🔍 Your 9-Step Playbook For Product Launches

Happy Friday, my friends.

This one took a little longer to put together, and that's why it's hitting your inbox on a Friday.

But, today we're discussing the playbook behind a successful launch.

And if you're planning on launching anything in the near future, this playbook is what you need.

This Is Why I Ditched Calendly And Increased Inbound Leads By 100%

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It’s an extra employee streamlining your business and always connecting the dots.

For example, Hawk Media used ClickUp to decrease project delays by 70% in its first year.

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The 9-Step Playbook For A Successful Product Launch

It's Friday, so hopefully, you have a little extra time on your hands for a deep dive into product launches.

Most marketers obsess over launch day.

I obsess over the months leading up to launch day because.

This playbook explains why.

Here are the 9 steps:

1. Grow and Grab

Anytime I work on a product launch, I stress the importance of Grow and Grab.

Meaning, it’s time to double down on social content to “grow” your audience and have a strategy to “grab” emails.

So, anytime I work with a client, or I’m prepping to launch a product - I’m intentionally scaling my content efforts and adding more calls to action throughout my content to build my email list.

For example, when I launched my paid newsletter, I followed this exact strategy:

For the 10 days leading up to the launch - I dropped a growth marketing thread every day
At the end of each thread, I added a call to action to sign up for an exclusive release

One grew my audience. The second grabbed emails.

2. Preview

After you’ve added people to your email list, your job is two-fold: To earn trust and build excitement.

You earn the trust by:

Introducing yourself and the story
Setting the expectation
Providing value before asking for anything

You build excitement by:

Giving exclusive looks to the product
Sharing social proof
Offering exclusive pricing to subscribers

So, for one of my past clients, we created a two-week email drip that looked like this:

Founder Story & Transformation
Goal Behind The Product & Problem it Solves
Valuable Content That Helps Solve The Problem
Valuable Content That Injects The Product
Sneak Peak Of The Product
Social Proof
Reminder Email About The Launch
T-Minus X Time Before Launch
Launch With Exclusive Pricing

If you use this drip, remember the goal is to earn trust and build up excitement which will drive conversions.

** You can add a pre-sell option if you want to test demand and gather social proof - more below **

3. Pre-Sell

Not everyone needs this or will do this. But I like to use pre-sells to test for demand and start gathering social proof before the official launch.

So, what I did in the past with a client was set a target goal of customers in a time frame.

For example, when I helped a client launch his fitness product - we wanted to test the demand for it before putting money, resources, and time into building and launching it.

I spun up a quick landing page, developed a quick funnel, added the payment infrastructure, and were off to the races.

The goal was 50 pre-sells in the first 24 hours.

We hit 70+ within 24 hours. This was all the data we needed to know to start scaling.

4. Product Positioning

One of the most overlooked parts of a product launch is product positioning.

What I like to do during the pre-sell is test product positioning.

For example, for the fitness product, I positioned it three different ways and measured which had the highest conversion rate.

That determined how we positioned it on launch day.

I’d advise you to do the same. Before launching, do an exclusive pre-sell where you segment your email list and use the segments to test your positioning.

5. A/B Testing

Positioning, check. Moving on to testing.

Now, that you’ve found how to position your product, you want to create an A/B version of your sales page.

Again, this matters because once we start running paid ads, the difference between a 3% conversion rate and a 5% conversion rate on a landing page can mean profitable or not.

So, later when we start running paid ads we’ve nailed down our positioning and we’ve nailed down our sales page.

6. Posts To Paid

Social is great for two things: driving sales and testing paid creative.

For a product launch, using organic social to test paid creative is key.

For this, you want to measure specific KPIs to determine if an organic piece of content is scalable or not.

Set a benchmark for these KPIs and if it meets or exceeds them, optimize it for paid social.

For example, here’s what I did in the past:

I created 10 IG story ads (different hooks, angles, types of content)
Measured which had the highest CTR (click-through rate)
Picked the top three and optimized them for the launch

So, when we launched - I had proven to work re-targeting ads ready to go.

Because of this, our CAC for an entire month was ~$10 for a $100+ product.

We later did this again with in-feed creative. We created 10+ pieces of content with specific benchmark goals, tested (hooks, angles, positioning, types of content), and rolled with the winners.

Because after determining the winner, you’re back at the whiteboard optimizing the winners.

7. Proof

Another benefit to the pre-sell is accumulating social proof.

Get your product (even if it’s not perfect) into the hands of some customers.

And make these customers your best friends.

Here’s why:

Use them to accumulate social proof and user-generated content
Ask for constant feedback → Use this feedback to optimize your organic social, paid ads, landing pages, and emails
Happy early-adopters typically evolve into advocates

So, the 70+ pre-sell customers became an integral part of our product development process.

And our goal was twofold:

Have these customers help us optimize and refine our product
Involve them so much they become advocates

8. Price

Pricing is often overlooked. And the one I used, I learned from one of my colleagues, Steph Smith.

With a digital product, it’s hard to create a sense of urgency or manufacture scarcity without feeling scammy.

So, I used a tiered pricing structure where the price increased after X amount of customers bought the product.

Here’s what that looks like:

$50 For the first 10 customers
$55 For the next 10 customers
$60 For the next 10 customers
Continued

And we did this until the product reached the original price.

9. Promote

Now it's the big day. And if you've done everything above, then launch day will be easy.

Because you'll know:

How to position your product
Which landing pages to use
What messaging to use
What social content to push
Which emails to send
How to price your product on launch day
What social proof to use

I hope this helps!

🔍 Your 9-Step Playbook For Product Launches

This Is Why I Ditched Calendly And Increased Inbound Leads By 100%

The 9-Step Playbook For A Successful Product Launch

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