Lessons From My First Product Launch | Eleanor Stones

So at the end of June I finally hit publish on a project I had been working on (and dreaming about) for a very long time. Since the first day, I started freelancing, in fact.

It was a set of templates for small business owners who don’t yet have the budget to invest in custom design. It focuses primarily around my Squarespace Website Templates but each ‘family’ of templates also has a matching MailChimp Email Template and set of Social Media Templates. I’m all about providing beautiful yet functional design that goes beyond your website!

Oh, and did I mention they come with video guides and a mini course to help take you from receiving your template to launching your site? I really wanted to cram them with as much useful information as possible!

Sure, I’ve ‘launched’ my yearly content calendars before. But they were more of a slip-it-out-into-the-world-in-the-dead-of-night sort of affair. This time, I took it seriously. I enlisted the help of the wonderful Pocket VA to help with planning on social media. I got images taken by the lovely Stories By Chloe. I got my ducks in a row. And… I launched.

You can imagine the excitement and nerves, right? I mean, I tried to sleep that week. But between delivering templates, marketing my products and being as giddy as a kid on Christmas day, I hardly got a wink in.

In this blog, I want to take you through some of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt before, during and after launching. So, whether you’ve got a launch planned later this year or you’re just after a nosy around mine, grab yourself a warm drink and let’s get stuck in…

Just do it

If I’m real with you here, I could have come up with 100 different reasons not to launch when I did. I could have put it off and procrastinated. I could have taken some time off or dedicated it to 1:1 clients. Even after setting a date for the launch, a big part of me wanted to run for the hills.

It’s a strange one, putting something you’ve worked on for so long out into the world. It sometimes feels like it’s been your baby which means it’s equal parts terrifying and exciting to show it off.

But it comes to a point where you’ve got to hit that eff-it button.

My first lesson was discovering I needed to feel the fear and do it anyway. We’ll never be 100% ready for things like this so no more putting it off another week or month. There’s no time like the present and all that, eh!

Repeat Yourself

You might as well get used to it now. Because when you launch you’re going to need to repeat yourself a heck of a lot.

You might worry that you’re the worlds most annoying personal/business. But, as I discovered first hand, you could be shouting on the rooftops about your launch, beginning to question whether you are annoying your audience. And then there will be a message that pops up asking something like ‘when does your offer run out?’.

This also reminded me of that age old marketing saying: a person needs to see your promotion 7-10 times before they are ready to buy from you. And with only a small percentage of your following across your platforms seeing your posts or emails, you’re going to need to chat about your products and just how darn great they are a LOT.

Moral of the story: repeat, repeat, repeat yourself.

And if anyone doesn’t like it? Well, they’re probably not the right fit for you and your incredible offering then.

Asana is your best friend

Or Trello. You know, whichever is your favourite project management tool.

I love a pen and paper notebook. It’s where all my notes and thoughts get dumped as the week goes on. In the past, I used Asana for client projects to keep me on track but everything else was pretty much on paper. But if this launch taught me anything, it’s just how useful tools like Asana can be for launches.

I simply dropped in all of the tasks I wanted to complete then broke them down into manageable steps. I gave each step a due date. And a lovely colour of course. Then each day running up the launch I would just log on to my computer and follow what Asana had down for my work day in the Calendar view.

It was such a breeze compared with flicking through different pieces of paper and notebooks.

But here’s the best bit. Next time I launch a new template, I can just duplicate my launch project, add in my new dates and away I go. So the hard work has already been done for me. Amazing, right?

Chatting Time

Don’t get me wrong, I bloody love chatting to business owners or those dipping their toe into the world of entrepreneurship. But I hugely miscalculated just how long I’d be doing this on launch week. My 1 hour a day did not cut the mustard.

Note to self: always add it some extra time when it comes to planning for customer queries, engagement and support.

Plan EVERYTHING in advance

There’s no such thing as being over-prepared for your first launch. You only have so many hours in the day and, as established above, you’ll be spending a lot of this time in your inbox.

Here’s some things you’ll want to add to your list to do in advance:

Your email newsletters. Chances are, you’ll be sending out a fair few emails during your launch period. From experience, emails always take longer than they’re often given credit. Unlike social media and blog content, once they are out there, there is no changing them. With this in mind, the last thing you’ll want do is rush them.
Your sales pages. These are where you can make or break a sale. So you’re going to want them looking tip top to clinch the sale. No rushing here either.
You social media posts. Same goes for any adverts you’ll be putting out. You can schedule these well in advance so you don’t have to lift a finger come launch week.

Trust me, by taking a look at these before you launch, you’re in for a much more relaxing one. I skipped number one, emails. I thought ‘oh it’ll be easy to just put together an email on the day’. How wrong was I! I was up late writing emails after a busy day. And I really need my 8 hours a night.

Most sales come right before a deadline

What can I say? People LOVE a deadline!

The fact is, most of my sales came with 24 hours left to go before my intro offer ran out. If potential customers don’t have that sense of urgency, they may just think ‘I’ll think about it another time’, ‘I’ll keep it bookmarked for later’.

We want them to make a decision now. To listen to their gut and see what is in their hearts. When customers can’t put off their decision, they’re forced to pick: do they really want what you have to offer? They might decide ‘nah it’s not for me’ but thats okay, these people were never going to be our customers anyway. ORRRR they might think ‘oh yes, this is actually going to change my life’. And with the sense of urgency you’ve

So, how do you add urgency?

Create a limited time offer. This is what I went for as I want to help entrepreneurs create beautifully functional websites all year long. When I launched my templates, I had a sale for a 3 days.
Open your cart for a limited time. This can work really well for courses. The idea is you open your cart for a set time period, say 1 or 2 weeks. During this time you can really focus on selling your product or course. The sense of urgency is at its greatest. If they don’t buy it now, they don’t know when they’ll next be able to.
Add fast action bonuses. Or you could try adding in a bonus for people who make their decision quickly. This could be a bonus product, a mini course or even a 1:1 session with you.

Want to take a look at the products that I launched? Check the Squarespace Website Template out here:

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