14 Lessons Learnt From My Most Successful Online Product Launch

For context, last month I launched a 100-hour long ‘epic deal’ on my website TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk to help musicians save money on recording, distribution and music promotion. Here are fourteen lessons and tips I picked up whilst creating this deal.

1. Focus on WHY your offer or product is valuable, not HOW

If you haven’t already seen this TED talk by Simon Sinek, I strongly recommend putting aside 18 minutes today to do so. It was one of the videos recommended to me by the organisers of TEDxMelbourne when I was planning for my TED talk.

Simon explains that the human brain is made up in a way that makes us most receptive to marketing ideas that focus on why a product exists.

I learnt this lesson through a simple headline split test. I was testing ‘The Ultimate Package to Build Your Fanbase’ against a few variations that implied why the product was exists and why it mattered, such as ‘Need to Get Your Music Out There?’ – the latter outperformed the former by several percent.

 

2. Add a sense of urgency and/or scarcity to your offer

When you add a sense of urgency to a great offer, conversion rate typically increases, as the customer no longer has the option to procrastinate.

There are various ways to add urgency to your offer. For example, you can add a time limit e.g. ‘offer available for 100 hours only’, or a simple product stock limit e.g. ‘only 21 products available’. Both imply that if you don’t act soon you may miss out.

Conversion rate for the epic deal almost doubled as time ran out

Interestingly, I also found that how you present urgency is a major factor – static text saying ‘offer available for 100 hours only’ was nowhere near as effective as a second-by-second countdown timer.

 

3. There’s an easy way to pay lower PayPal fees

If you were to sell 1,000 products for £10 each via Paypal, you’d pay around £540 in transaction fees. I wasn’t sure how many transactions I would receive during the epic deal, but I guessed that it would be in the hundreds, so I began looking into ways to lower my inevitable Paypal transaction fee bill.

I came across this useful chart detailing how Paypal fees work. In short, the more money that goes into your Paypal account the month before, the lower your transaction fees for the following month.

By sending a single payment of $10,000 into your Paypal account the month prior to your launch you will automatically lower your fee per transaction from 2.9% to 2.2% for the following month. Just be sure to do your math and check that the fee you’ll pay on sending the $10,000 is lower than the amount you save by having the lowered Paypal transaction fee.

 

4. Segment Your Converting Traffic by OS, Browser and Country to Troubleshoot hard-to-diagnose problems

There are a few reasons why I care so much about segmenting converting traffic by operating system, browser, country, and traffic source.

First of all, it’s a great way to troubleshoot problems that are hard to diagnose. When you notice that all browsers convert at 4-5% except IE 7.0, or that no sales are coming through tablet computers, you can begin to investigate what might causing those anomalies.

It also helps you to understand which traffic to invest your time increasing. If you’re paying for online advertising, having a dashboard like this makes it very easy to see at a glance which adverts are profitable and which aren’t.

 

5. Approach print media advertising with caution

I have to admit that I’m very naïve as to what the general consensus is around print media advertising for online campaigns, but my experience tells me that it’s relatively ineffective compared to online advertising.

There are a few things that I repeatedly noticed about print media advertising. First of all, the numbers always sound tempting. I paid less than £200 to have a quarter-page advert in a magazine that went out to 85,000 musicians. I paid another £600 to reach 325,000 musicians. Both ads turned out to be unprofitable.

Secondly, print media sales reps often tell you that you need to run an ad for more than one week for it to be effective. I call bullshit. If an advert is good it should work the first time round – if not, it’s probably not a good advert, and running it over several weeks won’t help.

 

6. Use pre-orders to troubleshoot problems, improve the product, and test the effectiveness of adverts.

Personally, I don’t tend to pre-order products, so I wasn’t entirely convinced that enabling pre-orders would be a good idea. After reading the chapter in Josh Kaufman’s excellent book ‘Personal MBA’ on using pre-orders as a means of ‘shadow testing’ a product, I decided to give it a shot.

First of all, I received about 50% of my total sales through pre-orders (I was very shocked by this!), which not only boosted my confidence in the product, but it also helped to spread out the incoming payments over several weeks – limiting the likelihood of PayPal account limitations etc.

Secondly, it meant that I was beginning to receive customer feedback, advertising effectiveness data weeks before the product actually launched, which helped me to improve the success of the launch overall.

 

7. Concept Feedback is an amazing (and free) tool for improving your landing pages

For those unfamiliar with Concept Feedback, it’s a website where you can post a landing page mockup and have professional graphic designers and user experience experts critique it for free. Ever since I stumbled across the site, I’ve been using it religiously to improve my landing pages.

Here’s a snapshot of the concepts I posted for the epic deal.

 

8. Forget average conversion rate

When people ask what my conversion rate for the deal was, I tell them 3.99%. But this number is an average, and is therefore quite misleading. Some traffic sources converted at 14%! Most converted at 7-9%. Plenty didn’t convert at all. What use is 3.99% in painting a true picture of what’s going on here?

IF your traffic sources are consistent, and you’re looking to improve your landing page through split testing, a mean average of conversion rate is a good metric to measure. But if you’re trying to understand how traffic converts on a page, measure conversion rate for that page segmented by traffic source.

 

9. Turn every refund request into your happiest customer

In total, I received 7 refund requests from customers who bought the epic deal. I ended up refunding just one of those, as the other six went away as some of my happiest customers.

Here’s an email I received from a customer who previously asked me for a refund.

How do you turn a refund-requesting customer into a happy customer? You find out why they’re disappointed, and do everything you can to change it – even if that means making a few phone calls or calling in a few favors.

 

10. Talking to potential customers via live chat = amazing

After hearing good things about the Olark live chat plugin I decided to give it a shot. Within a few hours it proved it’s value. Customers began chatting to me – repeatedly asking questions like “do I actually get a recording contract if I buy this?”

I was stunned – of course I wasn’t offering an actual recording contract! It turns out that several potential customers had confused a recording contract template that we included as an actual contract with a record label. Sometimes things can be so obvious to you that it’s difficult to see it from the customer’s perspective. Live chat is a great tool for remedying this.

 

11. The Surest Way to Boost Conversion Rate

Is to make your offer more valuable to your customers. Landing page A/B and multivariate testing has a glass-ceiling, which is that you’re focusing on changing how your offer is being communicated – rather than improving the value of the offer itself.

If your product or offer can’t be changed (or you’re not in a position to change it) then traditional landing page optimisation is a good call, but if you do have control over improving the product, bare in mind that this goes a long way towards improving your conversion rate.

 

12. Partner with companies who can compliment your weaknesses

In my mind, there are three broad aspects that you have full control over when trying to improve the success of a product launch:

1) Improving the value of your offer or product to a specific audience

2) Improving how you communicate the value of your offer to that audience

3) Telling as many people in your specific audience about your offer or product

It’s likely that you’ll find some of these aspects easier than others. For me, my strengths were part 1 and 2; I had created a product that was incredibly valuable to a lot of musicians, and I built a landing page that clearly demonstrated that value. My weakness was reaching a large audience of musicians.

This is where partnerships kick in – there are quite a few music companies out there with large audiences who were willing to joint venture with me, and therefore compensate for my weakness In this area.

 

13. Forums are great for brutal feedback

You can always count on forum dwellers to be brutal with their feedback. A month or two before launching the epic deal I posted a message on one of the music business forums that I participate on asking “What do people think of this epic deal – is there anything that could be improved to make it more useful for artists?”

The responses were brutal. Ranging from “it looks like a scam” to “the logo looks like it’s for a children’s product”.

I won’t lie – remarks like that can be tough to swallow, but I can’t deny that this advice was invaluable and significantly helped me to improve how the product came across.

 

14. Treat yourself to a cold beer

Because product launches are hard – and you totally deserve it ☺

I always enjoy talking product launch strategies with other entrepreneurs, so if you’ve got a launch coming up and want someone to bounce ideas off of, feel free to drop me an email on marcus(at)themusiciansguide.co.uk.

Marcus

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