the replay will be available in a couple of days, and we’ll see you next Tuesday for our next Tutorial Tuesdays. Thanks, Ange. Thanks everybody for chatting and participating and asking great questions and have a good rest of your week. Stay safe out there. Bye, everyone.