by Rick Braddy
There are many ways to launch a website. However, if you plan on selling something on your site, here’s ten recommended steps to take that will make your launch more successful and profitable. This step-by-step process will help you launch:
E-commerce websites
Membership and subscription sites
Software as a service sites
Single product sales page sites
Step-by-Step Launch Plan Process
1. Set your launch goals and a launch date
Setting your sales goals is the critical first step to actually achieving them, yet it’s surprising how often this step gets glossed over. Begin by choosing a realistic, achievable revenue target for the launch. For example, let’s say we want to generate $100,000 with our launch. Our average sale is estimated to be around $200 per customer order. This means we’ll have to sell 500 units to reach our goal ($100,000 / $200).
This unit sales volume can be used to calculate how much traffic is needed for the launch.
It is also important to choose a realistic launch date that’s at least 30 to 60 days in the future (to provide an adequate ramp through the preparation, planning and pre-launch phases).
2. Pick your launch team members
Getting the right people on your launch team is one of the most critical things you will do. The people on this team must work together toward achieving a common goal – getting your site and product ready and launched properly. Key people you need on your team include:
Executive / Leader – the person responsible for the outcome of the launch (and funding decisions)
Launch Manager – the person who is the final decision-maker for launch-related decisions and staying on schedule
Webmaster – the person responsible for the website infrastructure and web security
Web Designer – the person responsible for website design
Graphics / Video Designer – responsible for graphics design and videos
Copywriter – responsible for the website copy
Outbound Marketing Manager – responsible for advertising, PR and outbound marketing
Inbound Marketing Manager – responsible for social media and inbound marketing (e.g., bloggers, SEO)
Buisness Development Manager – responsible for recruiting affiliates, JV partners and other partners.
Now, if you are a small company or entrepreneur, you’re probably wearing a lot of hats. The reality is, you cannot do all of these jobs well, so do yourself a favor and make your launch much more successful by outsourcing each of the above areas that you aren’t 100% qualified and capable (time-wise) of doing a great job on. Getting right team in place with the skills required for success is half the battle of a having a top-notch launch.
3. Choose a target audience – finalize messaging and positioning
It’s important to choose a target audience – as in “one, single” target audience for your launch. This is one of the single biggest pitfalls of launching anything new – not choosing (or knowing, as the case may be) who you must target and reach, and how you can motivate them to take action. For example, if your target audience is small business owners, do not try to also accommodate the Fortune 1000, or you will make the wrong decisions about design, copywriting, offers and your sales process will fall flat and appeal to virtually nobody.
Once you are clear about who your “ideal customer” is, then craft your messaging for that buyer. Consider carefully why this buyer will choose your product over the competition and position yourself favorably as the obvious best choice for your buyer.
4. Identify traffic sources and promotions that will fuel the launch
In step 1, you set launch financial goals that resulted in a unit volume target; e.g., 500 units. To reach this goal, your launch must bring enough qualified traffic to website (i.e., enough of your target buyers). As a rough rule of thumb, you can expect your sales conversion rates to be no more than 2% of your traffic. This means you’ll need approximately 50 times your unit sales volume in traffic.
In the example, we said we wanted to sell 500 units, so we’ll need 25,000 visitors to the website during the launch to reach that sales goal. Keep in mind that these are just approximations designed to get you in the “ballpark”. Depending on many factors, you could require many more visitors (or fewer if you have an established relationship with your visitors on a blog, email list, JV partners with lists, etc.).
It is important to be realistic and conservative when establishing your traffic goals, and ensure you have adequately planned and budgeted for bring this traffic, which is the responsibility of the outbound and inbound marketing managers and business development manager to achieve through their launch programs.
5. Develop your lead-capture and sales processes and related offers
You will developing landing pages and sales pages designed to capture leads and close sales, respectively. These processes must be developed using best-practices and solid design principles so they convert visitors first into leads and then into buyers.
Your offers must entice qualified visitors to opt-in and become a lead in your system during the pre-launch phase. You will most likely need to offer something useful and of value for free in order to attract visitors to register for your launch and site.
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6. Design the site specifically for your target audience
Your site must be designed to appeal to your target buyers. If your buyers are consumers, then design for them. If they are enterprises, then a different (more conservative) design is required. Again, you can’t appeal to everyone, so optimize the design of your site for your ideal buyer, at the expense of everyone else so your site is optimized for appealing to your buyers.
7. Implement and test site instrumentation (e.g., Google Analytics)
Ensure you have good instrumentation in place so you can track and optimize everything as your pre-launch and launch progresses. You will not have a lot of time to do split-testing and optimization, so it’s important that you have all of these tests and instrumentation in place and ready to go ahead of time.
8. Verify your product is ready for market
I highly recommend some form of early adopter program be used to prove that your site and product are actually ready to be launched, ahead of your main launch. This seems to take extra time and effort, but in reality it doesn’t. You need customer feedback to ensure your product is ready for market and if it’s a new product, you need testimonials and social proof to use during your launch. Limit early access to around 100 or so people – just enough to ensure you are on the right track and actually ready to launch more broadly.
9. Test and validate all e-commerce and user-facing site features are working
After investing so much time, money and effort to prepare for your launch, ensuring that what your website visitors actually experience is of the highest possible quality is paramount. This means you must fully test each and every possible path a visitor can go through to ensure everything is in top working order, is free of typos and ready to go. Be sure to test:
Lead-capture and auto-responder follow-up messages
Checkout and shopping cart for each product that’s available for sale
Affiliate-tracking to ensure affiliates get credited properly
Merchant accounts (and ensure your merchant processor knows when you’re launching)
Website visitor tracking
Website optimization (if any)
Support systems
10. Execute a professional-grade pre-launch and launch sequence
Now that you’ve completed the first nine steps, you’re ready to begin your formal pre-launch and launch sequence, about 10 days to 2 weeks ahead of your grand opening date.
Launching websites and products isn’t rocket science, but it does require proper planning and following a proven, step-by-step process to achieve best results. Like anything, using the best tools makes all the difference in the results you get, as well as how fast (or hard) it’s going to be to launch your site and product right.
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