Dive into product launch tips and tricks to grow your audience and create your most successful launch!
KickoffLabs On Growth is a podcast aimed to help you launch and grow your business. We’ll share our own stories and feature interviews with successful startup founders and marketing experts.
Josh:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the On Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Ledgard. Today's guest runs an agency that helps founders market and launch Kickstarter campaigns in new e-commerce sites. We walk through all the steps you have to take to build an audience starting from zero. This advice is critical because while Kickoff Labs can help you build a great referral based launch contest, you still need to bring what we call seed traffic in order to find customers willing to share and engage with your company and ultimately buy your products. She brought some great expertise to the pod and has worked with a few successful Kickoff Labs customers in the past. I know you're going to learn a ton here. Enjoy the show. All right, everybody. So today I'm talking to Kirsten Ross from Launch and Scale. So, hi, Kristen. Welcome to the On Growth Podcast.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Hey, I am so excited to be here, so thanks for having me.
Josh:
Yeah. Tell me about your business. What do you do? How do you help people?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah, so I am the founder and CEO of Launch and Scale. So, we are a online platform, blog marketing agency, et cetera that all helps early stage founders launch their e-commerce brands online. So, we have different ways to work with people, whether that is having an agency where we do the marketing for you, or we have a group coaching and mentorship to help actually train you to grow your business. But that's all okay. What we do at Launch and Scale is we help early stage brands launch their products on Kickstarter, Shopify, get market traction, and actually look to scale them up to 3 million a year and more. So, there are many different ways we do that, but that is... In a nutshell, we launch e-commerce businesses.
Josh:
Perfect. So, at Kickoff Labs, obviously we've helped a lot of people launch new businesses. About half of our customers at least come from business launches, of people starting with a new idea,. Whether it's eventually something, they're going to have an e-commerce site, a subscription or a Kickstarter launch or something else, people are trying to build an audience. That's the root problem that people are trying to solve, trying to grow the audience. And I wanted to talk to you or I'm excited to talk to you today because you know what Kickoff Lab says as a platform is it provides a tool to help people grow the audience via referral. So, people come to Kickoff Labs, they'll set up a landing page, get people to sign up, enter the email address, and we can add that engagement and referral element to things, like give people points for following you on Facebook or give people additional points for every friend they refer.
And you can then turn those points into rewards for customers, whether it's a reward people earn a certain point level, or you're doing a giveaway as part of the launch. And that mechanic... The challenge for our customers is that mechanic does amplify whatever marketing effort they're putting in. So, I always like to tell people like Kickoff Labs or any platform that you're using, this helps you... If you put in a thousand dollars worth of marketing effort or personal effort, I want that to feel like you spent $1,500. But you still have to know how you spend that first thousand dollars worth of marketing, which is why I'm excited to talk to you to help people understand the ways in which they can drive, what we call it, we call seed traffic. That seeding of the market to get the ball of the referrals rolling in that case. And so I understand as we were talking beforehand, you actually do have a connection. You'd heard of Kickoff Labs before as well. So, do you want to share that?
Kheirstyn Ross:
This is not sponsored, by the way, but when I got connected with Josh for KickoffLabs, I was really excited because one of the brands that we helped launch about three or four years ago, The Monk Manual, it's a 90 day quarterly journal for peaceful being and purposeful doing. And I remember Katie at the time was helping Steven launch the brand, and she came in and said, "Hey, we have six weeks to get ready for our upcoming Kickstarter launch. We have 300 people on our list, and Steven really wants us to launch this on October 22nd." And I was like, "Okay, well, I don't know if you can do this in six weeks, but let's just do it." So, over the course of six weeks, Katie worked to use Kickoff Labs to build their list from 300 people to over 3000. They ended up launching successfully on Kickstarter and their campaign raised about $72,000. They ended up, in the weeks after the campaign when they went to produce the planner, they were oversold for two months, which is super awesome.
And now, Monk Manual is, I believe, seven figure plus brand and they're doing really, really, really well. And so I got acquainted with Kickoff Labs because they used that really successfully in such a short period of time to have a really successful Kickstarter campaign. And here we are, small world, but... Because Monk Manual is my go-to planner.
Josh:
Yeah, like you said, it's a small world, and it's a great product. And again, not sponsored by them, unless they want to sponsor us, but... And I'm hoping one day I'll convince him to come on the show and tell his side of the story.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, where do you see people falling down the most. When they reach out to you, what are the biggest challenge that they're having?
Kheirstyn Ross:
They either... So, let's assume it's someone who's just getting started and doesn't have any experience online, or maybe they are an Amazon seller and they now want to start building up their own product on their own website. When people come to me, they have no idea where to get started. They may know how to piece together a really ugly basic landing page, but they don't know how to garner interest in their product. They don't know how to get people to that page. They don't know how to build the email list. Even if they can figure out how to get people to their list and scale that, they don't know what to say or how to turn that list into customers. So, part of it is lack of confidence, lack of experience, but also, it's just so overwhelming to start building an audience or a product that doesn't necessarily exist yet or your pre-launch and you don't know what audience to go after or what your positioning is.
It's just like, it's really overwhelming in the beginning. And so if I can take that whole thing and distill it... People come to me because they need help building awareness. They need help building their audience to turn that audience into paying customers. And the basis of any launch you do, any business you're starting to grow, it all comes down to having an audience building machine that, yet you do certain things that we're talking about today, to allow you to build your audience, but that you can turn that audience into actual customers, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Josh:
So, where do you start? Because I say this mirrors... Obviously, our customers on the side that are startups that are doing this, that are starting from zero, or maybe they have 50 connections they've made so far with the product, but they're basically starting from zero is what I consider it. How do you go about... What are the things you tell them that they should be focused on, or you help them or you focus on for them if they've hired you? But what are the things that you focus on in terms of driving traffic? Because that's the biggest challenge I feel like people face, is once they... Let's assume they've, they've started to get their copy better, but they won't really know until traffic comes to the page if the copy is persuasive, but what do you tell people when they come to you and say like, "Okay, let's start driving. How do I drive more traffic, or how do I drive traffic, period, to start building from that zero to the first hundred or first thousand people on a list?"
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah. So, the first thing I like to look at is the foundations of your product. So, when we say, "I want to get people to my page," there's so many different kinds of people. You can spend so much money without a focus on who it is that you're going after first. The very first thing I like to do is take a look at who is your ideal customer that is going to buy this product? Okay? So, that's the first thing, is I would get really clear on who I think my customer avatar is going to be or who's actually buying my product. That is... An easy question you could ask yourself is like, okay, well, who is likely going to benefit the most from a product like mine?
So, if we use the Monk manual, and if you guys want to vote on Steven coming on the show, maybe with enough traction, we can get him on the show, but we have something like the Monk Manual where we have, instead of just traffic, you have to look at, okay, well, who would benefit the most from a journal that helps people with peaceful being, purposeful doing? Okay. And then you can start writing a list of like, all right, well, new parents, it could be entrepreneurs, it can be professionals. And you start to make a list of the kinds of people that you think would benefit the most from a product like this. So, that's step one, is getting really clear on who. The second step is why.
Josh:
I'm going to pause you for a second there.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Josh:
So, those are three wildly different audiences that I could imagine reaching out to in very different ways. So, how do you unify that? Is it maybe you'll get into that is different targeting, or is it speaking to each audience separately, or is it one message for all the audiences?
Kheirstyn Ross:
I love that question. Let's circle back to that after we-
Josh:
I'll put that in pause and I'll come back to it because I think you're right. I also think that becomes another challenge that feels even more overwhelming sometimes.
Kheirstyn Ross:
And I don't want to be arbitrary today. So, yeah, let's definitely do that. So, step one is list off anyone who you think would benefit from the journal. Step two is going to be why. So, why will they benefit from the journal? So, we have them. We look at, okay, well, entrepreneurs, why would they benefit from a system of peaceful and purposeful doing? Okay. Well, because entrepreneurship is chaotic, it's all consuming, there's no balance. And you start to write down all the pain points that entrepreneurs have with the kind of product that you have with the thing. So, if it's a system for peaceful being and purposeful doing, it's the entrepreneur wants more organization in their life, they want less chaotic and more... You write down what kind of benefits they might get from a product like this and what they're currently struggling with. Then you do that for new parents, and then you do that for all of the top five groups that you have listed down.
Then what I would do is I would take an honest look at that list and say, okay, well, if I have five to 10 wildly different kinds of people, I've now written down the pain points and why they might benefit from a product like mine, what do I think are the top 20% of that whole list that's going to benefit the most out of the groups I just wrote down? So, then you might say, clearly entrepreneurs and new parents out of the list of 10, because so chaotic, they blah blah, blah blah, whatever that looks like. And so you narrow down that big list. You do an 80 20 approach to it where you do 20%, I think these two are going to get the most benefit out of the big list. Right?
Josh:
Yep. So, I've picked out the best ones.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Awesome. So, you've now picked out the best ones. And the thing to know is that you are likely going to be wrong in these two, but that's where testing comes in. So, the next thing I would do, because can't... The more you spend on ads, the more you can test. But in the beginning, we are bootstrapped entrepreneurs. You may only have 50 to a hundred dollars a day for testing. So, you want to really limit who you're testing so you can get conclusive results. So, what then I like to do is I like to go to Facebook ads, TikTok ads to focus on marketing, targeting those two very specific groups. And so I would create ads that speak specifically to the entrepreneur, but the benefits the entrepreneur would get for this journal, I would then speak directly to parents, the benefits they get. And then what you can do with that is you can run two separate campaigns testing the audiences to see which ones resonate the most with your message. And that's how you could start testing audiences to see if entrepreneurs resonate the most with this or if it's more young parents.
Josh:
And what is... Just so we can get really specific for people, what does it mean to resonate? Is it you're looking at clickthroughs of the ads? Are you looking through clickthroughs to conversions on a landing page? What are you defining as the ad resonates well or does not resonate well?
Kheirstyn Ross:
So, yeah, that's a great question. So, if you want to get fancy, you can drive the entrepreneur and the young parent to two very different landing pages that each speak specifically to that demographic. What I would prefer is I would prefer one landing page that has the overall messaging. And then in the use cases, you could say people who would use this are entrepreneurs, young parents, et cetera. So, you drive them to one specific landing page. And then what I would look at as a metric of who's resonating the best with the offer would be based on the conversion into an email address with that. And then when you're actually in market, it's going to be who is actually buying your product the most.
Josh:
So, let's say you've done this testing, because you can get a lot of tests pretty quickly without a lot of social engagement by running the ads. Let's say you do this testing, you find out that the audience that resonates most is parents in this case. I'm not sure if that is the case, but let's just pretend it was.
Kheirstyn Ross:
We're just... Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
And so let's say the that's audience that resonated most. How would you be... Do you just focus on ads? Or how would you recommend somebody who's targeting that group go about driving more traffic and getting more interest in their product or the page?
Kheirstyn Ross:
I love it. So, where you will use ads to validate your messaging and audiences fast, you can now take that data and say, oh wow, young parents, one by a landslide, so we now want to take an organic approach to marketing. So, outside of paid ads, the other side that you can do is you... If you have product in hand, I definitely recommend reaching out to some influencers and getting them to do an unboxing video or product review on your product and circulate that to their audience. That would be definitely one thing to do because it allows you to build social proof and get in front of a wider audience without having to pay a ton of money to do that.
Josh:
So, I'm going to ask a dumb question. I don't have a connection to Kim Kardashian, so how do I get an influencer to talk about my product or to do it?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah, so you actually don't start with Kim Kardashian. What you want to do is start with micro influencers, which are... If you're going on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and you're searching for what would... Okay, so let's just say young parents might be looking up things like organization tips for new moms. Okay. And when you do that search on these platforms, you come across five or 10 different kinds of people who are talking about good organization tips or they are doing an unboxing video. They work with companies to talk about their products. So, you find someone like that, and you're like, oh cool. And you click through to their profile and you find out that this person has between five and 20,000 people of followers. That is a micro influencer. You want to work-
Josh:
So, between what numbers?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Say 5 to 20, 25,000.
Josh:
Like 5,000 and 20,000?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yes. Yeah.
Josh:
Okay.
Kheirstyn Ross:
So, at the micro influencer level, you get people who are... They have a very specific following, because what they do is, if you look at the account of an influencer like that, they specifically focus on products for young moms. So, that's a really good placement because your product for young moms will resonate with their audience. They're also not super expensive if you want to do a sponsored post. And the smaller the audience, the more willing they are to work in exchange for product, or in exchange for joining a affiliate program where you offer say a commission off of every sale that they generate. So, going after Kim Kardashian, that audience, A, it's going to be what, $50,000 plus to get her to give you a shout out.
Josh:
I couldn't even imagine. But I just know whenever I talk to people and I say, "You should try influencers," that is the first objection people gets, like, "Oh, how expensive is it going to be?" Because in people's heads, I think when they think of influencers, they're always thinking about the ones that you've heard of, like Mr. Beast or the huge ones that nobody as a new brand can think about-
Kheirstyn Ross:
It's not accessible.
Josh:
... approaching. It's just not accessible. And so when you narrow it down and say, okay, let's find micro influencers, and you define it as a few thousand people as a micro influencer, you don't realize those people are more accessible because they're also looking for not only... They might even just be looking for content to talk about, and so they just want to have new content every single day or several times a day, and your offer to try out this product might even just be enough without payment for some of them. And we've heard that from our customers.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Exactly.
Josh:
It's sometimes just the exchange of, "Hey, here it is for free. You try it out if you like it, post a video about it. And when we launch our store, we'll give you an affiliate link.
Kheirstyn Ross:
And that's it.
Josh:
And that works sometimes. It's all you needed. It just took the guts from some of our customers saying, "I just needed to reach out and find five of them to do," and they're willing to do it.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Exactly. So, it's about less is more. And what's interesting is these influencers, they're building their following. They need this content because the better their content, the bigger their audience gets. And in the future, they'll be able to charge a lot more for videos like that, and et cetera, et cetera. But I would definitely start with influencer marketing if you have product to send them. The next thing I would do is I would look to grow your audience a little bit. So, what you might want to do from paid ads is if you are building a [inaudible 00:19:33] list, an email list from your paid ad efforts, you can use that to funnel people into a Facebook group around your product or your upcoming launch. And then in your Facebook group, you can provide a lot of value, make it a really great community, and then grow through referrals. So, by using your customer base, you can start to bring people onto your email list, into the group through referrals and engage them.
Josh:
So, they're both feeding each other in that case?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
If you're creating a Facebook group, you are creating it around the launch, and then helping them drive traffic to your launch page to collect an email, and then driving new emails also back to the Facebook group.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yep, exactly.
Josh:
Okay. And then what about existing communities? And so what about engagement with say Reddit parenting communities or popular Facebook groups about new parent organization? Because all of these things exist.
Kheirstyn Ross:
A hundred percent. So, getting into new Facebook communities gives you a chance to network with people in your space, provide value, and get market feedback on your product, which is really, really, really invaluable. So, there is a bit of an art to being able to monetize getting into Facebook groups because so many of the good groups are anti promotion. So, you really do have to be in there from a value add standpoint and go at it from building yourself up as a little bit of an authority in that space and starting to get feedback and just being a positive force in those groups to be able to engage people in conversation and eventually say, "Hey, by the way, we do have a product that helps with that. Do you want me to add you to our wait list?"
Josh:
Yep.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Et cetera.
Josh:
Absolutely. I mean, it's something that we used as well when we were first launching Kickoff Labs, is that we had... I just went into Quora as a question answer community and just looked for people asking questions about contests and product launches and just started answering questions. And in my bio, had a link to Kickoff Labs. And then some of the question answers had pictures, and the pictures say screenshot of a Kickoff Labs launch. And the picture is... It wasn't a overly promotional. It was just part of the answer because I'm using my product as here's an example of... Because people would ask questions like, "Can you give an example of a good launch page?" Like, "Oh, here's three, three good launch pages." And just the caption of the image would say built on KickoffLabs, or maybe that was even just in the image because it was a free user using using a freemium version that had branding on it And so they would discover the product. And in the first year after doing the core post, I think it probably posted to just 50 or 60 answers. It wasn't that many.
It was a few a week. I was just doing a few a week. We started looking back at the referrals and realized that Quora had driven $20,000 in sales for our products.
Kheirstyn Ross:
From just little things like that.
Josh:
Just little things. And as you said, there's an art. If I'd gone into Quora in those communities and started saying, "Let me tell you about the number one product for doing that," or started trying to ask my own questions to then answer them, I could be immediately... Yeah, like you said, you'd be immediately banned from those communities, but there's value in doing it. And we've had other customers also tell us that one of the things they do is they go into these communities and they would even have their product team, if they had a few people on their team, just say, "Hey, we all have to spend one hour a day just going and answering questions with the link in our communities, just answering questions and providing that value." And they would get tremendous return on that investment from the one hour a day of just answering three or four questions each for five people one hour a day. It adds up pretty quickly to the traffic being generated to the site. Great. So, these are cool. These are things that we've heard from lots of our customers. So, what's next?
Kheirstyn Ross:
What's next is social media. Okay? There is a... One of my friends, Damien Law, he launched a late night snacking company. And what he did were they're cookies that help you relax and just get better sleep. Who doesn't want to eat cookies that also help with health benefits, like amazing. So, it's Effin' Good Snacks. And I watched him as he used TikTok to... No paid ads. What he did was he used TikTok in building up his presence throughout his journey of the whole pre-launch, of just getting the idea for it, building awareness, building his list, et cetera. And he built up TikTok around sharing behind the scenes. And because of that, he sold out of a thousand units of his product using just organic TikTok posts that he used.
So, using social media to share your journey, share the story, share your pre-launch is going to be an amazing way to cast the net wide and help your content be discovered by people looking for a solution like that. So, because of that, you build a following. When you build a following, you're able to then build your list with the right mechanism on that, because people click through to your website and go from there. So, social media and using things, especially TikTok and short form video, and sharing your story behind the scenes and having a really good content plan is going to help you as well. Yeah, so that's total blanket statement, but social media is very, very, very, very powerful in that way.
Josh:
I mean, I think the thing to think about is when you're doing the social media, it's not just random haphazard posts, it's got to be part of a bigger plan timed up with the launch. And so in the case that you're talking about, he was documenting his journey, but that was the plan for content, was like this journey documenting, because through the journey, he's telling the story of the product, I imagine, in these videos
Kheirstyn Ross:
And when you have things like, "Just got my first sample. Look at it. Tastes so good. I got my friends to try it. Tastes so good. By the way, if you want to follow, be sure to go to our email list and sign up for your discount." Hint hint, that's how you lead the story into the action that you want people to take.
Josh:
Perfect.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, we've talked a bit about growing the audience. I mean, if you've got other tips for growing audience. I think you've covered kind of the major ones, at least the ones that we hear about. We talked about the micro influencers, we talked about advertising for testing, we talked about networking with people, we talked about on social networks, and we talked about social media plans. Those seem like the big networks. Am I right-
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
... people use for driving traffic?
Kheirstyn Ross:
There are other things that we see brand owners doing. I don't know if you wanted to go through those or not, but-
Josh:
If you're going to like a couple other things. Yeah, I want to make sure we have time to get into while people are launching, the things they should do to keep the list engaged. So, I do want to talk about that.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Love it. So, I'll just quickly-
Josh:
Let's recap some of the other things you see working for your brands.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Podcast ads, getting interviewed on podcasts, weekend markets. Even if you only have a couple product sample, what you can do at trade shows or expose or weekend markets is talk to people, get them to use your product, join a wait list. Focus groups, those are the big ones. Any place where you can get in person feedback for your product, you can collect that information.
Josh:
Yeah, I've literally... One of my favorite entrepreneur stories I found soon after we launched KickoffLabs, there was at the coffee shop near me. There was literally a guy set up a placard next to his laptop saying, "Ask me about my app," and it was a picture of an app for pets. And he had a pile of gift cards, $5 gift cards, like your coffee is free if you talk to me about the app. And so he was literally just giving out $5 gift cards for people, but in exchange, he was getting them to take a small survey about the app, and then learn about the product. And I was like, this guy's going to make it. Whether it's this product or the next one, this person's going to make it.
Kheirstyn Ross:
I love out of the box thinking like that.
Josh:
Otherwise, he was just working. When no one was talking, he was just working on his app and stuff. But otherwise, he probably only spent a hundred or $200 in Starbucks gift cards, gave away all of them by the end of the day and had a whole bunch of customer data in hand afterwards. Anyway, let's talk about... Let's transition to... So, you're growing the list and you figured out maybe not everybody has to do all of these channels. I think it's important to remember you might test all of them, but for each brand, what we've seen is maybe one or two or two or three of the different channels works for that brand and that story. And so you're executing on a plan to keep driving traffic to your page. You're building this email list, so you're starting to build this list.
One of the questions we get is, what do you do to keep people engaged leading up to the product launch? Because the worst thing you can do that we hear is people that sign up for something, and then six months later you send them an email and say, "Hey, we launched. Come buy our product." And that just does not work.
Kheirstyn Ross:
That does not work.
Josh:
How do you guide people through what they're doing during however long... Whether it's three weeks, three months, six months, however long this launch period is before there's something for most people to buy, how are you telling them to engage with the audience?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yes. So, first, if someone's like, "Oh, I am building my list and I haven't emailed them yet," let's talk about why that's not good. In a busy culture, people have the attention spans of goldfish now. So, if you get someone excited for a nanosecond where they sign up for your product wait list, and then in six months, even two months, you email them, it's like, "Surprise, we're live," they will have no idea who you are and they're likely not going to open the email and your launch will fail. You could have a list of 40,000 people, but if you haven't emailed them, if you haven't contacted them, you will fail. You will not be happy with your launch, unless if you're like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or something like that, but most products will fail. So, engagement is everything. In this time and space, we want to stay on the customer's radar.
So, if you get somebody excited about your product and they join your wait list, you need to stay top of mind with them. When they come onto your email list or they follow you on social media, they take some action that says, "Ooh, I'm interested in following this," that's your opportunity to start to build a relationship, trust, and get them even more excited to show up when you're ready for launch. So, few ways we can engage them, the easiest way and the minimum is you should be emailing your list at least once a week, or yeah, at least once a week, I would say, in the beginning. When you do that, you're not only training their inbox to hear from you regularly and to prioritize your messages near the top, but you're also kind of training your customer on who you are and building affinity, I guess, awareness. They just start to recognize your company more, et cetera. So, once a week at a minimum, email them. When-
Josh:
You don't have a product to sell on that. So, what are emailing them? What are the types of emails that you're suggesting to send?
Kheirstyn Ross:
So, we are launching a coffee product in March on Kickstarter and it's a special kind of coffee maker. If we email... When we emailed them once a week, we're not just saying things like, "Hey 18 more weeks till we're live," that's it. We want to give people a reason to open these emails and to be excited. So, our content strategy is value add content. So, what that means is we look at our customer being coffee affection, shadows and we looked to send out content for maybe different kinds of brands they could try, extraction tips for their coffee, how to make the best cup of Joe in under three minutes.
Any questions that have come in off social media for like, "Hey, what's the price of your product? How do I use it? What is vacuum brewing? What is this? What is that?" Those questions are great content and email pieces too that you can send out. It can be manufacturing updates. It could be, "Hey, we just finished our prototype and here's a photo of it, or here's a video that we have." It could be the founder touching base about something. There's many different kinds of content that you can include, but it comes down to making sure that the content is worthy of your customer's attention. So, whether that is behind the scenes, sharing big press updates, or value add content by answering questions or something like that, that's the kind of content that we want to be sent out.
Josh:
Yeah, I would say the other category we've heard about, and I did an interview earlier this morning where the category that they landed on was telling the story, but then the other category of the emails they were sending out was just engagement in the building process. So, they were literally sending out do you like [inaudible 00:33:42] A or B? And so they were getting people trained to reply because they were sending them screenshots of, "Do you like this in our app or this in our app?" And they would just get people's answers and they would use that, because they wanted the input from the people presumably, because they're their customers that are going to buy the product ultimately, but they wanted the customers to feel engaged in the process so that their customers kind of felt like they were part of the journey, not just learning about it but they were participating in some small way towards the launch.
Kheirstyn Ross:
I love that. Even if you want to do something like get to know your audience a bit where you have a... You can do, "Hey, do you drink coffee or tea? What are you most excited to use this product for?" Or, you can send out... If you want to test the list to see how... I like testing lists to see how likely people are to take action on something. So then what we need them to take action to buy the product, they're more likely to do that. So, we have done things like a month before launch, we send out a survey in exchange for a gift certificate where we're like, "Hey," we ask questions like, "What is your favorite feature about X, Y, Z product?" And we list four features and we say okay, "Okay, this is the price point, this is what the product does, how likely are you to buy based on that?"
And we can look at that data and say, okay, so based on... We nailed what features and benefits we thought were the top ones our customers cared about, there's no problem about price, and everything looks really good and our customers responded positively that they are ready to buy when this happens. We've used surveys before to root out any issues where if we are launching a really expensive product and we go in and say, "Hey, the product's going to be 997, what are the chances you're going to buy this?" And if we get 10% of people come back and say no, then we know we've got some big problems because we haven't built up enough value with that list to warrant us being successful with the launch, or asking about things like, what is your favorite feature, what is not, allows us to know what to focus on or emphasize on our video or product page to make sure that the positioning is aligned. So, really cool things like that you can also use to get your customer feedback to see if you need to dig in anywhere.
Josh:
Yeah, that's a great tip on using the engagement and the feedback to figure out if you're ready to get into the launch phase, and what you focus on and whether or not you're going to sell to 1% of them or 10% of them after the launch.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Because it's like, "Oh, we look really good, or "Oh, no, we need to work on this."
Josh:
Yeah. So, we've got a few minutes left, so going to make sure we get to the phase talking about the launch. And so one of the things, the other failure point I see is people doing... They send a launch email and they say, "Well, that's it. I sent my launch email. Now, people buy, right?" So, the product is available to buy.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
Obviously you've probably sent a series of emails leading up to it. And you send your launch email and you're done, right? Everybody on your launch list is going to come purchase. So, what do you tell people to do or how to think about the launch period beyond just the first email that goes out saying, "Here's your opportunity to buy."
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah. So, people don't buy if they don't have a reason to buy. And part of you bringing people to... If it's a Kickstarter launch for example, as part of your 30 days, you're going to see an influx of sales on the first day, very little in the middle, unless if you get some viral spike or whatever, and then about 40 to 50% of your sales in the second half. And the reason this happens is because if you look at the kind of communication that typically goes out during launches is you front load it by saying, "Hey, we've got a bunch of early bird specials where you get to save this much money or you get this free gift or you get some cool perk by being one of the first 100 customers or something." So, everything's front loaded to get that initial traction and spike.
And so your communication in the first three days when you're really pushing those early bird offers is, A, we're live, but then you have to make sure that... You have to assume that somebody may not have received that email. So, you need to resend that email. You should send updates. "Hey, we're in our second day. We've raised this much. Here's another reason to go back and buy because we still have units available." Week one update. Make sure people... Okay, sorry, let me back up here. So, you have a lot of communication that happens during that open cart period because the reasons for people buying are going to be different. So, if somebody feels like they've missed the early bird offer, they might think, "Ah, I'm just going to sit back and see how this campaign does, or see if I like it or wait until product reviews come out and see what happens."
Josh:
Yeah.
Kheirstyn Ross:
So, you have to stay in communication with people because people may not be buying for different reasons. They may not buy because they think they've missed the early bird offers. They may not buy because they have a big question that you haven't answered yet, like "I'm new to Kickstarter, how do I back this?" or "I don't understand why I need this." And so when you send out communication that's like, "Hey, on the fence? Here are some top questions," and you answer the question, they, in a week or so, might come back and buy the product. At the end of the campaign when you're like, "Hey, you need to finish because after this date and time, this big offer goes away," they may not be aware of that offer. So, you have to hit them at multiple points during the campaign because there are different reasons why people are on the fence and you're not going to capitalize on that if you don't follow through with communication.
Josh:
I have a comment and a question. So, my comment is I think that that's a really good point in terms of the communication, you have to speak differently to different people. And also the point you brought up, I want to emphasize, because we've heard it repeated by some of our customers, that some of their most successful communications have been things you wouldn't think you need to do. You mentioned explaining how Kickstarter works or how a pre-purchase works, or in our case, how the wait list works. And some of the most successful communications have literally been telling people, "Here's how I'm running the wait list and here's how you'll be able to be first," just explaining it really simply. You sign up, you earn points. As you earn points, you move up the wait list.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
Once you're in near the top of the wait list, you'll get a chance to do the early bird, Oh, you don't know what early bird is? Here's an explanation of how Kickstarter works and how you're going to get access to the deals. And some of those communications, we assume, as founders or the business owners, that people just understand what Kickstarter is, but the reality is so many people. And so one person, he literally filmed a video of himself going through the Kickstarter purchase thing to just make people feel confident, like "Here's how it works." And he just did it to another product because his wasn't out there yet. So, he filmed the video. He was like, "Here, I'm going to show you what it's like to buy something on Kickstarter," and did a video with going through the purchase, waiting. And then he got the product and he unboxed. He's like, "Look, I got the product." And it was another product, not his, but just to teach people this is a safe thing and they understood what the process was.
So, I think that's totally a tip I wanted to double down on. The question is, what do you say to people, because it's a common objection I hear who say, when I send all this communication, whether it's on Facebook or TikTok or in email primarily as well, people are going to unsubscribe, unfollow or not want to be around it because I'm just sending too much. You mentioned a launch email, and then day two or day three update or a one week update. And you kind of mentioned a lot of emails, there were five or six mails you kind of rattled off your head there as part of that promotion. So, what do you say to people who are like, "Oh, everybody's going to unsubscribe or leave right away?"
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah. So, what I say to that is if somebody unsubscribes, they weren't going to be a customer of yours anyway because they're not resonating with whatever you're putting out. If that is the case, it's fine. Focus on the people who are there, who resonate and who open your emails. Everyone unsubscribes from everything, even if it is the most heartfelt message you've put out there. This is insane, but there are marketers out there who have tested sending an email a day to their list versus once a week. And it actually is that when you send it seven days a week, eventually what happens is your unsubscribe rate goes down and your open rate goes up because your list engagement starts to climb. So, don't worry about it. You're not sending too many emails. The reality is that every one of your customers on your email list do not open every email.
So, because of that, you have to hit them multiple times for them to see the email, to get the message, to get multiple points of contact. So, it's okay. Just focus on the quality of the content. If you are spamming your list seven days a week, spamming meaning like, "Hey, buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing," and you're not actually providing value or having your customer top of mind with reasons they should be excited to open the email, that's what you should be focused on. So, focus on the quality of your content, not how much you're emailing them.
Josh:
No, I mean, obviously I think you're absolutely right, is that the people who are going to buy stay on. I mean, I think about myself personally, there's some companies that I've literally, I've left their list, but then I've come back to their list because I wasn't ready to buy at the time, so I didn't want to hear from them. But then I'll see at Facebook ad, and I'll be like, "Oh, I should just sign back up again." So, I sign back up again. And then maybe a month after that of getting emails, I've been ready to buy the product. And so it's important for people to realize that not everybody's buying journey is just like they get an email and they [inaudible 00:44:08].
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah.
Josh:
Because your own buying journeys probably aren't like that. And then the other thing to recall, to think about is, I think it is, you can't take it personally if somebody's like, oh, unsubscribing, or they send an email back saying, "Take me off your list." Because for every one of those emails we get at a product, I know I get another email or talk to a customer and say, "Wow, your email on this was really helpful. Your email is part of the launch series, the content was great." And we get comments about that just as often, or more so than we get the negative, the unsubscribes. But we do, we see. Anytime we send a list, an email to our list, there's just people who are going to unsubscribe. They're just done, they weren't going to buy, and they leave. And that's okay. You just have to be okay with that.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah. Because for all you know, it might be the office assistant who is clearing out the founders inbox and they might want to move that communication over to somewhere else. You don't know. Don't think, "Oh, people unsubscribe, they must hate my content." Don't jump to that conclusion unless if you actually get enough feedback that says, "Why are you sending me this spam?" or "Here's my feedback," et cetera.
Josh:
Yeah. Cool. So, we've kind of gone through all the different phases. With a couple minutes left, what have we not talked about that you think is really important for people to think about when they're growing their audience for their e-commerce site or their launch?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah, what's interesting is, at this point, you become kind of a master at building your list, building an audience, and building awareness for a product. If you are doing a Kickstarter launch or a product launch in general where you have taken pre-sales for a product, and right after your launch, you're flipping into fulfillment, keep on top of your audience building, stay in communication with your customers, and focus on bringing a great product to market. I think that the launch is just part of the journey. And as you look to scale your brand, it comes down to rinse and repeat of exactly what you've been doing before the launch. You just keep it going at a larger scale.
Josh:
So, almost what you're recommending is the engagement activities that people are doing, whether they're running a launch giveaway or whatever they're doing to get their customers engaged and they have to launch that worked, you have to think it's like it's not launch day, it's launch month. And then, oh, it's not launch month. It's like, this is just my life now. I just keep engaging customers this way.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah, exactly. Because the amount of founders that burn out after Kickstarter, and then they ghost for six months because they're in China working on their product. And then they come back and they're like, "Hey, we fulfilled, but now we have to restart all of our advertising because we stopped everything." You are launching your business when you're launching your product. So, everything we've talked about today, keep doing it because that's how you're now going to continue to scale your brand.
Josh:
Cool. So, how can people stay in touch with you or ask you questions if they got [inaudible 00:47:16]? Because we get requests all the time, "Do you know somebody that helps partner?" So, how can people reach out to you, get in touch with you and get your two cents on what they're doing?
Kheirstyn Ross:
Yeah. So, if you need help validating, launching, or scaling your early stage brand, then you can either go to launchandscale.co. Book a call with me or the team. If you're just in the learning phase right now, check us out on YouTube. We've got hundreds of videos to help with this process. And if you have a question, send us an email at hello@launchandscale.co.
Josh:
Cool. And obviously, we'll link all that stuff up in the notes for the show in the podcast so it'll have links to everything going out so people can find it when we send out the mail. This has been great. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I know it's going to help a lot of people, just even hearing some of the things and reinforcing some of the best practices that we tell them along the way for launching. So, this has been great. Thank you.
Kheirstyn Ross:
Thank you. Yeah, this has been a pleasure.