Launch Tomorrow

Landing Pages for your Lean Startup

How Early Can You Launch?

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launch calendar launch tomorrowThe main thing about launches that I’ve realized is that people put way too much emphasis on them. They end up focussing too much on a one-off event, rather than on building a successful business. Sometimes, they end up paying a price for suboptimal trade-offs they make.

The goal of a traditional launch is to work towards a specific date. Your customers will expect to see the product on that day. You product development team has to get the product in a presentable shape. Launching works well as a tool to build anticipation.

But a launch is also a planning tool. The thing is, you commit to plans based on your assumptions. And if you are creating a new product, or entering a new market, there are bound to be some wrong assumptions.

For example, I’ve run or participated in a few Lean Startup Machine weekends in the past. Of the teams that are formed at the beginning, I’d say about 10-20% are still working on roughly the same product at the end.

This means 90% of early stage founders generated significant learning by speaking to their customers. If any of those 90% of ideas were launched without any customer engagement, there would have been a lot of back-pedalling to do. After speaking to many prospects over the weekend, most have an epiphany or two.

Engage with your market as early as you can. Here’s why you should do so in your startup:

  1. If you earn (or are already earning) revenue, you are proving the commercial viability of your idea with your chosen niche
  2. If you eventually do a traditional launch, you can start testing your marketing and positioning now. This typically involves getting your message in front of different traffic sources. Seeing what speaks to each niche. Optimize your growth. Improve your message market fit. Avoid low-ball price wars as a commoditized product or service.
  3. If you have revenue (ideally cash flow) then you can finance further growth. You can create internal positive feedback loops within your company. Self-finance your roll-out to different audiences.

If you are concerned you’ll be losing out on the marketing effect of “launch anticipation”, run a limited small scale test. Try giving your product away for free to a handful of ideal clients. Confirm that they actually spend the time to engage with it. Listen to their feedback. If it’s good, you can include the reviews as testimonials. If you need to improve, then at least you find out before you do an entire media blitz.

Or sell the product using paid advertising. Make 30 sales. Use those numbers to figure out all of the critical factors in your marketing. Quantify market size, customer acquisition cost, and conversion rate at different price points. Then you have a legitimate baseline for planning further investment in the product, or to reject it as a bad idea.

Once you do that a few time, you will be ready to start building anticipation. Do all of the usual “launch stuff”:

  • schedule media appearances
  • get in touch with your PR contacts and influencers,
  • try to get TechCrunch coverage…

Whatever is relevant for you and your product.

So there’s definitely a place for a traditional launch. It’s just after completing a lot of experiments–including marketing ones.

[image: dave cholet]

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38 different ways to prove your case

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While ideally you have some sort of proof direct in your headline and ad, your persuasiveness argument relies on how well you prove your point. You see, it’s ultimately about belief and feeling.

As heavy hitter Gary Bencivenga says:

Almost everyone in the world, in every field of human endeavor, is desperately searching for someone to believe in. Be that person and you can write your own ticket. Belief is today’s most overlooked yet most powerful key to boosting response to any ad, in any medium. Harness it and you unleash the core atomic power for exploding response.

Most prospects want to believe the claims you make in a landing page, yet the claims challenge their world-view and the status quo. You need proof, ideally proof that resonates emotionally, in order to get them to take action.

A landing page, or a salesletter, is like a one-to-one conversation between you and the prospect. You put various things on the landing page, designed to instill a particular reaction in the reader’s mind.

A good landing page is written in a conversational tone. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. In fact, you can read it out loud to ensure that the text “flows” well. prove your case

Imagine it as a phone conversation with a friend. They call you. They bring up a problem they’re struggling with. You say something surprising. You empathize with their pain. You talk about an approach you’ve used in the past or a product you can recommend to address it, as you know it will help them out. At the end, you help them buy the product or implement a solution in their lives. Empathize with your reader in the same way you’d empathize with that friend on the other end of the line.

Direct response progenitor Eugene Schwartz puts it well:

It is the facts that the prospect believes in and accepts, and the way that he passes that acceptance along from one fact to another, that determines the ad’s development, the arrangement of your claims and your images and your proofs, so that there is a step-by-step strengthening, not only of your prospect’s desire but of his conviction that the satisfaction of that desire will come true through your product.

You are building up the emotional weight of your argument as much as you can. You want the solution to become real in the prospect’s mind.

When you are making claims about the benefits your product has, your prospect is likely to not believe a claim that you make. It’s that “yeah, right” knee-jerk response. On the phone, you might be able to tell based on voice tone. Some prospects might tell you outright that they don’t believe you.

Proof counters that pushback. It’s your job, as a product creator or founder, to provide strong counter-arguments to this type of objection. In other words, your copy explicitly addresses the prospect’s objections. Show exactly how your solution can solve his problem. Or hers.

Well, the best type of proof is a poignant detail that knocks out a line of questioning or thinking. That’s why direct response copy that sells is clear.

If you want to know what types of proof you can use, I’ve got your back. In its next update, Launch Tomorrow will include at least 38 different types of proof you can include on your landing page.

You can get a copy over here.

To be crystal clear, most of the 38 different types of proof don’t require you to even even have a customer, much less a success story.

Even on a landing page MVP, it all comes down to knowing how to present your product.

[image: typexnick]

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4 characteristics of headlines that make sales

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One of the TV shows I’ve been catching up on lately is Newsroom. It’s a deep drive into modern media capitalism, with a lovable grump for a news anchor named Will McAvoy.

It’s also a fascinating watch for anyone who has or wants to have an audience. There’s lots of issues raised which are poignant far outside the newsroom. Like Shakira.

characteristics of headlines

For example:

– Intern.
-Yes?
-Come on over.
This is the overnight book.
The night crew puts together every story and every press release from everywhere.
Go through this and separate it into four piles– knew that, didn’t know that, don’t care, and Shakira.
But that one’s just for me, all right?

In this conversation snippet, one of the staff, Neal Sampat, explains a key newsroom process to an intern. The staff filters incoming breaking news notifications. They’re old school. They use printouts of the newswire. Given that she’s handed a stack of paper about a foot high, all she’s likely to read is the headlines. The four piles sort out news stories which are geniunely new and important. Everything else is de-priortized.

For a newsroom, this is critical. Their audience depends on them to share the most relevant news which impact their lives. After this first cut, the staff meet to plan the order in which the news will air that night.

Your headline needs to have the same effect on a new reader. Would it make it into the “didn’t know that pile”? You know, the pile which also doesn’t include the “don’t care” pile.

Why is specifically the headline so important? According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will continue reading. That means your headline is the singlemost important part of your copy. It requires the most effort to get right, say about 80% of your time…especially in persuasive content. Do you see why interviewing your customers and knowing what they want is so critical?

This has always been the case. Direct marketing legend John Caples analyzed high-performing headlines in his classic Scientific Advertising. He found four critical elements to headlines that pull sales:

  1. Self-interest
  2. News
  3. Curiosity
  4. Quick easy way

Self-interest is pretty much a pre-requisite in every case (it’s why features aren’t enough). Without a hint of self-interest, you’ll lose your reader’s attention almost immediately. Beyond that, some combination of the other three will help interest the reader enough to read the next sentence.

And hook in your reader you must.

That’s the sole purpose of your headline.

To turn the browser into becoming a reader.

Poof.

And if you want to learn more, check out Launch Tomorrow, my book on landing page and headline testing for early stage founders.

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What is a good landing page experiment’s conversion rate?

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Landing Pages Experiments launch tomorrow

Experimenting to figure out what’s effective

Let’s take the bull by the horns. Running landing pages as experiments requires some thought about conversion rates.

This question comes up in many forms. Here’s a recent post on a forum I participate in. I wanted to address it directly:

Hi!

Is there any benchmark telling that a given conversion rate is good or not good enough to proceed with the idea, getting into next step, interviewing people etc…?

Thanks for your valuable input!

So,

Conversion rates in the context of running an experiment (an MVP) mean something different than on a “normal” landing page. It’s like comparing apples and breadfruit. Both fruit, but quite different.

On a “normal” landing page, conversion rates drive overall profitability. The more people convert (buy), the more revenue you make given the same amount of traffic. The goal here? Be efficient.

Making money is a strong signal you’re onto a good idea. Yet don’t get ahead of yourself, bucko. Massive profits (and a high conversion rate) from cold traffic are usually the result of an a fully optimized sales funnel.

An MVP is a different beast, or bull, to continue the original metaphor.

When running a landing page MVP, in contrast, you’re figuring out what’s effective. What’s worth building.

You use the conversion rate as an indicator of whether your proposed solution will address the problem that you think a particular audience has. Note: lots of guesses in that last sentence.

This is a different approach than “classic” A/B optimizing. You aren’t trying to optimize your idea to convince yourself that you’re so smart (even though you are). You’re trying to figure out whether people actually need what you want to sell. It’s a “go/no go” test. Either you proceed with the idea or you don’t.

The only conversion rate benchmarks which I’ve found in my research are conversion rates in fully optimized funnels. (The first kind).

By current standards, a conversion rate of over 30% to email is fantastic according to kickofflabs.com. Wordstream claims a conversion rate of 10% to a sale is great.

Given that’s the case, you’ll need to decide up front what is acceptable for a a landing page MVP—before you start sending traffic to it. It’s an experiment. You want to learn something whether your experiment crosses the threshold or not, right? That way you get a meaningful result with your hypothesis test.

Stripped down to its core, a landing page MVP is just a sales funnel that hasn’t been optimized yet.

So given the above, here’s how I would approach it:

  • a conversion rate of 0% is a clear reject
  • a conversion rate of 30% to email and 10% to a low price sale is a strong accept (yes these do exist–I have done a few like that).

The trick is choosing a threshold between 0 and 30% that makes sense for your particular product idea. A fully formed product idea requires an understanding of your target audience, their problem, and a proposed solution in return for something of value. Typically this refers to email or cash. That’s what you need for a landing page MVP.

Given the above, at minimum, you’re best off running a few tests in succession:

  • Does the customer have the problem you think?
  • Is the customer willing to pay to solve the problem? (you can test this with a low cost offer and charging for a solution)
  • What is the optimal price to maximize total profit? (test what the optimal combination of volume, price, and conversion rate are)

This will quantitatively validate whether you’re on the right path, without building a product. It’ll also force you to think about how you’re going to acquire prospects….which is a topic unto itself.

Once you are asking for money on your landing page MVP, it makes sense to simplify the above with the following formula:

gross profit/customer
= revenue/customer – cost/customer acquisition
= price on landing page – cost per ad click / landing page conversion rate

Notice how this relates the price you want to charge for your solution to the target conversion rate you want to achieve. In this context, it’s easier to think about what you need your conversion rate to be for an idea to make sense. As the price you charge goes up, the conversion rate can go down while still making your idea profitable.

If you first offer a high value solution that’s attractively pitched at a low price, you should expect to get a high conversion rate. The higher you make that threshold value, the more ideas you will reject.

So if you apply Wordstream’s 10% conversion rate to a landing page MVP, be prepared to fail a lot of tests in order to find it. It does happen, though.

You’re probably dying to find out what I use. 😀

Currently, I want at least a 5% conversion rate to a sale on cold traffic before I pursue an idea further. If it’s less, the idea is bad, or the audience is bad. In either case, it needs rework. Or a trash bin.

I’ll give you an example of such a failed test tomorrow.

If you are launching a product or evaluating a new business idea, you’ll love my book Launch Tomorrow. It goes into the nuts and bolts of validating and launching new products–using landing page MVPs.

Don’t delude yourself, as I know I have many times in the past.

Get feedback.

From your ideal prospects.

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