A couple of years ago, I was contacted by a lovely woman in the women’s health space. She sells a couple of online birth courses to help women navigate the experience of labor and delivery — whether they choose to pursue a natural birth, VBAC, or a C-section. Most of her products fall in the $100—$200 range.
Now, it’s important to keep in mind, she had a lot of great things going for her business:
She had over 100K followers on Instagram, and she was gifted at content creation.
And, she had an email list of about 6K (But most of them had already had their babies and weren’t leads. Plus, she had ghosted her list).
When we first started working together, she was just dipping her toe into the online course world. She had created a quality course, and had been launching nearly every month for a year and making about $5K in sales each time.
So I helped her get her launch strategy in place and started writing Facebook ads, email sequences, and sales pages for her products.
At the end of two years, she’d made $264,872 in revenue…and that’s without upsells or downsells. That’s just from her core funnel.
Yep, she more than DOUBLED her annual revenue working with me.
Here’s what I learned during the process!
1. What you *want* your audience to want may not be what they want
Have you ever spent a ton of time creating something, and then tried to sell it — but no one seemed interested?
Sometimes, you’re just too close to your own expertise and knowledge to know what your customers really want.
In this case, she was very excited about her course helping vaginal birth after cesaerean (VBAC) moms to have their dream experience in the hospital.
And even though she had a beta launch…And even though there’s a definite gap in the market for this kind of education. And even though she loved this product and the group of women she attracted into it — it just wasn’t a big earner. Sometimes, you just need to give the people what they want. Not what you want them to want.
Her more ‘mainstream’ birth course kept outselling the VBAC course, even though her heart was in the VBAC course.
Eventually, she decided to put more focus into the course that was selling more easily, and she made more money as a result.
What was even more surprising? One of her best sellers was a course about C-sections — the sales page for that converts at over 35%. And this is a course she created quickly just to have something to give away.
Bottom line: always follow the data and put your efforts where the numbers are, not just where you want them to be or where you think they should go.
2. Even the most phenomenal copy can’t save a poor offer or lack of audience
My dear client was so excited by the results from her first launch working with me (she made $21K in 24 hours with a new sales page that was poorly designed and one email!) that she tried launching again immediately after her first launch was over.
I can’t blame her.
But she was gutted when the second launch didn’t go as well as the first one.
Same exact offer.
Same exact copy.
But she was launching to the same exact audience, too.
The people who had already bought her course didn’t need to buy it again.
And while there were a few still hiding in her list that came out once she offered a second time…it’s unrealistic to think that great copy can work like an ATM machine.
Direct response marketer Ed Meyer put it like this:
40% of your success is the offer
40% is who you’re offering to
20% is the creative (messaging, copy, design, etc.)
Bottom line: Your offer and your audience are always the most important elements of your sales pipeline. Great copy can only do its job if those two items are in place.
3. Writing is actually a lot of hard work
Maybe you’ve tried to write your own copy, or maybe you’re a copywriter and you already know this…but writing takes a ton of hard work and a lot of time.
You may not sweat when you’re writing, but it sure can tire you out.
And coming up with dozens of different hooks to sell the same exact course over and over again is flat out exhausting.
There’s a reason copywriters charge a premium for their work, and there’s a reason truly great launch copy that converts can’t be written by an AI.
Your copy’s got to be infused with emotion, tell stories only someone with massive amounts of empathy can, and make you laugh. AI can’t do any of that (as of this writing anyway!)
4. Keep tweaking your launch every time
Here’s the thing — when you’re working as a solopreneur, things can feel really heavy, right?
You’re trying to do alllll the things:
Develop and refine your product
Create content
Deliver webinars
Write copy
Handle support requests
Actually deliver the program you’ve promised
And I know it’s hard to know what you don’t know…but don’t forget to leverage the assets you’ve already got.
This is one of the things that this client and I will be working on in the coming year.
Making sure tech is set up properly to target:
Leads who register for the webinar but don’t show up.
Those who abandon their carts mid-check out.
Women who don’t buy during the launch with a downsell sequence
You can’t start out with everything running perfectly out of the gate — but you can keep on tweaking, refining, and improving your results with every single launch.
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Just click here to fill out my short application and I’ll be in touch!