Two weeks ago, I had a very successful re-launch of my Become a Blogger Coaching Club.

During the launch, I surpassed my goal by 258%. Needless to say, this made me happy.

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How did I do it? I used a combination of a carefully crafted webinar and email sequence.

In this post, I’m going to share all of the details with you, so that you can go out and do the same to launch your digital product.

Why You Should Use Webinars

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Using Webinars to Launch

I love webinars, but not only because I find them to be a lot of fun. They are extremely effective when it comes to selling products.

Here are three reasons:

You are able to demonstrate value upfront

For someone to decide to buy your product, you have to establish some level of trust. Think about it . . .

You are asking them to go to a web page, pull out their credit cards and buy from you.

How do they know that your purchase process can be trusted?

How do they know that they will get what they pay for?

How do they know that the quality of your digital product warrants the price you are charging?

Some of this uncertainty can be eliminated (or at least reduced) by demonstrating the value before the purchase.

Value

Teaching your potential customer something useful in a webinar can help them understand the real value of what you provide.

With Live Events comes Energy

How do you feel when you get together with a group of friends to watch a movie? You probably get more excited than when watching a movie alone.

That's the same thing that happens during a live webinar. It's not simply someone going to your sales pages and reading.

It's them having a shared experience with others, and that brings a lot of energy to the experience.

The Sense of Urgency is a Great Motivator

If you do a webinar in the way I outline in this post, there will be a sense of urgency.

This is a great motivator to action.

How to Launch Your Product with a Webinar

To launch a product successfully using a webinar, you're going to have to go through several steps.

I'm going to share the exact steps that I used that resulted in my successful launch. I hope you can take these steps, tweak them (as needed) and apply them to your next launch.

Create a High-Quality Product

Yes, I know that this is not an episode on creating products. But this part is so crucial that I need to cover this part in some detail.

Here's the thing – if you sell a mediocre product, you're going to have mediocre results.

Creating a high-quality product doesn't mean that it will sell itself, but it will make the sales process easier.

The goal is to create a product that solves a specific problem for your potential customers.

This can be a course or (as in my case) even a membership site.

You want to make sure that the value is so good that you can give away a lot of valuable content during the webinar and still have LOTS to share in the product.

Regarding the technology for my membership site, here are the tools I use:

  • WordPress: Do I even need to explain this one? All of my sites are based on WordPress because WordPress ROCKS!
wordpress
WordPress
  • Amember: This is the membership site software I use to handle member registration and protect my pages.
  • Stripe: This is the payment processor I currently used. I go rid of PayPal because of technical issues that always seem to arise. Stripe makes it SUPER easy to accept payments and integrates with Amember well.
Stripe
Stripe
  • Facebook Group: After trying forums for previous launches, I'm so glad to be using a Facebook group now. Fewer problems and more interaction. A win-win situation for everyone.

Planning your webinar

It's time to plan your webinar – the big event. This is where you will be providing your attendees with a ton of value and then announcing the launch of your product. Here are the things you must do:

Set a Schedule
Set a Date

Set a date

The first thing you want to do is set a date. When will you be launching your product? That will be the day of the webinar.

Once you set that date, you can take a step back and set the milestones you need to reach to be ready on time.

Create an Outline

All of my content starts as an outline (even this post). By creating an outline first, you're able to get a birds-eye view of your project.

It allows you to get a good idea of the flow of your content and make decisions about what should be removed or added.

Get Feedback

Once your outline is complete, it's a good idea to get feedback from someone else. Did you miss anything? Does your flow make sense?

Getting an outside perspective can often go a long way and help you spot mistakes, refine concepts and make your content more effective.

Revise your outline

Once you've collected feedback, take some time to revise your outline. The more work you do on the outline, the less work you'll have to do when you create your slides.

The Structure of Your Presentation

Questions
What to include in your presentation

What makes a great presentation? One that engages your audience, delivers value, and gets the desired result.

Of course, in the case of launching a product, the desired result is to sell your product.

I've toyed around with the structure of my webinars and here's what works well for me:

The Pre-Webinar Banter

Around 5 or 10 minutes before the designated time for the start of the webinar, I start the broadcast and chat with the attendees who are on early.

During that time, I ask them simple questions like who they are and where they are tuning in from.

I might also ask another question that's related to the topic of the webinar. For example, in my last webinar, I asked for them to let me know if they already have a blog.

When they answer in the chat, I read their responses out loud for them to get a sense of who's in the room. This helps to warm them up for the main event and gets them excited.

The “What” Section

This section contains the title slide and the slide that outlines what we're going to cover. The goal here is to set expectations and to hook their attention.

This section shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 minutes.

The “Why” Section

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Audience Interactions

This is where you really sell the value of what you're teaching by explaining why it's such an important topic? What pain will it help your audience solve by the end of the webinar?

If they resonate with your “why”, they will be excited to watch the entire presentation.

I find that this is best accomplished by sharing a story. For example, In my most recent webinar, I shared the story of how I went from being an unsatisfied high school science and math teacher to a university professor by leveraging my blog.

I then showed how I was able to leave that job to be a full-time blogger. By sharing that story, I was able to connect with people on the webinar who wanted more from life than they were currently getting.

This clearly showed why they needed to pay keen attention to what I was teaching.

The “Who” Section

This next section is where you let them know a little bit about who you are (as it pertains to the content). For some people, this might be their first interaction with you.

You never want to assume that everyone on the call knows you.

This also allows you to demonstrate why you are qualified to speak on the topic you are presenting on.

Side note: The “Why” and “Who” sections can be reversed – whatever makes the flow of the presentation better. Also, everything up to this point shouldn't take more than 10 to 15 minutes.

The “How” Section

Webinar
Webinars

This is the most important part of the entire webinar because this is where you deliver on your promise. Whatever you said you would cover in the “what” section should be covered in great detail here.

The goal here is to give so much value that the webinar could serve as a standalone product because of how much value you packed into it.

Attendees should be able to walk away, take action and achieve results.

This should also be the longest section. If everything before the “how” section took 10 to 15 minutes, this section should take around 30 minutes.

A key thing to keep in mind is that while this webinar should be very actionable, you should leave room for “more”. And that more will come in your offer.

The Offer (including the “when”)

Once you've over-delivered with some awesome actionable content, it's time to make the pitch.

Your attendees have seen the value and can walk away and take action. However, for those that want to take things further and get even more guidance, they can get even more value by buying your product.

In this offer, you should include the following details (and a lot of this will sound familiar):

  • What pain your product is solving
  • What are the benefits to choosing your product
  • What your product includes
  • Testimonials from others who have had success with your product
  • The price of your product
SpecialOffer
Special Offer

Once you've gone through all of that, there's one more important thing that's needed – a time-sensitive special offer.

By having a sense of urgency, you will increase your number of signups significantly. This can be a reduced price for those who are on the webinar or for those who take action quickly.

I did my webinar on a Thursday and offered a $1 trial for those who signed up by Tuesday at midnight.

Prepare your Marketing Assets

So you've got your slides created and you are ready to go. But in order for your promotion to be successful, you will need to create some marketing assets:

Your Sales Page

This one should be fairly obvious. When you give your call to action at the end of your webinar, you will need a place to send them to in order for the to buy.

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Elements of an effective sales page

That's where your sales page comes into play. Here are the elements of an effective sales page as described by Ray EdwardsP.A.S.T.O.R acronym:

  • Problem: State the problem in a way that your audience can identify with it.
  • Amplify: Amplify the problem.
  • Story/Solution: Tell a story that shares the solution
  • Testimony: How has your product worked for others?
  • Offer: What exactly are you selling?
  • Response: This is where they respond to your offer and take action.

For more on this, check out Ray's Episode on P.A.S.T.O.R.

Your Email Sequence

When launching a product, your email sequence plays a vital role. As great as your product will be, subscribers often need to go through a nurture sequence before making the decision to buy. Here's the exact sequence I used to launch my Coaching Club.

Before the webinar, I sent out three emails:

  1. The first email announced the webinar and gave them the link to register. This email went out on the Monday before the webinar, which was done on Thursday.
  2. I sent a second email on the day before the webinar.
  3. I sent a third email to let my subscribers know that we'd be starting in one hour.

The result was a well-attended webinar. Yipee 🙂

EmailChecking
Email Follow-up

After the webinar is where the real marketing began. Here are the emails that were sent out then:

  1. The Replay Email: I sent this email out on the day after the webinar (Friday). In this email, I sent the link to the replay page and I let them know about the $1 trial offer that would be expiring on Tuesday.
  2. Two Days Remaining: In this email, I decided to share a success story from one of the members of the coaching club. I also reminded them that there were only 2 days left to claim the special offer.
  3. 24 Hours Remaining: In this email, I answered 2 questions that addressed concerns that some of my subscribers might have had. The two questions I chose were:
    • Is the Coaching Club right for me?
    • Is the Coaching Club worth the cost?
  4. On the day of: On the day of, I decided to send out 2 emails:
    • First email (12 hours remaining): I shared one benefit of membership. For this promotion, the benefit was the hot seats that I just implemented at the beginning of our coaching calls.
    • Final email (6 hours remaining): This was the “last call” for the $1 trial offer. This one was more direct and focused on the fact that the offer would be ending soon.

In the past, I've hesitated to send out that many emails. Then I realized that by really promoting the Coaching club, I'm actually helping my audience out.

Because I created a quality program, I knew that members would get a tremendous amount of value from it, so I was more confident in my promotions than ever before.

It's also important to note that 56% of my sales came in during the last 24 hours. Yes, by doing that final promotional push, it more than doubled my sales. This emphasizes the importance of sending those email reminders.

Bonus Tip: Use Countdown timers

I've already mentioned the importance of creating a sense of urgency and how that results in increased sales. Using countdown timers are very effective for emphasizing the time-sensitive nature of your offer.

Knowing that the sale is ending in approximately 6 hours is not as effective as knowing that it's ending in 6 hours, 15 minutes and 4, 3, 2 seconds 😉

Whether you use LeadPages or OptimizePress, they both give you the ability to use countdown timers on your landing pages. However, with LeadPages, you have to specifically choose a page that has the countdown timer feature. With OptimizePress, you can add it to any of your pages.

For your emails, I recommend using Motion Mail. It allows you to create countdown timers and add them directly to your emails. It's a beautiful thing. Urgency even before they leave the inbox 😀

In Conclusion

Webinars are powerful. When you combine a carefully crafted webinar with a well thought out email sequence, you are setting your product up for success.

Feel free to take the steps I shared in this post and modify them to suit your needs. If you plan on launching a product, use this as a guide and then come back and let me know how it worked for you.

Your Turn

Have you launched any products of your own? If so, what tips did you learn that could help us all. Go ahead and share in the comments below.

Infographic

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Infographic: How to Launch via Webinars

About the Author Leslie Samuel


Leslie Samuel a business coach for high-performing entrepreneurs. As the host of the Leslie Samuel Show, he teaches how to build an online business. "Changing the world one post at a time” is the mission he strives towards. As a former university professor, he has a passion for education. He's the founder of Interactive Biology, a blog and YouTube channel dedicated to making biology fun for students and teachers. As the head of training for the Social Media Marketing Society, he helps social media marketers get the training they need to stay on the leading edge of social media.

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