If you talk to creators and online business owners that crush their launches they'll tell you that the success of your launch depends on what happens BEFORE the launch.
Which, in this case, is referring to our Pre-Launch.
So in this deep dive I'm going to be sharing exactly how you can build a waitlist and pre-launch, step by step.
I will be sharing on-click tagging inside of Kit for building our waitlist, but the core lessons will be replicable for all email service providers.
Here's what we'll be covering:
- Why You Need To Pre-Launch
- Easy Pre-Launch Strategy
- When To Build A Waitlist
- How To Build A Waitlist
- On-Click Tagging
And then you'll be off to the races, ready to nail your next launch WAY before you're ready to open the doors.
📬 Why You Need To Pre-Launch
Pre-Launch is for doing a few things, but mainly building anticipation.
During pre-launch you'll want to:
- Build Anticipation
- Make Your Audience Aware
- Educate Your Audience
In the images above you can see three emails that were sent during Jay Clouse's pre-launch for his product CreatorHQ.
Each of these emails immediately included a few short paragraphs about CreatorHQ, and then a soft-pitch to join the waitlist.
Jay sent 2X weekly emails for a couple months leading up to his cart open [launch] and even shared a full video breaking down his launch here.
He shared that he also segmented the people who joined the waitlist so that this intro section content was doing one of two things:
- People NOT On Waitlist: Building Awareness For CreatorHQ
- People ON The Waitlist: Educating Audience On CreatorHQ
This tactic is a bit more advanced, but Kit makes it pretty easy with their Liquid Conditional Content (which I can cover in another deep dive).
📬 Simple Pre-Launch Strategy
Pre-launching can be as simple as sending 2-4 lines/paragraphs in the header section of our regular 1-2X weekly emails for a couple months leading up to launch.
That said, you need to not only make people aware of the upcoming product, but also educate them on it so they understand why they need it.
One of the number one reasons people don't buy is due to unanswered questions.
💡 Coaching Timeout: What If My Product Isn't Identical To My Newsletter Value Prop?
In my Creator Newsletter Bootcamp you learn how to make sure your newsletter and flagship offer are essentially identical.
That means that everyone subscribing to your newsletter is essentially telling you that they're also perfect for your Flagship Offer.
That said, as your audience grows, you may choose to brand wide (expand your niche a bit) and sell other products that aren't necessarily exactly what your newsletter value proposition is.
Regardless of the circumstance, you will likely want to also gear your pre-launch newsletter content to be at least somewhat related to your upcoming launch.
For example: If you teach people to make money online and you're launching a course on copywriting, it would typically be helpful to also keep your weekly lessons in some way geared to copywriting tactics as well (this is part of both awareness and education).
📬 When To Build A Waitlist
Building a waitlist does a few different things for you:
- It gives you a gauge of interest for the product you're selling.
- It allows you to give an incentive to those people to buy.
- It gets people to raise their hand and take an initial CTA.
The third one there may seem like it's a repeat, but I'll break them all down here.
Getting a gauge on your upcoming launch with a waitlist is good to get a feel for your positioning, messaging, and even to make sure you have a fully validated offer ready for launch.
If you're unable to build a waitlist during pre-launch, you may need to take a step back and reevaluate where there is a potential disconnect with your audience..
That said, the people that DO sign up for your waitlist are raising their hands and taking action, albeit a small one.
This tiny 'Yes, I want to join the waitlist' is enough of a nudge for us to learn from and use to our advantage.
Here are some actions we can take with our waitlist:
- Give them an incentive for joining: This can be early access, an exclusive discount, or even some kind of bonus.
- Create added urgency or scarcity with said incentive: Your waitlist is warm, they took a small action, and now you can use the incentive you promised to create FOMO around it (don't miss the early access, discount and/or bonus).
A waitlist isn't a magic tool that's going to just automatically bring in tons of sales — but it still gives us some good leverage and it's important to pre-launch regardless — so a waitlist is a great way to get an extra bang for your buck.
📬 How To Build Your Waitlist
It's time to build our waitlist.
Let me start by pointing out that there are many ways to build your waitlist, but in this case we're going to be focusing on how you can build it, step by step, using the pre-launch tactic we discussed above.
As I mentioned above, we're going to be walking through this one inside of ConvertKit, but you'll be able to replicate this inside other ESPs as well.
📬 Step One: Create Your Tag
In order to actually build our Waitlist we need to start collecting email addresses into a specific "Tag" (this may be called something else like "Segment" in your ESP).
So the first step one is simply going into your ESP (Email Server Provider) and creating your Tag.
As you can see in the image above, in Kit (ConvertKit) I started on the main menu bar by clicking Grow, then Subscribers and then I went to the right sidebar down the page and clicked + Create a Tag.
This can be anything you'd like, but "Creator Newsletter Waitlist" would be something I name it, for example.
📬 Step Two: Create A Simple Landing Page
This may not be necessary inside every ESP, but with ConvertKit you're required to have a URL to send your audience to if you're going to be creating an on-click tag.
You can make this in Notion if you don't have a full website set up, or you can make a simple landing page like the one I'm showing above.
We'll be using that link in the next step.
📬 Step Three: Create Your On-Click Tag
The last and final step is to create your on-click tag.
For this you'll type out your CTA (in this case you can see I write: "Be the first to know when the next cohort opens (and get an exclusive waitlist bonus).").
Next you'll:
- Insert your URL/Link.
- Click "Tag subscribers who click this link"
- Choose the Tag you created
That's it.
You're building your waitlist.
